Cricket in the Sun (from the series: They Move Amongst Us)
The cricket was just standing there on a stone picnic table waiting for anyone or anything to come by. It didn’t care much when I turned up, it just ignored me. It was one of those hot Texas days where the sweat drips off you [...]

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Those who were never hypnotized by Hemingway are unlikely to appreciate what follows—even if they’ve been maintaining software for decades. Those who’ve read Hemingway will understand.
The Bug Count Also Rises (attrib. to John Browne)
In the fall of that year the rains fell as usual and washed the leaves of the dust and dripped from [...]

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Several believed-to-be-lost diaries of French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre recently came to light following their purchase from an obscure book shop in Montmartre. These are early diaries and they reveal a young Sartre obsessed not with the void, but with food. Apparently Sartre, before discovering philosophy, had hoped to write “a cookbook that will put to [...]

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When you know the Sun is at the centre of the solar system, any other model of the solar system looks insane. But if you do not know, and you have no means other than the naked eye to observe the motion of the planets, the structure of the solar system is neither obvious nor [...]

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Originally, the Internet was conceived by DARPA as a mesh network and designed to be one. One of the characteristics of such networks is that if you destroy a node, you only lose the node. The rest of the network continues to function quite happily. Similarly, if you lose a connection between two nodes, the [...]

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