Misc

I was first told that by Mr. Smarty Pants of the Austin Chronicle (believe it or not, Kristen and I actually worked with Mr. Smarty Pants for a while at Origin).

Over the years, it’s seemed to me that the ways the world is changing are very much driven perhaps not by the algorithm per se, but the increased awareness of how much we are swimming in a sea of mathematics.

Read More ““The future is in algorithms.””

We’ve crossed 100 readers on the Frappr map, so I thought a post to celebrate would be worthwhile. In fact, we’re at 106! Well, 105, because I think there’s one duplicate in there…

Notable facts revealed by the map:

• Most of the readers are in the Eastern U.S. and Europe. This isn’t surprising given the language the blog is in, I suppose.
• Some of you are clustered a bit. Likely candidates for “blog reader luncheons” are Chelmsford, UK, since Alice, Richard, and Darryl could all get there; somewhere between Manchester, Leeds, and Sheffield for the other UK folks except Jherad (he’s just out of luck, unless he wants to drive to London); the Los Angeles area; Austin TX; the DC area; the Seattle area; and small pockets in Michigan and Chicago.
• Those of you in Australia are all really far apart from one another.
• We have one guy in Russia, and he’s really lonely. Also one guy in Brazil. I’d sugget they get together, but’s a long hike followed by a long swim, then another long hike.
• Bruno in Brazil is in fact really far away from everyone else.
• Other places I never expected to have readers: Bulgaria; Turkey; Louisville, KY; and Broken Arrow, OK.

All in all, very cool. Of course, based on other web stats, there are folks in Austria, Spain, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Iceland, and so on who haven’t yet put themselves on the map. Around 11,900 of them, in fact.

Read More “Where You Are”

I can’t put it any other way than that.

Richard, have you volunteered to have your brain sliced and diced by science yet?

Has anyone ever noticed that captchas (the thingies that make you type in a nonsense sequence of letters) can sometimes make great tools for alien-name generators?

I just got one that asked me to type in “Eerep.” I immediately conjured in my mind someone green, with flippers, nice big black eyes, rubbery skin…

(The image is one of my old doodles…)

Those readers outside the U.S. might not be aware that today is Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, a holiday (a “bank holiday,” to use the British term). So I’ve been enjoying a long weekend — I took Friday off as well.

It is worth remembering why we have this holiday. My daughter came home from school able to quote the “I Have A Dream” speech, this bit in particular:
Read More “MLK”