Remember the John Woo movie Face/Off, where John Travolta and Nicholas Cage trade faces? Well, it isn’t science fiction any more.

Jacques Derrida is dead. The Telegraph has an intelligent and balanced review of his life and work. Derrida’s work had a huge influence on my college education, and it was always clear to me that his own writing was far more precise — and humane — than that of his American imitators. I am sorry [...]

Patrick Costello has put up the whole text of his book, The How and The Tao of the Old-Time Banjo, under a Creative Commons license. Patrick is a generous, down-to-earth, iconoclastic teacher of banjo and I am really looking forward to reading his book. You can also order a printed copy here.

There are 11 different ways you can misspell “pedal to the metal,” all of which use legitimate words that Word won’t flag as misspelled: {pedal, petal, peddle} to the {metal, mettle, medal, meddle} = 12 permutations, only one of which is correct.

Researchers studying the behavior of software agents set up a test, called the “minority game,” where agents are competing for limited resources. In each round, the agents make choices, attempting to wind up in the successful minority. When the researchers added the ability for agents to communicate with one another to share information on successful [...]