An Exercise in Digital Humanities —

A Cross-Platform Debugging Drama — I am happy to announce that I just finished a three-week-long debugging drama and am eager to share my initial frustration and final excitement. This semester, my operating system course students had to implement a simple multithreaded Web server in C. They could use either Linux (directly or on VM)…

"Wrong Answer. Try Again!" —

And an Invitation to Contribute to the Study — 📚 Connect with us. Want to hear what’s new at The Pragmatic Bookshelf? Sign up for our newsletter. You’ll be the first to know about author speaking engagements, books in beta, new books in print, and promo codes that give you discounts of up…

An End-of-Semester Joke — Prof: Hello, class! As an end-of-semester exercise, let’s solve a simple problem: Demonstrate that for a sufficiently large n, n!≈n×(n-1)! (Laughter in class. Bob the Best Student laughs most.) Prof: n!, also known as n factorial, is… Bob: A product of all positive numbers smaller than or including n! Prof…

What Twitter and Complex Network Analysis Tell Us About Our Holidays — 📚 Take advantage of 40 percent off data science titles during The Pragmatic Bookshelf’s Black Friday event — now through November 29, 2021. Use promo code turkeysale2021 to save on ebooks, including Data Science Essentials in Python and more books by Dmitry Zinoviev. It is mid-November, and the smells of…

Virtual Intimate Objects — A Virtual Intimate Object (VIO) was a [2005, now defunct] low-bandwidth application that allowed a user to “send one bit of message to the other through Internet, … opening up a valuable and novel channel for communicating intimacy among couples.” (http://intimateobj.sourceforge.net/) It looked like a round button in the taskbar…

A Tribute to Google Correlate — As a tribute to Google Correlate that shut down on December 15th, 2019, “as a result of low usage” (sic!), I prepared a map of all cities and towns of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. I started by extracting the most significant correlations between the queries referring to each city or…