My nephew Ben, a budding computer programmer, found this old picture of me in a book about computer programmers. The photo has the following caption: “Sometimes programmers play computer games when they need a break from their work projects.” What the author perhaps didn’t realize (the photograph was obtained from the Corbis Stock photography archive), [...]

This weekend, I counted all the words on Project Gutenberg. This has been done before, notably, here. My script crawled most of the English language books on Project Gutenberg (about 20,000 titles), and counted how often each word appears, and how many books each word appears in. The script ran for about 20 hours. You [...]