One small step for robot, one giant leap for rotbotkind. Thanks to a partnership between autonomous delivery robot developers Nuro and Domino’s, the pizza chain everyone knows and loves, you can now get your cheesy inches brought to your door by an emotionless battery-powered robotic serf. Well, I say “you,” but in reality it’s only for a very small group of people… in a very specific location… on very specific days, that will be able to take advantage of this futuristic delivery option....

The US Constitution requires that a population count be conducted at the beginning of every decade. This census has always been charged with political significance, and continues to be. That’s clear fromthe controversies in the run-up to the 2020 census. But it’s less widely known how important the census has been in developing the US computer industry, a story that I tell in my book,Republic of Numbers: Unexpected Stories of Mathematical Americans through History....

You’ve tried SEO, you’ve worked with people who know all of the right words to say. You have a great product and yet you seem to dump customers every time that they have to sign up in order to check out from your online shop. What gives? Kate O’Neill can probably find out. Kate is the Founder and CEO of aNashville-based[meta]marketer. It’s a cold, nearly-rainy day in November and I’m meeting with her to talk about a number of things, but mostly about why [meta]marketer keeps popping up on my radar when people talk about Nashville....

One summer night in August, 1935, a young Soviet miner named Alexei Stakhanov managed to extract 102 tonnes of coal in a single shift. This was nothing short of extraordinary (according to Soviet planning, the official average for a single shift was seven tonnes). Stakhanov shattered this norm by a staggering 1,400%. But the sheer quantity involved was not the whole story. It was Stakhanov’s achievement as an individual that became the most meaningful aspect of this episode....

If you thought that C is the kind of language that only 60-year-old white men know, think again. Yeah, it’s the dinosaur among today’s programming languages. But it’s still alive and kicking in more areas than you’d think. For one, Unix is written in C. Originally written in assembly, the Unix kernel was rewritten in C backin 1973. This made Unix a lot more portable across different machines, and helped make it popular....