Simon’s Chess Factor

Sometime in 2014 or 2015, I was chatting with a friend, a guy with a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering. He knew about my background in AI and robotics, and was curious about Uber’s and Google’s self-driving car efforts. He asked if I was optimistic about prospect of autonomous cars. By autonomous, he meant: a taxi …

Antibody Test

Down with the sickness It was the second week of January and nobody had heard of SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19 yet. My wife, L, was down with the flu for the second time of the season. It was bad. Incessant coughing and fever, in bed for six days. On day three she started complaining that she …

Unboxing Rose

Little G wanted to open the box. The sun wasn't up yet. The whoosh of the first morning tubecar had shaken her awake in her hiding place under the bridge. The noise was so deep that it wasn't so much sound as a feeling. Taking rich people up to San Fran or wherever they went, …

11 Years Gone

So. I'm back. I think. Let's not dwell on where I've been for eleven years. Life, right? I stopped writing entirely for a long time. Then, three years ago I started writing fiction. Or, rather, I revived an old interest in fiction from thirty years ago. I've been publishing short stories in small literary pubs …

Turtle Graphics In Python? Cool…

I just learned that Python has Turtle graphics built in.  Very cool.  How did I not know about this before?  Now I guess I know what Maggie's first programming language will be. Inspired by this nice post showing how to draw fractal trees, here's a quick Sierpinsky triangle algorithm in Python: import turtle def striangle(depth,base): …

Cool Seattle Thing No. 3429: Dev Workshop for Transit Data

Too bad I found out about this after the fact...  Apparently King County Metro recently hosted a Developer Workshop for transit data.  Apparently they're looking for more people to write innovative transit-related applications like the super cool One Bus Away, which I use every morning and evening on my Android phone. Having spent years riding …

Real Estate — How far can prices fall?

A month or two ago I was walking the dog in my neighborhood and I ran into a real estate agent who was about to list a home around the corner from me.  The owners were moving out.  She was surprisingly chipper and upbeat.  It was all I could do not to laugh at her.  …

Yes We Can!

EOM.

Guido Van Rossum’s new Blog

Neopythonic. Thoughts from the creator of the Python programming language, now working for Google.

Buy Obama!

I noticed today that Electoral-Vote.com's composite of national polling is giving Obama a 338 to 185 lead in electoral votes.  The interesting thing about this is that Intrade's state-by-state prediction markets have been giving him roughly the same margin for several days, maybe a week -- i.e. the prediction markets have been leading the polls.  …