(Photo courtesy ZeroOne.)
It’s a cruel irony: As the citizens of Zimbabwe sink into bitter poverty, they are becoming millionaires and billionaires. Inflation is eroding the value of the Zimbabwean dollar so rapidly that everyday transactions turn into lessons in the arithmetic of large numbers. When the photo above was made on July 17, the largest […]
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 […]
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 […]
Wow. Jupiter has sprouted a third red spot. It was just two years ago that the Great Red Spot was joined by a smaller companion, which was quickly dubbed “Junior.” I guess the new red spot, discovered in the past few weeks, will have to be called “III.”
In the view above, from the Hubble Space […]
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 […]