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 $400, you send one machine to a child somewhere far away (Afghanistan, Cambodia, Haiti, Mongolia […]

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 to produce the graphic. The whole specification—including data, scales, labels and stylistic preferences—gets packed into a […]

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 a few years ago by Leslie G. Valiant of Harvard. The ideas have been further […]

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 I might well wind up with three discrepant values.
Strolling by a construction site the […]