Sheep without Muzzle

The world embraces Adam Smith’s ideal of individualism, hoping that the Scottish philosopher is right and everyone will benefit in the end. Unfortunately, we have arrived at the Nash equilibrium in the matters of sustainable development. No one is willing to pay the price for preserving the environment, so it is degrading in negligence. Using Hurwicz’s ideas, we need to design a mechanism that will make preserving the environment economically advantageous.

UN has a committee on environment preservation, and holds annual international conferences. We have not seen much progress. The problem is in the soft and unequal requirements.

The best way to make the requirements hard is to bar the percentage of trade equal to the percentage of unmet financial obligations per country. This will make countries very much motivated to meet their contribution promises and possibly lower them.

To make the requirements fair, every country must contribute the same percentage of their gross domestic product to the cause of environmental improvement. This will be the resource for building renewable, non-polluting sources of energy like wind and solar panel farms.

Following these rules, the countries will strive to meet their contribution promises in order to keep trade uninterrupted. The incentive to grow the gross domestic product is also preserved.

Yarrr, mateys!

We be the softwarrre pirrrates!

gvocab has a new home at google code. There is also a link at gnome files.

Here is the second release of gvocab, the vocabulary builder. New features:

• gvocab remembers session state after closing
• mistakes are crossed out, hints are bold
• faster start up time with a progress bar for reading the words xml file

Click to view the screenshot:

It turned out that gconf recommends to not store anything except properties in the gconf database. gvocab stores session state in ~/.gnome2/gvocab/session.xml, similar to gedit, which stores its own session information in ~/.gnome2/gedit/sessions/gedit-*.

For the next release, I am planning improvement to the teaching algorithm. I think a word should not be marked as learned the first time the user guessed its meaning right. Repetition is essential to learning.

Here is a GTK vocabulary builder with 5k+ words. Key advantage: it will not get off your back until you have learned every single word.

In the next release I want to use gconf to remember the learning progress.