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 […]
The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments the other day on programs meant to maintain racial diversity in the public schools of Seattle and Louisville. Listening to accounts of the debate put me in mind of Thomas C. Schelling’s elegant mathematical model of race relations. The model suggests that extreme segregation can arise spontaneously even when […]
Christopher Joyce of National Public Radio is about to launch a series of reports on the “Industriosphere,” in which I am taking part. As in my book Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape, the subject matter is all the manmade bits of the environment we live in. (What is that stuff? What does […]
Driving over the river and through the woods yesterday, I was running low on fuel. My car has two kinds of instruments to tell me that I’ll soon be standing by the side of the road feeling foolish. A conventional gas gauge shows the fraction of a tankful remaining, presumably based on readings from some […]
The new issue (September-October) of American Scientist is available on the Web, and subscribers to the ink-and-paper edition should receive copies soon. My “Computing Science” column is more topical than I would like, given today’s headlines. I examine some ideas from graph theory and social-networking studies that intelligence agencies may (or may not—who knows?) be […]
I can cook anything, as long as the recipe starts with “Take it out of the freezer” and ends with “Put it in the microwave.”
Go ahead and scoff, but I’m proud of my culinary accomplishments. Furthermore, I submit that the art of microwaving frozen foods is not without intellectual challenge. Inferior technique could leave […]
Forgive me if this story is slightly stale. I meant to write it two weeks ago, but for some reason I kept putting it off.
A paper titled “Scheduling Algorithms for Procrastinators” has been posted on the computer-science section of the arXiv. The authors are Michael A. Bender (Stony Brook University), Raphaël Clifford (University of Bristol) […]
The ABC Evening News ended today’s broadcast with a riff on the date—06/06/06. We heard about a 6-pound, 6-ounce newborn, and a 66-year-old man celebrating his birthday. I’ve always been a little perplexed by this fascination with 666. The book that started it all (Revelation, or The Apocalypse of John) was written a full millennium […]