One of my favorite examples these days is Bresenham's line drawing algorithm. You pick up any first-year graphics book and they'll describe Bresenham's algorithm for drawing a line, and it's about five statements long, does what it does, and it's pretty simple. You go and you take a look at any industrial-strength implementation of Bresenham's algorithm and it's thousands if not tens of thousands of lines long. Why is it so big? Why is there all this complexity in what is really a very simple...

A few years ago, Burger King had a great example on the web, the subservient chicken. You could go to this website, and you could type in whatever you wanted. This guy in a chicken suit would do whatever you typed in. For example, “Do a back flip,” and the guy in the chicken suit would do a back flip. “Hit a home run,” and he would look like he’s hitting a home run. But it wasn’t heavily-branded. It didn’t say, “Burger King, Burger King, buy...

A few years ago, Burger King had a great example on the web, the subservient chicken. You could go to this website, and you could type in whatever you wanted. This guy in a chicken suit would do whatever you typed in. For example, “Do a back flip,” and the guy in the chicken suit would do a back flip. “Hit a home run,” and he would look like he’s hitting a home run. But it wasn’t heavily-branded. It didn’t say, “Burger King, Burger King, buy...

A few years ago, Burger King had a great example on the web, the subservient chicken. You could go to this website, and you could type in whatever you wanted. This guy in a chicken suit would do whatever you typed in. For example, “Do a back flip,” and the guy in the chicken suit would do a back flip. “Hit a home run,” and he would look like he’s hitting a home run. But it wasn’t heavily-branded. It didn’t say, “Burger King, Burger King, buy...

At any rate, mainstream Englishmen considered the Pilgrims to be deliberate religious dropouts who intended to found a new nation completely independent from non-Puritan England. In 1643 the Puritan/Pilgrims declared themselves an independent confederacy, one hundred and forty-three years before the American Revolution. They believed in the imminent occurrence of Armegeddon in Europe and hoped to establish here in the new world the "Kingdom of God" foretold in the book of Revelation. They...