Is it worthwhile to vote in the Presidential election this coming November? I think so. Every four years, usually in the fall, you can read economic and decision theoretic arguments about whether voting is a rational act.¹ Those arguments are fine for the mathematically inclined, b/… Read full post »

When I was much younger I loved to read books about how to do magic. Not real magic, of course; mainly card tricks.¹ I practiced doing passes, side slips, palms, and other basic sleights for hours on end. Today all that's survived of whatever skills I learned is a few card flo/… Read full post »

Last year I joined a planning committee, to replace a friend who was leaving.

"Can we still count on Frank?" asked Bill. Frank had been responsible for some of our work for the past several years.

"Yes," said Brad. "I'd like to get started a little earlier this year, so that… Read full post »

Tonight my wife and I were watching TV, and though my attention wanders during the commercial breaks, I caught the tail end of an ad for a dating site: FarmersOnly.com.  "What was that?" I said. "It must be a joke," my wife said. But it's real. From their web site: 

We… Read full post »

When someone asks me what I do for a living, I say, "I'm a college professor." If there's any further interest (usually the eyes have already glazed over) I say that I'm in a computer science department and I work on human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence. This all might sound rather… Read full post »

I've been arrested just once in my life. I wasn't charged, and I was released after a couple of hours. So this wasn't a life-changing experience. It just means that when filling out forms for employment and security clearances (I worked in the defense industry for several years), I have to… Read full post »

Forthcoming this fall from Oxford University Press

So you've written a book. What should you call it?

Tough question. Two years ago I submitted a proposal to Oxford for a book titled Computational Thinking.

My editor liked it. (She suggested that I resubmit a proposal for two books, one purel/… Read full post »

Rush Limbaugh:

What does it say about the college co-ed Susan Fluke [sic] who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex--what does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. 

[Later:] ...In this instance, I chose… Read full post »

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 »