Nate.spot

Like most people who studied English Literature in college, I've fantasized about writing a novel one day. Over time that goal has, let's say, slimmed responsibly to fit its britches. These days I'm more interested in short stories, but in many ways the g

Your brain needs to offload just as badly as your butt does. I know it sounds boring to sit in there, alone, naked from the waist down, staring at the wall. But that's the point. Our hellish attention economy has produced a generation of anxious and overs

If I spend more than a few days in a new town, I start to poke around for a breakfast diner. It's a sort of greasy time bubble where everyone sets aside their differences to gorge on eggs and coffee. Eggs, coffee, bacon, pancakes. Notes to a song that we

I finished Fermat's Enigma recently and was surprised how much I enjoyed a book about math. I've always seen myself as a liberal arts guy, but in the last couple years I've been reading a lot of computer history books that each have some flavor of mathema

Note: This is a rather spicy topic to do my JulyReply on, but there you go. This is just my personal take and nothing more. In reply to this post : I'm relatively new here, but I've been surfing the discover feed for a while now. Both Scholarch's and Absu

I was lucky enough to grow up in a house with a backyard and a pool. To the side of the pool is a guesthouse with white stucco walls and a multicolored tile roof. In my earliest memories, the guesthouse had a bed where aunts and nannies sometimes slept. A

Two's Complement is a way to represent positive and negative numbers in binary. It's useful because we want a way to represent each number's inverse within a limited number of bits. The sign bit Putting aside two's complement, the "naive" way to represent

On my way back from a trip last month, I stopped in Baltimore to catch a Conan show. I've been getting into doom metal lately and Conan is a lot of fun. When asked for their favorite Conan album, one redditor responded : "the one with the yelling about ba

One of my favorite things about small projects is the way their constraints can inspire unexpected solutions. You might expect a simple design to limit the room for creativity, but in my experience the opposite is often true. With this project I had the g