It was pointed out to me by Kenny Easwaran that I ought to try clustering texts that already have a natural grouping. So I ran the clustering program on 15 texts written by three authors, and here is the result: The largest eigenvalue is 25 times bigger than the next largest eigenvalue, and picks out the author […]

I ran my clustering program (which I just ran on the New Testament) on Shakespeare’s plays—which were conveniently packaged into a text file by Open Source Shakespeare. The result was the following graph: I know little about Shakespeare, so I can’t say too much about the above image. I’d love to know what you think: does […]

While we (meaning my wife and I) were filling out the forms for our marriage license, we were interviewed by NPR for Morning Edition! A copy of the broadcast is available online.

National Bingo Night (which seems to me to be very silly, but ignoring that…) has a “play along at home” game, where you print out a bingo card. How would I design this? I had hoped that the website generated a Bingo card, digitally signed it, and then sent the signed card to the user. […]

I am frequently amazed to discover that songs which I had believed to have been original are actually covers. It turns out, for instance, that TMBG’s “Istanbul (not Constantinople)” is a cover of a song from the 1950s. Ironically, one might argue that Istanbul is itself a cover of Constantinople—and that argument (unifying form and […]

Most mammals produce their own vitamin C, but humans carry a mutated form of the gene responsible for one of four enzymes enzymes necessary for vitamin C production, and so we humans must find it in our diets. In effect, every human being has a metabolic deficiency! And in light of this wonderful news, why […]

The question is: how little can I spend to feed myself for one week? I ought to eat 2000 calories/day, so I’ll need to purchase 14,000 calories/week. Here’s a “healthy” option: just eat apples. One ounce of apple has 15 calories, so I’ll need to eat 58 pounds of apples per week; I might […]

Tasha the Cat received a new toy—a plastic circle containing corrugated cardboard, with a ball stuck in a track. Watch her pounce!

On a recent plane trip, I was reading a very abridged version of (the ten thousand page long!) Church Dogmatics by Karl Barth, and I found something totally beautiful. Believing God to be entirely “transcendent in contrast to all immanence” and “divine in contrast to everything human,” and reading (e.g., in Philippians 2:7) that Jesus is […]

Given a text in two languages, is it possible to uncover the meaning of individual words? The Bible is a particularly easy text to work with, since corresponding sentences are marked (i.e., with the same chapter and verse numbers). I downloaded a copy of the Hebrew Bible and the King James’ Version, and looked at […]