“For every 100 girls diagnosed with a special education disability 217 boys are diagnosed with a special education disability.

“To answer a call on the iPhone, you can tap Answer on the screen, or pinch the microscopic microphone bulge on the white earbud cord. Either way, music or video playback pauses until you hang up.

Making a call, though, can take as many as six steps: wake the phone, unlock its buttons, summon the Home screen, open the Phone program, view the Recent Calls or speed-dial list, and select a name. Call quality is only average..

E-mail is fantastic. Incoming messages are fully formatted, complete with graphics; you can even open (but not edit) Word, Excel and PDF documents.

The Web browser is a real dazzler. You get full Web layouts, fonts and all, shrunk to fit the screen. You scroll with a fingertip — much faster than scroll bars. You can double-tap to enlarge a block of text for reading, or rotate the screen 90 degrees, which rotates and magnifies the image to fill the wider view.

Finally, you can enlarge a Web page — or an e-mail message, or a photo — by spreading your thumb and forefinger on the glass. The image grows as though it’s on a sheet of latex.

“Why should the big N [north] always be on top when there are hundreds of other directions—thousands, if you get down to seconds of arc—that have an equally legitimate claim on our affections? I grieve to think of the shattered dreams of, say, south southeast.

During the Middle Ages, maps often had east on top—whence the expression ‘to orient.’

“The executive branch has an obligation to remain within constitutional limits. The point of the signing statement is to advise where the executive sees those limits.

“Airline chaos is the travel story of this year.

“Beverly Hills and the neighboring city of West Hollywood are together entirely surrounded by the city of Los Angeles. The area’s so-called “Golden Triangle” of wealthy neighborhoods is formed by Beverly Hills and the Los Angeles neighborhoods of Bel-Air and Holmby Hills.

“Good developers take ownership so you don’t have to.

“Once you are past your base set of code, the percentage dedicated to server side code starts to increase. This is primarily due to added complexity of features and other enhancements (spam protection, security, error handling, etc.) that do not necessarily have an interface element attached to them.

“To imagine that Bret Victor spends a lot of his time collecting jokes for his examples (like you and me) does him a gross injustice.