Where have all the flowers gone, Long time passing? Where have all the flowers gone, Long time ago? Where have all the flowers gone? Yo...

On NPR’s Morning Edition yesterday, they had a brief item about the leap year, reported by Renee Montagne: We woke up this morning to the r...

It’s that time of year: a Tuesday near the end of January. It’s just past another anniversary of the president’s inauguration, and time for...

New Scientist , which seems to run hot and cold out of the sensible science tap, is chilling our tootsies off with an icy-cold flow: an una...

Physicist Stephen Hawking turned 70 last weekend, and has been living with ALS — amyotrophic lateral sclerosis — for nearly 50 years. Usual...

Now that I have the file-count limit sorted out on the audio system in my car, it’s much better at playing songs in random order. Now I’m ...

On NPR’s Morning Edition today was an item about a cable television channel called OWN , the Oprah Winfrey Network. It seems that Oprah do...

I don’t refer often enough to the excellent blog Halfway There , by the pseudonymous Zeno, a community-college math teacher in California. ...

As I sit here with a Cesária Évora CD on in the house, I have an update to the car AV system issue, wherein it couldn’t stop playing Bob D...

The human brain is very good — quite excellent, really — at finding patterns. We delight in puzzles that involve pattern recognition... con...

The other day, we heard that the U.S. NTSB would be proposing a nationwide ban on mobile phone use, and people were speculating that it’d in...

In case you haven’t been following the current Intervents over the past few days, let me call your attention to a Rick Perry campaign ad th...

I have a new car (as of October), a Subaru Legacy . The new car has a Pioneer AVIC-X930BT navigation/audio system (I mentioned its anti-th...

In his After Deadline column last week, New York Times editor Philip Corbett criticizes some overly complex sentences, reminding Times writ...

The photo on the right (click it to enlarge it) is a shot of a Whole Foods advertisement on a Metro-North train . Their unriveled commitme...

On Thursday, the U.S. Senate passed the National Defense Authorization Act , an annual bill that provides for continued operation of the U.S...

I don’t understand, sometimes, how people put together their web pages. Who really thinks that, say, pink text on a red background looks go...

On a recent trip to Shenzhen, China, two colleagues and I went to a restaurant for dinner and happened onto a dish that was splendid to look...

Today gave us one great musician, and took away another, both of whom I’ve written about in these pages before. Canadian singer/songwriter ...

Jimi Hendrix was born on this day in 1942, in Washington — the state, not the city. He died far too young, at 27. And so castles made of sa...

The navigation system in my car has an anti-theft feature that’s interesting, in that it relies entirely on a sort of herd immunity . The ...

New Scientist tells us about Facebook’s analysis of the friend relationships in their social network. Only four degrees of separation, s...

In my old company’s news: IBM has announced that Ginni Rometty will take over as President and CEO in January. From the IBM announcement :...

I’ve noted before that my high-school friend Bill Irwin found these pages some while go, and we’ve reconnected. Such are the benefits of s...

It’s that time again: U.S. presidential elections are in a bit more than a year, so, of course, furious campaigning has started. The religi...

Microsoft’s Raymond Chen usually blogs about interesting things about Windows. He also throws in assorted items about other things, and tod...

Paul Krugman writes in the New York Times about how populations shifts and lower wages can appear to create jobs locally, but notes that i...

Daniel Grayling Fogelberg would have turned 60 today, had he not left us at the age of 56, taken by prostate cancer. His home town, Peoria,...

I’m in Québec City this week for the IETF meeting . A group of us were having dinner last evening, and at the end of the meal, as we were p...

Yahoo news notes that LinkedIn is now the number 2 social network , behind, of course, Facebook. Brent Hailpern has an amusing way of poin...