I found a funky little used bookstore in my hometown recently. It might be my new favorite. There's a big sci-fi section which has a great selection of those mass market paperbacks I love so much. Usually on my first round through a bookstore I'll make a point not to consult the to-read list on my phone. Instead,...

I grew up an only child and spent many formative hours alone. I learned to occupy myself by playing with action figures, learning magic tricks, and growing vegetables (in Harvest Moon 64). My mind was a cozy place. There were no siblings to fight with, so I could afford to take my time thinking and speaking. There...

Like most people who studied English Literature in college, I've fantasized about writing a novel one day. Over time that goal has, let's say, slimmed responsibly to fit its britches. These days I'm more interested in short stories, but in many ways the genre is just as challenging as its bigger-boned cousin. For...

Your brain needs to offload just as badly as your butt does. I know it sounds boring to sit in there, alone, naked from the waist down, staring at the wall. But that's the point. Our hellish attention economy has produced a generation of anxious and overstimulated (and probably constipated) people. Quiet reflection...

If I spend more than a few days in a new town, I start to poke around for a breakfast diner. It's a sort of greasy time bubble where everyone sets aside their differences to gorge on eggs and coffee. Eggs, coffee, bacon, pancakes. Notes to a song that we (and our physicians) know by heart. I take comfort in the...

I finished Fermat's Enigma recently and was surprised how much I enjoyed a book about math. I've always seen myself as a liberal arts guy, but in the last couple years I've been reading a lot of computer history books that each have some flavor of mathematics. I struggled so much with math in school that it's hard...

Note: This is a rather spicy topic to do my JulyReply on, but there you go. This is just my personal take and nothing more. In reply to this post: I'm relatively new here, but I've been surfing the discover feed for a while now. Both Scholart's and Absurd Pirate's posts about meta-blogging and repetitive content...

I was lucky enough to grow up in a house with a backyard and a pool. To the side of the pool is a guesthouse with white stucco walls and a multicolored tile roof. In my earliest memories, the guesthouse had a bed where aunts and nannies sometimes slept. As a child I cared only for its bathroom, where I kept my...

Two's Complement is a way to represent positive and negative numbers in binary. It's useful because we want a way to represent each number's inverse within a limited number of bits. The sign bitPutting aside two's complement, the "naive" way to represent a negative number is to simply use its highest order bit as a...

On my way back from a trip last month, I stopped in Baltimore to catch a Conan show. I've been getting into doom metal lately and Conan is a lot of fun. When asked for their favorite Conan album, one redditor responded: "the one with the yelling about battle." That about sums it up. The venue was the Metro Gallery,...

One of my favorite things about small projects is the way their constraints can inspire unexpected solutions. You might expect a simple design to limit the room for creativity, but in my experience the opposite is often true. With this project I had the good fortune to stumble into a solution that 1) taught me...