When I was a kid, there were no toys I treasured more than magnets. I had dozens of them: horseshoes, bars, a couple of powerful alnico cylinders salvaged from old loudspeakers. The invisible but very palpable forces acting between these objects—pushing like poles apart, drawing unlike together—were signs to me that mystery still exists in […]

In the fall of 1972 President Nixon announced that the rate of increase of inflation was decreasing. This was the first time a sitting president used the third derivative to advance his case for reelection.
—Hugo Rossi, Notices of the AMS, vol. 43, no. 10, Oct. 1996

I wrote about spam three years ago in the May-June 2003 issue of American Scientist. Since then, my unhealthy fascination with the stuff has been dulled somewhat by overexposure, but I continue to keep an eye on the subject. The volume of spam reaching my mailbox is now about 10 megabytes per month, almost all […]

It is by no longer having to think about things that civilisation progresses.
—Joseph E. Stoy, Denotational Semantics

Scribble, scribble, scribble. As if the world didn’t get enough of my writing already, with a bimonthly column in American Scientist, now I’m equipped to publish my every thought on a momen’t notice.
The bit-player weblog will cover much the same territory as the Computing Science column in American Scientist, but with greater frequency and with […]