My wife and I married young, in our early 20s. The sequence of our lives since then has been a bit out of order. Some Americans travel through Europe after they retire, but my job took us there just a year or so after college. The two-year stay we'd planned on… Read full post »

Has someone ever corrected your pronunciation? It's happened to me often enough, even in public. One of my embarrassments was due to the word examplar--I was answering a question in class, when I was in grad school, and I pronounced it with emphasis on the first and third syllables. My professor/… Read full post »

This is a not-very-Christmas-y post I published a couple of weeks ago at does this make sense? I still like the ideas about infinity; I'm feeling more upbeat these days, though.

How do you understand infinity? An infinite amount of time, an infinitely large space, or an infinite number of… Read full post »

Yesterday afternoon I submitted the latest revision of my manuscript to my publisher. My New Year's Day gift to myself. It's a non-fiction book about computers, in the general category of popular science.  This is how the process worked, if you're curious and thinking of doing such a thing yours… Read full post »

Income and wealth inequality have been in the news lately. Part of what drives the Occupy Wall Street protests, for example, is the perception that the very, very rich--the top 1% of the population in the U.S. and elsewhere--are "writing the rules of an unfair global economy that is foreclosing… Read full post »

In science classrooms across the country, children learn how to carry out experiments. Imagine two sixth graders looking over a second-story balcony (properly supervised, of course). Jane holds a notebook, pencil at the ready. Jim holds a golfball and a large marble at arm's length over t… Read full post »

Human beings are rational animals. We're not the only rational animals, contra Aristotle; the great apes and some birds, for example, behave rationally in many situations and sometimes show remarkable flashes of insight. Even if we're not uniquely rational, though, human beings are more rational, mor/… Read full post »

I'm partial to stories about ghosts and the supernatural. Supernatural literature goes back centuries; it's a rich source of themes and ideas for modern entertainment. Here are three of my favorite stories-turned-into-movies.

So he put his hand into the well-known nook under the pillow: only,… Read full post »

We live on a small cul-de-sac off a busy road. Our house has a long driveway and is barely visible from the street, through the trees. Our neighborhood is so quiet that we don't even get trick-or-treaters for Halloween. Weeks can go by without our seeing the neighbors outside their… Read full post »

Last week, during a campaign stop in New Hampshire, Rick Perry gave his views on evolution:

It's a theory that's out there. It's got some gaps in it. In Texas we teach both creationism and evolution, because I figure you're smart enough to figure out which one's right.

Should we… Read full post »

Aa, aal, adit, aline, avo, azo, azon... Do you know these words? If you do, it's probably from playing Scrabble.

There's only a weak sense in which I "know" these words. I have a vague memory that aa is a Hawaiian word for a kind of cooled lava, and that/… Read full post »

Every true apprentice writer has, however he may try to keep it secret even from himself, only one major goal: glory. The shoddy writer wants only publication.

"Glory? Nonsense," my friend said. We were sitting at an outdoor cafe. I shifted in my seat. She had actually written books; I… Read full post »

About a year ago I collected two years' worth of my Facebook status updates and published them as a single OS post.

I'm no master of aphorism (wouldn't that be an exotic handle?) in that my observations seem to center mostly on movies, food, and our cat, but for anyone who's… Read full post »

Some readers may remember that I teach courses in human-computer interaction. By the end of each semester, I hope that students will have learned to analyze the usability of everyday computing devices (among many other skills). Here's a question that I made up for this semester's final exam. I… Read full post »

Early this morning I was working on an idea for the book I'm writing. It didn't pan out--too jokey. But perfect fodder for a blog post. Imagine a remake of your favorite movie, taking modern technology into account. Here are a few possibilities.

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Ilsa Lund
Heading to… Read full post »

It's been said that all you really need to know is what you learned in kindergarten. I've discovered that this isn't true. Six-year-olds don't understand very much about life or even themselves, much less the way things will be in the future.  Here's a taste.

It may be years or even… Read full post »

Yesterday, during the rain and gloom, I was chatting with my wife about our long history of watching horror movies together. In a fit of inspiration (though you may call it something else) I put together the chart below. The image is linked to a larger version on Facebook.

Imagine that… Read full post »

Yesterday afternoon I went to a birthday party, where I played  hide-and-seek with the hosts' four-year-old little girl, L. It reminded me of the work of my friend Greg, a cognitive scientist who has used hide-and-seek as a task in some of his case studies [PDF]. (Long-time readers of this blog/… Read full post »

So you'd like to be a spammer. It's not a career path your parents would be proud of, I suppose, but if you're going to do something, do it well. Here are three strategies for successfully spamming OS.

Shoping spam: Create an account on OS¹. (For this strategy to work, it helps/… Read full post »

The Laura Schlessinger controversy has gotten me thinking about analogies. I find that when I try to make my views clear, especially to someone I disagree with, analogies come in handy.

For example, here's the opening to Schlessinger's recent radio conversation:

SCHLESSINGER: Jade, welcome… Read full post »

Here's the challenge: Write a story using only words from this list.

Here's the backstory: One area of computer science, information retrieval, deals with the comparison of documents, especially the identification of documents that are similar to each other. Imagine typing a query into a search engin… Read full post »

In the earliest days of the cosmos, at the dawn of coordinated universal time, Titans walked the Earth. They numbered twelve: the brothers Ocearus, Compilus, Trieus, Hypertexton, I/Opetus, and Kernelus; and the sisters T1, Rheatime, Mnemoleak, Tetris, BBS, and Bootis. The elder gods reigned over a pe… Read full post »

I will be in Philadelphia for a business trip in a couple of weeks days, and there's a chance I'll have some free time on Friday evening, August 6, for drinks. Is anyone game for an OS meet-up?

I propose to meet at the Irish pub Slainte, on 3000 Market Street… Read full post »