Sub-reddit for Systems Science and OR

I've been a big fan of Reddit's Programing subsite for a while. Just this morning I found another sub-reddit:
SYSOR: Systems Science, Operations Research and Everything In Between, and I'm loving it. Lots of links on data mining, graph software, image recognition, learning theory, etc etc.

Not sure if the Operations Research part in the title is so big now -- there's some sort of complicated reorganization of a number of fields including operations research, systems science, computational learning, and more general computer science areas. I'm a fan of the great historical overview in the Introduction in Rusell and Norvig's AI book; I'm sure it's slanted in various ways, but what else are overarching narratives for? :)

conplot - a console plotter

This has to be the most quick-and-dirty data visualizer out there: I wrote an ascii art plotter script that takes a column of numbers on stdin and throws out a plot on your console. I've been using it for several months to quickly look at numbers on the commandline, especially from logs and such. (Back in school I would use gnuplot for this; R is good too. But sometimes you want to move really fast, esp if you have a few hideous perl -pe one-liners on your hands and mucking around with temp files will interrupt your flow.)

Link: github.com/brendano/conplot

"Demo":

$ cat time.log | conplot                                            
14601                                                                     
                                                                         oooooooo
                                                                    oooooo
                                                            ooooooooo     
                                                 oooooooooooo             
11269                                     oooooooo                        
                                       oooo                               
                                     ooo                                  
                                  oooo                                    
                                 oo                                       
                               ooo                                        
7271                       ooooo                                          
                        oooo                                              
                     oooo                                                 
                  oooo                                                    
               oooo                                                       
            oooo                                                          
3272       oo                                                             
           o                                                              
           o                                                              
          oo                                                              
        ooo                                                               
      ooo                                                                 
-726  0                                                                   76826

I must say, it's way easier to throw up some code on GitHub than on to SourceForge, which is the only other open source code hosting service I've used. I guess Google Code is their biggest competitor in that respect; I haven't tried it.

The best natural language search commentary on the internet

With Powerset's launch, there's an awful lot of hot air and crappy blog posts about natural language search being written. Instead of contributing to that mess, I prefer to direct the reader to the best writing on the topic that I've seen: Fernando Pereira's posts on search.