Dissecting an interview question: reconstructing a tree

College recruiting season is almost upon us again, and I’ve been doing a little research to try to find a new question. My current question is OK, but it’s a little clunky, and I’ve been sniffing around for something new. In my research I’ve been going through Programming Problems. It’s a good compendium of the different […]

Sticking

There’s something simultaneously inspiring and incredibly disheartening about following the tweets of a professional writer like @nkjemison. Here’s a well-respected author with a half dozen books in print, and you’d like to believe that she just sits down whenever she likes, bangs out a couple of perfect pages, then goes off to whatever larger-than-life stuff authors do […]

Beads on a string

In traditional western musical composition, each score typically has a time signature that defines the overall tempo of the music. One number defines the length of the beat, the other the number of beats per measure. So, you might have three quarter notes ( 3 4 ), two half notes ( 2 2 ), seven eighth notes ( 7 8 […]

Science, superstition, and open plan offices

If you’re anything like me, you probably have one or more anti-science, anti-rationalist bêtes noires. Maybe you like to rage against the creationists and what they’re doing to our schools. Or gripe about the global warming deniers and what they’re doing to our planet. Or fume about the crazy anti-vaccination nuts and what they’re doing to […]