Protests Then and Now
When a government engages in deviant behavior, it is the responsibility of the people to express their opposition. That’s why I’ll be participating in the No Kings protest in New York City on Saturday. ... more ...
Charles Petzold
Books and other writings by Charles Petzold
Latest posts
The Appalling Stupidity of Spotify’s AI DJ
Am I naïve in expecting Artificial Intelligence to be smart? Is my interpretation of the word “intelligence” too literal? And when an AI behaves stupidly, who’s to blame? The programmers or the AI entity itself? Is it even proper to make a distinction between the two? Or does the AI work in so mysterious a way that the programmers need no longer take responsibility? ... more ...
30 Years
After all these years, I still get the dreams. ... more ...
Twenty Years of Blog Posts
Today is the 20th anniversary of this blog. I posted my first entry 20 years ago as I was finishing my book Programming Microsoft Windows Forms. Since then, I’ve posted over 900 entries, all of which are still online. ... more ...
The Mary Queen of Scots Channel Anamorphosis: A 3D Simulation
I’ve been going down some odd rabbit holes recently while researching my free online book-in-progress The Lost Art of Logarithms. Although the book is mostly focused on the history, use, meaning, and importance of logarithms, I believe that even histories of science and mathematics profit by being placed within political, cultural, social, and religious contexts. ... more ...
Does the Moon Make Flower-Like Loops Around the Sun?
I recently saw an animation on Facebook that purported to show the “hidden beauty of the Moon’s orbit as it creates a flower-like pattern while revolving around Earth and Sun,” further referring to this motion as “celestial choreography” and an “intricate dance” (Brain Maze post from February 20, 2025). ... more ...
Password Math
A friend from my PC Magazine days recently posted on Facebook a little mathematics anomaly that he encountered while trying to figure out the number of possible passwords under certain conditions. He began with the stipulation that a four-character password had to be constructed from characters from each of four groups: 26 uppercase letters (which I’ll abbreviate as U), 26 lowercase letters (L),…
Reading Jack Smith’s “Final Report”
This is a good-news-bad-news kind of day. ... more ...
A Conversation on the DEX Show
I recently had a delightful remote chat with Tom McGrath of the DEX Show podcast (a presentation of the nexthink software company) about the 2nd edition of my book Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software and some other issues. Here it is: ... more ...
Very Wrong Math
The difference between misinformation and disinformation is the difference between ignorance and malice. Trolling is somewhat different, incorporating an element of provocation and narcissism. But what the hell is this? ... more ...
2025 Project: “The Lost Art of Logarithms”
I don’t make New Year’s resolutions, but I do have New Year’s projects, and for 2025 I hope to spend as much time as possible working on my book The Lost Art of Logarithms. ... more ...
The Best Decade in Music
Like many people who turned 11 years old in 1964, the first record album I bought “on my own” — in other words by pleading “Mom, can you get this album for me?” — was Meet the Beatles!, their first release in the United States. But so what? I have about as much inclination to listen to that album now as to watch episodes of My Favorite Martian, which was my favorite television series at the time.…
Stop Fascism: Vote Blue
It might seem silly for a retired technical writer and obscure blogger to endorse a Presidential candidate. I am not vain enough to believe that my prestige (such as it is) has the power to influence people’s electoral choices. But I believe this election to be too important for anyone to remain silent. Silence is not an option. Silence equals complicity. ... more ...
Rudimentary 3D on the 2D HTML Canvas
I’ve been working on a graphical web project that requires an interactive roll of a pair of dice. Dice are cubes and would be most convincingly rendered with 3D graphics. But because these dice are only a tiny part of this project, I was reluctant to call out the big guns. I didn’t want to wrestle with the low-level WebGL to do 3D graphics or even a friendlier WebGL wrapper such as three.js. ...…
“Fantasy on a Fugue” (Revisited)
This has been on my to-do list for 40 years. ... more ...
That Bullshit Income-Inequality Meme
Memes can be fun and sometimes even informative, but when memes contain numbers — and particularly numbers without a source — memes can be deceptive and just plain wrong. For example, here’s a meme that’s been floating around that purports to illustrate income inequality in the United States: ... more ...
Netflix Cancels Bach, Mozart, Beethoven
I’m a fan of Bridgerton (Team Penelope, if you care), the feel-good Netflix series portraying a fantastical harmoniously multiracial Regency England, and renowned for its steamy sex scenes, the marvelous Shonda Rhimes touch, and clever quasi-“classical” arrangements of pop songs. These arrangements avoid the anachronistic incongruity of 19th century sets and costumes accompanied by the…
Reading About the Dreyfus Affair
One of my 2024 projects is to read Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time at the rate of about 10 pages a day, and so far it’s been successful: I’m currently heading towards the end of the 3rd volume, The Guermantes Way. During a long dinner party in this novel, seemingly everyone has taken sides in the Dreyfus Affair. This is an episode in French history centered around a wrongful arrest and…
Interactive Graphical Arithmetic
When called upon to perform basic arithmetic these days, most of us grab the nearest device with a calculator app. On the rare occasions when the power is out and the batteries have run down, we might need to resort to doing the calculation by hand. In either case, we’re performing a digital calculation, meaning that we’re manipulating discrete digits in an algorithmic procedure. ... more ...