As I mentioned, the American Scientist web site is undergoing an overhaul. One aspect of the transition that’s still in transition is redirecting http requests so that old links and bookmarks will retrieve the correct document on the new site. I wish I could snap my fingers and fix this problem globally, but that seems […]

Theorists and theologians of programming languages give a lot of thought to issues like referential transparency, lexical scope rules and idempotency. More often than not, though, programming languages live or die for reasons that have nothing to do with such syntactic and semantic virtues. In the early 1980s everyone wrote programs in Microsoft BASIC because […]

Imagine an unending stream of names:

Britney, Brad, Angelina, Britney, Pamela, Jessica, Jessica, Britney, Clay, Brad, Britney, Britney, Pamela, Clay, Brad….

Your job is to keep a running tally of the number of unique names. (The snippet above, with 15 names altogether, has 6 unique names.)
There’s a straightforward method of solution: Keep a record of all […]

Hormel Foods, the Minnesota meatpacker, reports a surge in sales of Spam. News accounts attribute the rising popularity of the pink meat-in-a-can to higher prices for other commodities. Or maybe it’s the Spam musubi fad.
Meanwhile, the other kind of spam seems to be surging as well. I’ve been keeping track of my personal spam consumption […]

I have a longstanding friendly feud with my Editor-in-Chief over the use of logarithmic scales in graphs. I tend to go for a log plot if there’s the slightest hint of an exponential trend in the data; she argues that the human sense of numbers is inherently linear, and thus a nonlinear scale should be […]