This morning I am enjoying the benefits of jet lead. My watch says it’s 7:30, but the hotel-room clock reads 4:30, so I have a few hours free to lie awake and solve the world’s problems. As a warmup exercise I’m doing mental arithmetic. I’m dividing integers, and trying to figure out how I do […]

Hardware is hard, whereas software is soft; the people who named these things knew what they were talking about.
A while ago, I volunteered to help a friend upgrade the disk drive of an Apple iBook. My first clue that this was going to be a fun project was learning that we needed a special […]

As I was saying, I’ve been trying to get up to speed with Adobe Flash and ActionScript. I’ve also been looking into Processing, another programming language designed for creating interactive animations and visualizations that can be shared on the web. Processing was invented by Casey Reas and Ben Fry when they were at the MIT […]

The last time I was ranting about spam, I inquired of Pfizer, the makers of Viagra, how they filter spam from their own incoming mail stream. They can hardly block all messages that mention their own product. They never got back to me with an answer. Now perhaps I know why. Wired News reports that […]

Reminiscing about Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs led me to pull the book off the shelf, and I was taken in once more by the epigraph from the late Alan J. Perlis:
I think that it’s extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful […]

My love affair with the Scheme programming language began in the front seat of a 1976 Ford Mustang. I had just bought a copy of Abelson and Sussman’s Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, which uses Scheme as the vehicle for a course in computer science. On the way home from the bookstore I grabbed […]

Pavel Pevzner has mastered the art of transforming cabbage into turnip. The key to this vegetable metamorphosis is a process in which a sequence of genes is spontaneously snipped out of a chromosome, flipped end-for-end, then spliced back into the genome at the same place. Thus the reversed genes are in the opposite order and […]

Quantum computing gets a lot of attention, but we don’t hear much about quantum mathematics. The very idea is an affront to Platonist thinkers everywhere—those of us who consider the elements of mathematics to be independent of the physical universe. Is the truth of the Pythagorean theorem subject to the same uncertainty as the fate […]

I watched the spelling bee on TV a couple of weeks ago and was stumped by word after word: aniseikonia, oberek, randkluft, cachalot, schuhplattler, cilice. It’s all enough to send you reeling back to Andrew Jackson or Mark Twain or Winston Churchill or whoever the hell it was who said “I don’t give a damn […]

Among the 250 million Rubik’s cubes manufactured since 1980, how many lie abandoned in a scrambled state, having never regained their original configuration since being taken out of the box? Most of them, I would guess. Now comes word that those cubes might be restored to pristinity with a little less effort. The upper bound […]