Radical Liberation

Libertarian, Christian Geekery from the Midwest by Stephen W. Carson.

I write for LewRockwell.com, blog at the LewRockwell.com Blog and the Mises Blog.

My wife Heather and I have a home page at RadicalLiberation.com.

My tweets.

The Archive.
Thu Apr 2
Cultural Literacy: A Reading List for Beginners

Austro-libertarians often rightly complain about the economic illiteracy of traditional conservatives and most mainstream political commentators. I am no exception. In my own classes I have to spend…

Tue Mar 10
Kent Beck: Meeting commitments vs. testing and refactoring: false dichotomy

Kent Beck responds to an attack from Andrew Binstock:

Removing the inflammatory emotional words from the above, I get: “Kent Beck [Bob can answer for himself] supports testing and refactoring in ways that don’t advance the project.” What?

Sat Mar 7
Untitled Document Syndrome by John Gruber

If you want to understand why they call him “Chairman Gruber” read this great example of his writing. I’m not sure exactly how to explain what he does that is so important for the Mac community, but it has something to do with making ultimately simple points that seem obvious to everyone once he makes them but were not at all obvious before he makes them:

Everything on your computer is ultimately saved somewhere in the file system. But that doesn’t mean that you want to handle the actual filing by hand for everything. You don’t really want to know a lot of things about the specific technical details of how your data is saved, or if you did, you’d write your own app.
G. K. Chesterton

Many GK Chesterton resources, including whole books.

Sat Feb 28
The Pragmatic Bookshelf | Becoming Productive in Xcode

2 $5 screencasts that give tips on how to use XCode more efficiently.

Speed Kills

Robert “Uncle Bob” Martin:

If you want to be a craftsman. If you want to be someone who builds software quickly, accurately, and repeatably. If you want to be someone that your employer respects and values. If you want to respect yourself. Then remember this simple fact. Speed Kills.
Tue Feb 10
Interview With Ward Cunningham, Inventor of the Wiki and Extreme Programming

This interview on FLOSS Weekly of Ward Cunningham by Leo Laporte and Randal Schwartz is really remarkable. I did not know that the wiki and extreme programming (now usually known as Agile programming) were invented by the same guy. Even more enlightening was to hear him describe what the two have in common… Both allow for “incompleteness” while still being useful. Wikis allow for links to pages that haven’t been written yet, while extreme programming requires that the software always be working and passing tests even if it has only a limited set of features initially. That is, both are Incremental (see his Wiki Design Principles).

Near the end of the interview he envisions languages that support unit tests natively rather than as something tacked on. Intriguing stuff!

Thu Feb 5

The Joy of Multiple Children

Holding my fourth child, and second son, Ransom, I’m thinking about how my experience of him is different from my first child. With our first child we noticed a lot of things that weren’t specific to her. Things that had more to do with the novelty of having a baby and seeing a little person develop from the very beginning. But with subsequent children, we have focused less on this since having a child is less and less a novelty.

Sure, we take less pictures of our later children than we did our first. But being obsessively documented doesn’t necessarily seem like the greatest thing. What we do have is more and more ability to focus on what is unique about the new baby as opposed to what he has in common with pretty much every other human baby.

We enjoy the particular personality of each child. In fact, I think of our newest baby less in terms of being a baby then of being a very small person. Like a detective I look eagerly for clues as to who this person is. Is he intense like our first child? Is he mellow like our second? Is there anything distinctly boyish about him, even at this early phase?

It is staggering that Ransom, Lord willing, has a life ahead of him. A life that will certainly be tremendously impacted by us just as his siblings. But a life that will ultimately be his own to make through a million choices. A life that will be shaped to some degree by God-given gifts and talents that we can even now faintly begin to detect. Little gleams that someday will be apparent to all but, for now, we treasure these things in our hearts.

Tue Feb 3
What It Feels Like To Be A Libertarian

How does it feel to be a libertarian? Imagine what the internal life of Cassandra must have been and you will have a pretty good idea.

Sun Jan 25
“ It really all comes down to the attitude one takes toward one’s influence on others. The absence of IP creates a broad mindedness that seeks to make a difference in the world and looks for imitators as a sign that it is working. The presence of IP subsidizes a kind of inwardness and bitterness that sees the whole world as populated by potential thieves to keep at bay. Jeffrey Tucker, What is Your Attitude Toward IP? - Mises Economics Blog