As more and more people get smartphones that can play MP3s or streamed music, like the iPhone or Android phone like the upcoming HTC Evo 4G (I’m gettin’ one!), fewer and fewer people are buying standalone MP3 players. Why have two gadgets when you can have just one? But I think there are good reasons to do so, but I …

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A few months back I gave a presentation to the NYC R Meetup. (R is a statistical programming language. If this means nothing to you, feel free to stop reading now.) The presentation was on ggplot2, a popular package for generating graphs of data and statistics. In the talk (which you can see here, including both my …

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Hah, it rhymes! The fall haul (hah!) from the CSA inevitably means two things, root vegetables and ungodly numbers of pears. I love root vegetables, but tend to find pears to be pale imitations of apples. But when poached in red wine, or cooked with butter and sugar, pears can have some redeeming value. Recently, for …

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The problem of how to monetize online publishing, particularly news publishing, is neither new nor all that surprising. But the ongoing lack of a solution is steadily eating into news organizations across the country. Yesterday, the Times announced it was going to buy out or lay off 8% of its newsroom staff, despite …

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