PHP is like democracy. It's not perfect, it might not even be great, but it's the best we've come up with so far.

The idea of visualizing lexical novelty is very interesting. Could you possibly also visualize word uniqueness, i.e. which paragraphs contain words that are used the least in the whole book, or maybe even in the author's whole body of work? Perhaps that could provide a more visually balanced view of where the author was at her most creative.

Indeed, it is important to remember that correlation does not imply causation. I also think that this service is supposed to find events that cause searches, not the other way around. Perhaps if you move the dates around a bit (i.e. push the dates of stock closing prices back a day or two) it could find some real correlations of news items about IBM causing searches about related issues, but I can't imagine a straight relation between _the volume_ of searches and the stock price. Any event, good or bad, will cause a rise in volume of searches. Perhaps you should try to correlate the volume of trading stock, not the closing prices.

Considering that only you and the service provider (i.e. your bank) benefit from security, and that local hardware (WiFi router) is far more vulnerable to attacks than your/bank's hardware, HTTPS is the best option by far. I think all web traffic should be encrypted, though we'd need to work on how browsers cache it etc. HTTPS is cheap enough to be used everywhere -- it shouldn't increase your CPU load by more than 1-2%. I think that a great way to make people use encryption more would be to issue free SSL certificates with every new domain name sold.

Even a human typist needs to have the text _dictated_ to him, which isn't the same thing as plain talk. To be able to actually talk to a computer, it'll need artificial intelligence, knowledge about you and the context of your conversation, and probably also a camera with software that can understand body language. A camera also helps to solve the problem of computer knowing when you speak to it, as opposed to other people/computers.

Or you could simply click-trough and copy the link from the address bar.

Sorry, I've just noticed it's the same argument Shirky uses :)

I suppose that if Carr lived trough the advent of printing, he'd argue that people read more and more books, and therefore spend less time on each of them, making their retention lower and reflections on the contents shallower. They're also distracted by new books comming out every week or so. "Internet" doesn't distract me. Unnecessary new e-mail sounds, or IMs from strangers would.

Why not use Google Charts? http://code.google.com/apis/chart/image_charts.html

Indeed, every abstraction has a computation cost and makes the code simpler (in theory, at least.) Since most performance problems stem from complex code, in most cases it makes sense to use abstractions.