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This morning, Buzz Aldrin and I got to pretend we were on the moon. The astronaut was in Washington for the unveiling of the new-and-improved Google Moon, a digital lunar model with the same fluid navigation as Google Earth. The guest of honor, however, didn’t stay on message. While he would “love to talk about Google and Google Moon,” Aldrin ...

And all along, the secret was right there in the stochastic gradient descent. On Friday, a team called “BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos” declared itself the winner of the $1 million Netflix Prize, the contest to improve the site’s existing movie recommendations formula by 10 percent. We don’t yet know exactly how the likely winners did it—the winning ...

Did you mean President-elect Boatman? Barack Obama may be one of the most recognizable figures in America, but there's a decent chance your copy of Microsoft Word or Outlook is still shrugging when you type in his name. The 2003 Word nudges you in the direction of Osama or Bema, which, in one of life’s delectable little ironies, ...

The analogy between CNN's holographic correspondents and Star Wars was lost on no one, but Jessica Yellin may have played it up a little too much. Her Carrie Fisher is impeccable. Video by Andy Bouvé.

McCain’s concession symbolizes the passing of many torches, not the least of which is the completion of the most historic screwing over in modern American politics. Consider the evidence: In the 2000 South Carolina primary, George W. Bush’s campaign conducted push polling suggesting that McCain had fathered an ...

As the networks declare winners in the early states on Tuesday night, this map will project the winner in states where polls show that candidate has a more comfortable lead. For example, if Obama wins Virginia, where he has a six-point lead in the polls, this map will assume he wins states where his margin is at least two points wider than that. ...

With a Democratic win in Ohio, Slate is officially calling the election for Barack Obama, whose convincing performance in early returns has made it all but impossible for John McCain to win. Even as visions of a mega-landslide victory for Democrats faded with McCain victories in dubious tossups like Georgia and North Dakota, Obama’s core ...

With the handful of states he has already won, plus those that are nearly certain to fall into his column, Barack Obama is nearly certain to clinch the presidency in the near future. Although battleground states like Virginia and Indiana are still too close to call, Obama’s core strategy of carrying John Kerry’s states and tacking on a few ...

Early returns from Virginia are not encouraging for those who are hoping that Democrat Mark Warner's popularity in the state can push Obama over the top as well. Some had hoped that Warner, who is running for the Senate against fellow former governor Jim Gilmore, would produce a ''reverse coattails'' effect, attracting voters who support him to ...

Although Barack Obama’s maternal grandmother passed away late Sunday night, Hawaii’s chief elections officer says the absentee ballot she cast on Oct. 27 will still count in today’s election. At the risk of being callous about this sad story, the subject of whether Madelyn Dunham’s vote should count is open to interpretation. A similar case ...