A statement on an Islamist web site that is thought to be linked to al-Qaeda is getting a surprising amount of attention today, considering the message is not precisely new and shocking:
“All compounds, bases and means of transport, especially Western and American airlines, will be a direct target for our coming operations in the near future,” said the statement.
I seem to vaguely remember some events a few years back that indicates to me that targeting airliners is not a totally new tactic from al-Qaeda. In fact, it is hard to imagine any more obvious target, except for the fact that we already expect this and are (I hope!) prepared for it.
I also seem to remember that other modes of transportation, like trains, are not really considered off-limits to these terrorists either.
So what is new here? Nothing. I am not one to minimise terror threats, but I feel this is just another attempt at scaring the airline passengers with in the tourist season.
Al Gore harshly criticized U.S. Senate candidate Alex Penelas, saying his fellow Democrat was "the single most treacherous and dishonest person" he dealt with during the disputed 2000 presidential campaign.
William Saffire speculates that all the outpouring of respect for Ronald Reagan may inspire the Bush administration to change its stand on stem cell research.
In fact, the thought occurred to me immediately after I heard he was dead, but thought it a bit tactless to bring it up at the time.
Professor Tim Spector has come up with the genetic excuse for cheating on your partner. Through twin studies, he has identified what he thinks is a genetic component of what makes women cheat on their partner.
Focusing on women, he found that if one of a pair of twins had a history of infidelity, the chances her sister would also stray were about 55%.
In general it is estimated that just 23% of women are not faithful.
Maybe he has found the genetic component of lying to researchers instead?
Or, alternatively, maybe he's found a genetic component of actually being more honest than the average woman. It's a bit hard to know what you find out when your study relies on people being honest about quite intimate details.
Not to mention he may just have found that there is a genetic component that makes twins both chose lousy partners to begin with. There are endless possibilities.
In 1977, Bill Gates and friends were introduced to the puzzle known as Petals Around the Rose. It took Bill several hours to solve it, as this brilliant article describes (read it!).
Can you solve it? If you do, please don't post the actual solution anywhere. It is one of those brilliant puzzles people really should find out for themselves.
It only took me a few minutes to solve it, so obviously Bill Gates just happen to be smarter than me in every other way.
There are many brilliant men and women in computer science, but there is one giant: Donald Knuth.
I promised in a recent posting in the VB section of my blog to not say much more about future releases, but I wasn't really planning going into computer archeology. For some reason I did. Donald Knuth is now a retired (or emeritus, as they call it) professor at Stanford, working on volume 4 (and 5, etc) of his legendary one-man encyclopedia The Art of Computer Programming (1-3).
Most books and articles about computer programming are obsolete in a few years at best. The first volume of TAoCP was published the year I was born, in 1968. Many years later I grabbed the three volumes (yes, #4 is still in the works) from my Business School library and read as much of them as I could before the librarian threatened to take my kneecaps. Indeed, good algorithms and brilliant writing do not have a sell-by date.
Knuth is not only a computer scientist extraordinaire, he is a musician and writer, he wrote both a typesetting language (TeX) and masterfully designed the typefaces (fonts) for his books; he has even written a book on Biblical exegesis. Donald E: Knuth has a homepage, but no longer reads or writes email after he retired.
I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.
And he avoided the onslaught of spam. I told you he was a genious!
For a sample of his timeless work, read his legendary article Structured Programming with Go To Statements in PDF format. This article is from December 1974. Yes, it is 30 years old, and it was a monumental article that really convinced the field that goto statements are evil (Cobol programmers still used them for years, but they are not truly human), and also showed the superiority of structured programming with statements like while and for. If you are a programmer, you will recognice the article is old, and you'll also realise that nothing is really new under the sun.
Finally, no article about Donald Knuth is complete without including his most famous statement, the one about bugs that every programmer will understand immediately. In his own words:
On March 22, 1977, as I was drafting Section 7.1 of The Art of Computer Programming, I read four papers by Peter van Emde Boas that turned out to be more appropriate for Chapter 8 than Chapter 7. I wrote a five-page memo entitled ``Notes on the van Emde Boas construction of priority deques: An instructive use of recursion,'' and sent it to Peter on March 29 (with copies also to Bob Tarjan and John Hopcroft). The final sentence was this: "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it."
In 1977, Bill Gates and friends were introduced to the puzzle known as 
There are many brilliant men and women in computer science, but there is one giant: 
