Monthly Archives: January 2009

the chatterböxen story

January 25 09

I have just launched the beta of Chatterböxen, my ephemeral, anonymous chat program (with tightened-up graphics). Chatterböxen began as a simple attempt to create an AJAX chat with jQuery, but quickly evolved into the current look and feel, with words and phrases floating in a bright white space.

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a curious computer science problem

January 11 09

I was discussing linguistics with my esteemed colleague and close friend Alex English earlier when I stumbled upon a very interesting computer science problem: the generation of grammatically-correct, semantically meaningful palindromes. The minute I typed my message about it I regretted it, because my immediate impression was that this is an extremely difficult problem.

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2008: a retrospective

January 8 09

I’m looking forward to 2009 mostly because I’m glad to see 2008 be finished forever. The politics and the economics of 2008 were just about the worst I’ve seen in my lifetime. The 2008 primary—at least on the Democrats’ side—got super messy. I was behind Obama from the very start because I live in Chicago [...]

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