Superficial Intelligence

No, I'm not talking about the colored eggs associated with the Easter bunny. Although these eggs I'm referring to are also hidden. This week I want to share a few easter eggs found in some popular software applications. Easter eggs are usually hidden features usually put into the application by the programmers. They tend to be undocumented, non-malicious, and humorous. This week I'll show you some that I like. There are hundreds of easter eggs, so if you're really interested in finding out more, check this easter egg archive at www.eeggs.com.

I'll start today with a personal favorite. If you have ever used Matlab, try writing "why" in the command line. You will get all sorts of random answers to this question, such as "Because Jim told me to" and "Because the programmer wanted it". I bet the programmers asked themselves this question everyday that they went to work.

On a side note, I want to thank everyone for the great feedback on the new design. I more than doubled my record number of daily visits to the blog. I just hope it's not a one-time spike!