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 […]

These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is a long distance call
—Paul Simon

As a person who occasionally sends e-mail and talks on the telephone, I’ve been following with interest and curiosity all the recent press reports about alleged eavesdropping and data-mining by U.S. government agencies. Mathematically, the most intriguing part of this story has […]

Scientists are selfless seekers after truth, unswayed by worldly emoluments, immune to the tawdry enticements of fame, indifferent to prizes and honors. Thus I can’t quite imagine why anyone would bother ranking a collection of scientific papers by applying the algorithm that Google uses to decide which Web pages deserve the most prominent display. Nonetheless, […]

A thought for the day:

Our federal income tax law defines the tax y to be paid in terms of the income x; it does so in a clumsy enough way by pasting several linear functions together, each valid in another interval or bracket of income. An archeologist who, five thousand years from now, shall unearth […]

But now I’m back, and the announcement you are reading at this moment should be followed—or is it preceded?—by several more posts in short order.
Actually, to tell the truth, I’ve gone nowhere geographically, but I’ve been busy finishing a column for the next issue of American Scientist.
I’ve been away for a couple of weeks.
I need […]

I used to play hooky at the library. That tells you what kind of reckless, rebellious youth I was. When I skipped school, I would take the subway downtown and spend the day in the sunstruck Science and Industry room of the Free Public Library of Philadelphia. Another time, at the end of my junior […]

I am the child of a bookkeeper, and I’ve inherited the habit of double-checking receipts and balancing accounts. My friends make fun of me when I carefully note down the dime that I put in a parking meter, but lately I’ve been fretting over even smaller sums—charges that come to less than a penny. It’s […]

I am at gate C21 at Houston Intercontinental, en route to San Antonio. The flight is late and overbooked; there’s a crowd of hopeful standbys at the podium. The first-class plutocrats are already aboard, and now the rest of us are filing on, one section at a time. “Passengers in rows 25 to 29 are […]

I wrote about spam three years ago in the May-June 2003 issue of American Scientist. Since then, my unhealthy fascination with the stuff has been dulled somewhat by overexposure, but I continue to keep an eye on the subject. The volume of spam reaching my mailbox is now about 10 megabytes per month, almost all […]