The Shir Hadash Men’s Club speaker tonight was Steve Wright, the Editorial Pages Editor of the Murky Nooz. His talk was interesting, as was the Q&A session.

After the talk, I lingered a minute to ask a few more questions, the last being “How can you run Mallard Fillmore — it’s never even funny?” His reply confirmed my deepest suspicions: “We only do it to piss people off.”

I happened to tune into the BBC World Service on my way to work this morning; the program on offer was Discovery. This week’s edition (available online until about October 18th) was about the limits of mathematics and computation, and featured IBMer Greg Chaitin, talking, among other things, about the number Omega which would answer all questions if it could just be computed completely. No, it’s not 42.

Worth a listen!