Ages ago (in blog years) I mentioned some algorithmic ideas for getting passengers aboard airplanes faster, based on a 2005 paper by Steven Skiena and others. Since then, the queue at the departure gate has only gotten longer. Now another preprint on the same theme has landed in the arXiv. This one is by Jason […]
Saturday’s New York Times had a story by Sam Roberts about a newly released Census Bureau study of the frequency of surnames in the U.S. The Times story was mainly about the names at the top of the list, and especially the increasing prominence of Hispanic names (Garcia and Rodriguez have made it into the […]
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 […]
One of the drawbacks of not having a job is that you never get a vacation. Thus the only way I could get away this summer was to take an unpaid leave from blogging. Now I’m back, though—once again ungainfully unemployed. I want to thank all my faithful readers for their forbearance during my absence. […]
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 […]
Investors are constantly checking the stock ticker, gamblers check the point spread, and everybody is forever checking their e-mail. For a writerly type like me, however, the unshakeable obsession is checking my Amazon sales rank. Amazon.com calculates a sales rank for every book listed on its Web site, and updates the ranking hourly. Here’s a […]
It’s tax time for Usaians. I’ve been plodding through the thick book of forms and instructions, tips and cautions, tables and worksheets and schedules and Paperwork Reduction Act notices. The unwelcome annual ritual always reminds me of the words of Hermann Weyl:
Our federal income tax law defines the tax y to be paid in terms […]
There was a line at the Post Office window, so I went to the self-service counter, plopped my letter on the scale, and found that it weighed a whisker under two ounces. I bought stamps from the machine and stuck on a 39-cent and a 24-cent. I was just about to drop the letter in […]
Doing some laundry last night, I threw a duvet cover and nine pairs of socks into the dryer together. (Household hint: Don’t.) The duvet cover is a giant fabric pouch with a slit along one side; think of a queen-size pita pocket. Initially, all the socks were outside the pouch. When I pulled the load […]
The mathematics section of the arXiv archived 989 preprints in October. Why is that fact worth noting? Because arXiv papers are identified by numbers of the format YYMMNNN, with two digits for the year, two digits for the month, and a three-digit sequence number. Ten more papers and all the world’s mathematicians would have been […]