the bug in Excel

In Meknes, just checking emails to see if Justin Smith has set up an appointment with my dentist to fix my broken tooth on my return to Berlin (he has), I suddenly wonder what Joel Spolsky is up to (for this, I hear you say incredulously, you needed to go to Morocco?), and I find that Joel has a post on the bug in Excel! And why, if you multiply 77.1 x 850, you get 100,000 instead of 65,535! (It turns out that .1 is the binary equivalent of a repeating decimal.) All here.

I spent a few days in Chefchouen, in the Rif mountains. Many as yet inchoate thoughts on languages that fall outside formal educational systems for one reason or another - there are three or four Berber languages, of which only one has been written down, and there are no mechanisms in place to help travellers pick up enough of the basics to go to places where not much else is spoken.