We spent all day yesterday circummotoring the Olympic Peninsula in a little Ford Escort. A beautiful drive, with eagles and cedar forests and foggy views of British Columbia across the Juan de Fuca strait. I had been re-reading John McPhee's Annals of the Former Worl…

On the drive home from work today, NPR talked to us about fireflies. Specifically, the femme fatale firefly, who blinks at her own species' frequency just long enough to find a mate, and then switches to the frequency of another kind of firefly. When those guy fireflies come a-courtin', she eats them.…

I've been working today on creating a latent semantic search engine that searches mass spectra for some common organic chemicals.

Poisons, actually. It turns out to be easiest to find on…

Here is something that really irks me about Microsoft. They hire a boatload of amazing people to do research, including some geniuses at natural language processing, and yet their vision of what the Computer of Tomorrow will be remains stultifyingly dull. That is, when it isn't downright Orwellian.

For example, at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, we saw an impressive demo…

Scandal strikes the Nathan's hot dog eating contest! On the surface of it, it seemed to be a routine rout by the Tiger Woods of hot dog ingestion:

The 24-year-old Kobayashi, who weighed 113 pounds before the contest and almost 120 pounds after, bettered his 2001 world-record performance by half a hot dog.

I got my first segmentation fault today. Learning C++ feels like trading in a big old Continental for some cramped Italian car with a stick shift. Sure, it's faster, if you know how to use the thing. But all I can do is lurch forward in bunny hops, and there's this strange grinding noise coming from the gear…

Picking up some odds and ends at my mother's house tonight, I caught sight of myself in the mirror and casually remarked to her how much my face had changed lately. I looked older. And she said to me “My son, with every minute that passes and breath you take, you draw inexorably closer to death.”

A pretty typical worldview for anyone who has had to spend the last few days here witho…