Some guy took a crack at answering that question. Or more accurately, he claimed to take a crack at it; he never actually got around to answering it. It occurred to me the questioner does have a point, though.

What is computer science, anyhow?

Ban signs advertising gas prices visible from the roads. Oh, it's not a total solution, but it would certainly turn the volume of kvetching down if people didn't see every twist and tumble of a commodity's price.

It's been a bit quiet here because I've been very busy. My long waiting game is over and I finally have a new job with Barracuda Networks. They are most famous for their effective spam firewall appliance, but I'll be working on the IM Firewall appliance (which may be slightly misnamed; it provides IM server services and ships with a client, it's not just a "filter"). They're opening an office in Ann Arbor, but to interview I had to fly out to California, and I'll be spending some time in Cali before the office opens.

A dream I once described here: I dreamt that somebody came up with a symbol that would cause you to die if you looked at it. I’m not sure exactly what the symbol was, but it was an 8 by 8 grid of single-digit numbers and a few lines. (Matrix mathematicians beware!) The funny thing is this: Nobody believed it when told. They’d demand to see it, snatch it out of the person’s hands, and as they are collapsing to the ground loudly declare, “See, I told you so.

The last five minutes of St Elsewhere is the only television show, ever. Everything else is a daydream. - Dwayne McDuffie

The best argument against the War on Terrorism is that terrorism simply isn't enough of a threat to be worth the resources we're pouring into it. On the balance, in a universe that permits things like nuclear weapons, I'm not quite willing to bet the farm on that argument, but I certainly think it's well within the field of factually-viable opinions on the issue. Bolstering the "terrorists really can't be large-scale threats"

Holy cow. That's not a special one, either, they all look like that. (And the humor's pretty good, too.)

I just saw a Pepsi commercial that claims that "56% of people think that Diet Pepsi has more cola flavor than Diet Coke." Considering that the "null hypothesis" would be "50%", that's one of the least impressive endorsements I have ever seen on television. (Sure, since we don't have access to the full details, that may be a test that had more than two options. But still... as endorsement goes, that is tepid.

The second part of the answer, and the one most often missed by non-techies, is the fact that the content in question is an integer — an ordinary number, in other words. The number is often written in geeky alphanumeric format, but it can be written equivalently in a more user-friendly form like 790,815,794,162,126,871,771,506,399,625. Giving a private party ownership of a number seems deeply wrong to people versed in mathematics and computer science.

The question probably never occurred to viewers in the 1970s and 1980s, but suddenly it is highly relevant: exactly how much worthwhile entertainment content was there in shows like “Charlie’s Angels,” “T. J. Hooker,” and “Starsky and Hutch”? The Sony Corporation and its production studio, Sony Pictures Television, which controls the rights to those and many other relics of a distant era of television, have come up with an answer to that question: three and a half to five minutes.