One for the mathmos: an interesting article on hash functions by Bob Jenkins, formerly of Oracle, now at Microsoft. Jenkins looks at various hash functions in use at the time (1996, updated 2005), then proposes his own, along with a confident promise:
I offer you a new hash function for hash table lookup that is faster and more thorough than the one you are using now. I also give you a way to verify that it is more thorough.
Wikipedia’s interpretation of the function shows it to be the same function as the one Perl 5.8.8 uses for its built-in hashes. (Search for #define PERL_HASH).
Browsing Bob Jenkins’ site turns up many other gems, including this:
Little League did not produce a great baseball player, but Bob did acquire a knack for spotting four-leaf clovers.
An attitude to sport which is achingly familiar to me. My advice to Microsoft, Oracle et al: if you’re looking for the nerds of tomorrow, you could do a lot worse than start your search on the perimeters of the world’s school sports fields.