Cash register at Catalina Coffee: It’s a wooden frame for an iPad. The cashier flips the top over to let customers paying with a credit card to sign. Register frame created by Tinkering Monkey.

Something is efficient if it performs optimally under ideal circumstances. Something is robust if it performs pretty well under less than ideal circumstances. Life is full of trade-offs between efficiency and robustness. Over time, I’ve come to place more weight…

This is my 2,000th blog post. I’ve been blogging for a little over five years, writing around a post a day. Thank you all for reading, commenting, sharing, and generally being so encouraging. This post will just be a few…

When I was in high school I had a conversation with a singer, a man with an incredible range. I was sitting at a piano, and he demonstrated that he could sing notes well below the bass clef. Then he…

Nothing to see here. Move along. …

I’m about to make some changes to my blogging software. If all goes well, you’ll just notice a different theme. If something goes wrong, come back a little later or send me a note. Thanks.

I was watching one of Erik Meijer’s videos on functional programming today and it occurred to me that the tie dye shirt he was wearing looked a lot like an image from a recent blog post. Here’s the image from…

Betteridge’s law says Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no. If Betteridge was right, then the answer to my headline question should be no, in which case Betteridge was wrong. But Betteridge…

When you reject a data point as an outlier, you’re saying that the point is unlikely to occur again, despite the fact that you’ve already seen it. This puts you in the curious position of believing that some values you…

From Two Cheers for Anarchism: Like the city official peering down at the architect’s proposed model of a new development site, we are all prone to the error of equating visual order with working order and visual complexity with disorder.…

I just found out this morning that Ted Odell passed away recently. He was my advisor for my undergraduate thesis and something of an informal mentor when I was in grad school. He was a kind person and a sharp…

Here’s an amusing sentence I ran across this morning: The code was simplified in 2003 and is harder to understand. Maybe the author is being sarcastic, but I doubt it. I believe he means something like this: In 2003, the…