A teacher comes out with a very large glass jar. He drops rocks in it until there isn't any more room. "Is it full?" he asks the students. They agree that it's full. Then he takes out a bag of gravel, which he pours in the jar. "Now is it full?" They agree that it's full. He takes out a bag of sand, which he pours in the jar. They agree that now, at last, it's full. He takes out a jug of

A New Kind of City Will the city disappear or will the whole planet turn into a vast urban hive?--which would be another mode of disappearance. Can the needs and desires that have impelled men to live in cities recover, at a still higher level, all that Jerusalem, Athens, or Florence once seemed to promise? Is there still a living choice between Necropolis and Utopia; the possibility of

An AP article carried on CNN presents the usual sky-is-falling problem of students blindly accepting information on the Internet. It takes a sideways swipe at Wikipedia -- "The credentials of the people writing grass-roots Web journals and a committee-written encyclopedia called Wikipedia are often unclear." -- but allows that, maybe, multiple reviewers and points of view just might be

Someone Call David Kay I think eBay might have found some of those weapons of mass destruction.

Aspect-Oriented Software Development I contributed a chapter on bytecode transformation to Aspect-Oriented Software Development, a honking big book with material by almost everyone who's doing interesting work in this field.

This may be the greatest illustration in a scientific journal of all time: Translating the Noise, Nature Genetics 31 (May 2002)

The Unpredictable Time was, science fiction was not only predicting the future, it could be about the idea of predicting the future. The central conceit of Asimov's Foundation trilogy is that through psychohistory, it is possible to predict sociopolitical events with high accuracy. The 2003 nominees for Hugo Award for Best Novel do a complete turn-around. They are largely set in the future