A while ago, Jordan introduced me to Ghost in the Shell . It's an interesting anime series focused on the intersection of artificial intelligence, philosophy, cybernetics, and crime-fighting; the first season was really quite impressive. Much to my surprise, I stumbled across the following video during my daily news consum...

Comment spam has come up in a few recent posts by people I know. I've seen my fair share of this, but I encountered something new today. My post on BitTorrent and the Oscars was recently hit with "Watch the Oscars Online" link spam. This is the only instance of this type of spam I've seen on my blog — everything else...

Joel Spolsky has some very enlightening comments on Microsoft's recently released Office Binary Formats . Specifically, he explains why they are so inscrutable . An excerpt: A normal programmer would conclude that Office's binary file formats: are deliberately obfuscated are the product of a demented Borg mind were created...

From the first time I thought about having children with Jessica, I've been curious about whether we'd have boys, girls, or both. Since both of us grew up in families where the siblings were of homogeneous sex, I was especially curious to see what we would have. Yesterday answered that question, at least: we're having a bo...

Philip Greenspun just published an interesting piece on software patents . A choice excerpt: A basic theory of human endeavor suggests that the smartest people who will ever work in a field are those who work in that field when it is new. When a technology is new and exciting, it attracts the best people that it will ever...

At iLike, we have a really cool page showing the fastest-spreading songs among our user base. That page has many, many songs on it, and — as you can see below — you can listen to clips of many of those songs. We have a pretty awesome clip player that indicates how far along you are in the song you're currently...

My morning bus ride reading ( The Essays of Francis Bacon , available on Project Gutenberg) brought me these three quotes, all within a few pages of each other; they struck me as particularly pertinent given the ongoing elections: Concerning boldness in civil business: It is a trivial grammar-school text, but yet worthy a...