Addictive game....it is possible to win though...just try try again.

[ Some configurations seem more winnable; based on my limited experiences, ones that already describe a partial barrier of alternating open and closed spaces are easier. -k]

Chat Noir - Flash game

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster believes that the likelihood of an ultra-portable MacBook is about 85% at Macworld San Francisco.

Munster bases this prediction on circulating rumors about the ultraportable MacBook that have been making the rounds amongst Mac rumor sites over the past few months.

Well, big grains of salt are required to be attached to Munster and his ilk in general, but damn if I don't hope this is true, if only for the fact that releasing this device would reduce, by a lot, the amount of bitching I hear from a significant percentage of my friends.

Mac Rumors: Ultra-Portable MacBook Likely at Macworld San Francisco 2008?

While most of this is over my head. Is it possible that this could become the Grand Unified Theory we are all looking forward to?

Even if it isn't the pdf is very interesting.

[ Yeah, my physics degree really is just for show at this point... the math here is well beyond my capacity.

I very much look forward to hearing the what people who DO have the math think about all this... it's a fascinating, if opaque. -k]

Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything - Telegraph

This is surreal. The Cleveland Plain Dealer reports (via TechDirt) that Ohio's Cuyahoga County—ground zero in the nationwide e-voting debacle that I've been chronicling here at Ars—is holding a "recount" of their November 6 local elections by going back to the memory cards in their Diebold touchscreen voting machines and reprinting all the paper ballots, so that they can tabulate paper copies of the votes in compliance with a law that defines the paper record as the only official record of the vote. How stupid is this idea?

Wow. Just wow.

Ohio e-voting review makes a mockery of "recounts"

What is Walk Score?

We help homebuyers, renters, and real estate agents find houses and apartments in great neighborhoods. Walk Score shows you a map of what's nearby and calculates a Walk Score for any property. Buying a house in a walkable neighborhood is good for your health and good for the environment.

Killer app. Gold star.

[ Well, it will get one from me eventually perhaps... they need to find a way (hard, no doubt) to incorporate other information.

For example, my address scores a 57/100, which, granted, isn't very good, but I still think is too high. They count the Tara as walkable from my place. I won't deny that it's physically possible to walk there - I've walked to the diner down there before - but there aren't sidewalks for a large portion of the walk, and it'd be (er, was) scary as hell at night, if sober (and if not, it'd be just plain dangerous).

Perhaps my metrics are too strict, but I say if there aren't sidewalks along a road as major as Briarcliff or La Vista, it's not effing walkable, even if there's a pile of good restaurants and stuff along the way.

Also, it calculates things under 1 mile away, AS THE CROW FLIES. Using Google Maps directly to get distances along actual roads, a place shown as .5 miles away on WalkScore is in fact 1.4 miles away. That's a pretty major oversight, even if you leave out the lack of usable sidewalks.

Finally, and this is more blue sky than bottom line, I guess, but still would make a big difference to me, is some way to rate the quality of various road segments for walkability (perhaps collaboratively). Let's face it, the walk from a condo in midtown to a nearby bar is distinct from walking in Decatur and is definitely distinct from me walking across the 85 Bridge on N. Druid Hills Road to get to a little grocery store. -k]

Walk Score - Helping homebuyers, renters, and real estate agents find houses and apartments in great neighborhoods.

God, that would be great!

PRESS RELEASE: An Alzheimer’s Vaccine? - FierceBiotech - Biotechnology Articles, Biotech Industry News, FDA Approval News

SEATTLE - Coming soon next to the Coke and Pepsi in a store near you: ham-and latke-flavored soda to make your holiday feast complete.
It even will be kosher, the company making it says - including the ham.

Primus anyone?

Salt Lake Tribune - Mmmm, ham soda

CHOICE IS GOOD. And the more choices, the better.

This simple American credo lines the shelves of grocery stores with 162 varieties of breakfast cereal, turns ordering a cup of coffee at Starbucks into an Olympic challenge, makes selecting a phone company an enterprise requiring a business degree and supplies dating services with an endless stream of hopeful customers.

It also underlies the way many economists think about human behavior. Human beings, according to traditional economic theory, are rational creatures who, faced with a choice, weigh the costs and benefits of each option and pick the one they prefer. And the more options people are given, the theory goes, the more satisfied they will be.

Yet in an article published last month in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, two social psychologists dispute this view, arguing that at some point, multiplying the number of alternatives people are given becomes counter productive.

In a series of studies, Dr. Sheena S. Iyengar, an assistant professor at Columbia's business school, and Dr. Mark R. Lepper, chairman of Stanford's psychology department, have demonstrated that providing too many options— particularly when the differences between them are small — can make people feel overwhelmed and overloaded, and as a result, less likely to buy or pursue any of the options available.

One is glad to read in the article that Barry Schwartz was included, since this topic is well within his purview.

Choice is good.... Amd the more the better...

Air traffic as seen by the FAA.

The Flight Patterns visualizations are the result of experiments leading to the project Celestial Mechanics by Scott Hessels and Gabriel Dunne. FAA data was parsed and plotted using the Processing programming environment. The frames were composited with Adobe After Effects and/or Maya.

Weeee airplanes are fun and pretty.

[Extremely awesome. -k]

Flight Patterns - FAA Visualizations

The Master of Liberal Arts and Science program, Vanderbilt University’s prime educational outreach program to the Nashville community, is attracting record numbers of students and expanding course offerings.

This summer a MLAS class in religious architecture has been visiting sanctuaries across Middle Tennessee. Upcoming courses include Music, Gender and Sexuality, James Bond and Popular Culture and Southern Literature. Three certificate curriculums have been initiated, in ethics, creative arts and history.

“Last spring we had about 80 students among six courses,” said Martin Rapisarda, associate dean in the College of Arts and Science. “That’s a record number of courses offered in any one semester, and a record number of students in any one semester for the program.”

The growth indicates expanding interest in Nashville in the benefits of lifelong learning.

The MLAS program puts top Vanderbilt faculty in the classroom with adults who wish to continue their education at the graduate level but are constrained by the demands of career and family. Typically, students in the program take one course per semester which meets one evening a week.

The program costs $2,151 for each three-hour course, or half the regular Vanderbilt rate for graduate courses. Vanderbilt employees get a discount that cuts tuition to $645 per class.

The courses are rigorous, with term papers and research expected of the students.

“If this were merely a coffee klatch, it would certainly not be a Vanderbilt University graduate degree program, and I wouldn’t be able to interest our faculty in taking part,” Rapisarda said. “I tell students to expect to work hard and to spend at least 10-12 hours a week preparing for class.”

Rapisarda has added two required core seminars to the now 30-hour program, one to help ease students back into the rigors of the classroom and designed to be taken as the first class in the program. The Capstone Seminar, the last class in the program, encourages students to apply skills learned in the other classes to an extended study of a particular interest culminating in a thesis, work of art or other final project.

“We’ve seen incredible growth,” Rapisarda said. “Right now, we’ve got faculty lined up until Spring 2009 to teach in the program. This audience of motivated adult learners has proved to be a popular experience for our faculty.”

rad. go vandy.

Vanderbilt : Master of Liberal Arts and Science program