Monthly Archives: December 2007
The new toy
In this season of giving and getting, you’ve got to admire the marketing savvy of the One Laptop Per Child project. They named their introductory sales campaign “Give One, Get One.” The computers cost $200 apiece. For a donation of … Continue reading
Posted in computing
3 Comments
Googling for graphs
The latest cute trick from Google is a service for producing quantitative graphics on demand. For example, here’s a bar chart of the traffic to this web site over the past year: The cute part is how you get Google … Continue reading
Posted in computing
6 Comments
To P or NP, that is the question
It’s time for my bimonthly self-promotional horn toot. The new issue of American Scientist is now available online, and paper copies should soon be stuffing mailboxes everywhere. My “Computing Science” column is on a new class of “holographic” algorithms invented … Continue reading
Posted in computing, mathematics
6 Comments
Measure twice, average once
Whenever Norm Abram tells me to “measure twice, cut once,” I wonder what I’m supposed to do if the two measurements disagree. Perhaps I should measure a third time, in hope of settling the question by majority rule; but then … Continue reading
Posted in mathematics, statistics
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