Links

• The never-ending crosswalk
• Amusing charts explaining life as a PhD candidate
• If this kid doesn’t make you smile, something’s wrong with you
• Making Me Nervous A great little song that I’ve been meaning to pimp for a while. More at BradSucks.net

Long time, no post

It’s been a busy week at work. I’ve got some stuff saved up and I’ll try to get around to posting some of it this weekend. Until then, uncensor the internet or bake a mean chocolate chip cookie.

Links

• All (Known) Bodies in the Solar System Larger than 200 Miles in Diameter
• Worst rap album covers. Ever.

Links

Crazy finish in the DII basketball championship game

Time Magazine covers this week:.
In the rest of the world: “Talibanistan”, a story about the resurgence of the Taliban.
In the US: “Why We Should Teach the Bible in Public School”

Links

Heartbreaking cases like this are why abortions need to remain legal.

How do you prove photography to a blind man?

Wednesday Links

• New York is currently experiencing “unknown precipitation” (whatever that is…)
• Gmail Fetcher launches to everyone. You can now pull all of your POP email accounts into gmail.
• 17 is the “most random” number. Really, this just displays how poorly conceived human notions of randomness are. We’re wired to find order in the chaos of the world. Going the other way just doesn’t come naturally.
• A great comment from this thread: What did Einstein Invent Anyway?
  

  Your question is misguided. Einstein was a scientist, not an engineer. Scientists try to learn about the world; engineers try to use that knowledge to create useful things. Trying to rate a scientist based on his inventions is a case of using the wrong score board — like counting innings in a tennis game.

Friday Links

• The inner life of a Cell is a stunning animation of processes happening inside human cells. If yo’re a bio geek, watch it first and see how much you recognize. Then head over and take a look at the explanation for all the details.
• What’s the sum knowledge of all nutrition research? According to Michael Pollan it’s this simple: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
• Turtles! may soon be replaced by Turtles??
• Finally, a good short story by Isaac Asimov: The Last Question

Science-y Links

• Houston: the U.S.’s epicenter of automobile-facilitated sprawl
• How our wants become needs. 35% of Americans say that owning a dishwasher is a necessity.
• Getting what you pay for: Why some colleges are having to raise tuition to attract more applicants.
• Uncharted Islands are appearing around Greenland as the polar ice retreats.

Flash Fun

Here’s a highly addictive little flash game. Can you beat level 75? That’s my best.

Update: 81 is my new personal best, and I think I’m done. Once you figure out the optimal strategy, it just takes too long to play.

Links

• CNN’s site is over 50% advertising
• Sneaking greens into your diet - I need to try some of these
• Some good tips for organizing your huge music collection. Now that I have an iPod, I love me some smart playlists.
• Fascinating look at Asymmetric warfare

Hopefully, those keep you busy until I’m done with this @#$#% fellowship application.

Link Dump

For your reading enjoyment:

Anil Dash smacks down email forwards with style.

A math limerick that’s all kinds of clever.

A man was recently detained at JFK airport solely because he had Arabic writing on his shirt. Now, you can show solidarity and proudly proclaim: “I am not a terrorist”. (I own the shirt and will be wearing it next time I fly)

Need late night food? Find it at GopherNow

Quick Post

Too much good stuff going on for me to not post some of it. So here’s a link dump:

• Bruce Schneier on “anti-terror”
• Houston crime stats / Google map mashup
• Trashing the Oceans: a report from the Eastern garbage patch in the north Atlantic
• A long New Yorker article on the Poincaré conjecture and the brilliant mathematician who proved it. He is now refusing the Fields Medal and a million dollar prize claiming that “everybody understood that if the proof is correct then no other recognition is needed”.
• Map of projected world population chage by the year 2025

Coolest thing you’ll see today

A 14-inch drill bit broke into a mine shaft and turned a large lake into a maelstrom, sucking in drilling platforms, barges, and anything else in its path.

via Kottke

Giant Centipede

How cool is this giant centipede that eats bats for dinner?! And how’d you like to find one under your bed?

Clutter

I often collect snippets of information that I read in text files, with the idea that I’ll turn them into blog posts or ruminate on them later. Right now I have way more accumulated than I can handle, so here are a few of the random things I’ve been reading about lately:

PZ Meyers on the state of science education in the US:

Imagine being an electrical engineer and hearing that a third of the country doesn’t believe all that stuff about electricity and radio waves, but thinks there actually are little people moving about inside their televisions. That’s how biologists feel about the state of knowledge about biology here; we’ve got a lot of people with medieval attitudes about the subject. This is the pool from which we have to draw our students, and that worries us.

Razib shares this exchange from a message board he’s on:

dude, mormans are weird. let’s just face it. the whole thing makes me giggle when I talk about it. golden tablets . . . the whole thing is goofy-times.

Response:

Weirder than, say, believing that a man who died two thousand years ago can be eaten in convenient wafer form as a requirement to getting into heaven?

By now this is old news, but according to Reuters:

The FBI secretly sought information last year on 3,501 U.S. citizens and legal residents from their banks and credit card, telephone and Internet companies without a court’s approval, the Justice Department said Friday.

Thank goodness the EFF and ACLU are making some serious noise about this, but why aren’t more people seriously pissed off about this?

And finally:

Did you hear the headline abou the lunatic who raped the laundry woman and ran away? “Nut screws washer and bolts!”

Odds and Ends

• From the “Duh” department: How well students handle complex reading is the biggest factor in college success.
• World population hits 6.5 billion: people having more sex than ever. (related: Bad Religion - Ten in 2010)
• An article by Paul Krugman on why the free market and healthcare don’t mix.

Links

• Boy on a Stick and Slither - some of these are pretty good. I feel like you have to read a few before you get the tone of the strip, though.
• The best Onion graphic ever. I’m surprised that I didn’t post this a long time ago

Yes, it’s a Wombat

This wombat is smarter than most people. Or at least most Republicans…

Links

• How cool is this: Dance Dance DNA
• Awesome scratching video
• Another movie trailer remix. This one is for Sleepless in Seattle

Links

• Just in case you’re the last person on earth who hasn’t seen this: The Chronic-*what*-cles of Narnia
• Download songs from Myspace. I don’t use the site much, but I know that a lot of people do.