For the past few days, Joshua Schachter and I have been working on a neat application of Bloom filters, an ancient and underappreciated algorithm from the days when men were men, women were women, and computers read data from perforated stone tablets.

The fruit of our labors is a little social network ext…

For the past few days I've been working on a little project that reads Russian novels and converts them to pretty pictures. Specifically, it turns them into pastel-colored graphs that show you the contextual relationships between characters, based on how many times their names occur together in the text.

The point of the exercise is to try …