Alarm bells should go off any time you open your web browser, poke around for a few minutes, and close it feeling roughly like you had turned on the television and found that "there's nothing on." Because if that happens, it means either that the Internet has somehow become less dynamic and informationally rich than […]
[This post turned into a kind of narrative about solving a particular problem, which I'm happy with, but if you're interested in my general remarks about the online encyclopedia of integer sequences (the original intention of this post) jump here.] Over the weekend I had a chance to work on a few Project Euler problems. […]
If you're out to understand a story that's really located, as in deeply bound to a particular place, you would do well to have at least a murky mental picture of nearby landmarks, both natural and manmade. For books like Joyce's Ulysses, where the action so often hinges on spatial minutiae -- like which side […]
All of the things I admire about Richard Feynman -- his intellect, and verve, and eloquence -- seem like special cases of a more general feature of his mind, namely, its almost fanatical devotion to rigor. Here's an example of what I mean, taken from a wonderful essay, "Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine": Concentrating […]