This course teaches the art of guessing results and solving problems without doing a proof or an exact calculation. Techniques include extreme-cases reasoning, dimensional analysis, successive approximation, discretization, generalization, and pictorial analysis. Applications include mental calculation, solid geometry, musical intervals, logarithms, integration, infinite series, solitaire, and differential equations. (No epsilons or deltas are harmed by taking this course.) This course is offered during the Independent Activities Period (IAP), which is a special 4-week term at MIT that runs from the first week of January until the end of the month.

Street-Fighting Mathematics | MIT OpenCourseWare

The Army Reserve is looking for soldiers with a knack for information technology to help fight the nation’s wars in cyberspace.

Reserve wants soldiers to protect networks

Drainage tunnels beneath the Strip exert an unnatural pull on artists whose work rarely sees the light of day

Underground gallery - Las Vegas Sun - Graffiti

Giles Bowkett:

Capturing the aggregate information about what a given community considers interesting is very useful; but it's insane to conflate what the community finds useful in aggregate with what each member of the community will personally find useful. Unfortunately, very many sites have made precisely this insane mistake - practically everyone except del.icio.us, in fact. Consequently we have a whole genre of sites with very predictable signal/noise decay.

This happens because the kind of filtering that a social networking approach to news gives you has some serious flaws. I'm mainly ranting about the Hordes Of Moronic Imbeciles Expressing Their Opinions About You Problem, but two other problems to consider are the Tim Bray Problem and the Cory Doctorow Problem. These guys are each more interesting to the developer community than they are to me, which puts them on my radar way more often than they should be, and in either case this causes a problem.

The Tim Bray Problem is that the developer community pays a lot of attention to Tim Bray, but I have never derived any use at all from any information connected to Tim Bray in any way, and after exposure to a lot of such information, I'm becoming very confident that nothing Tim Bray says about anything will ever make any difference to me one way or the other.

The Cory Doctorow Problem is related, but much thornier.

Unlike Tim Bray, Cory Doctorow often annoys me. The Cory Doctorow Problem is worse for me than the Tim Bray Problem, because Tim Bray is a glass of water when I'm not thirsty, and Cory Doctorow is a winning lottery ticket buried under a hundred thousand yipping chihuahuas who all need to pee. I could really use that lottery ticket, but I really don't want to deal with those chihuahuas.

Summon Monsters? Open The Door? Heal? Or Die?

To many in the military, the need for secrecy outweighed the Internet’s value for rapidly and widely sharing ideas. While jihadists built entire intelligence and recruiting machines online, huge swaths of the U.S. military were walling themselves off from the Internet.

But not entirely.

The Army cleverly dodged the bans, setting up its own versions of popular Web 2.0 sites, but hiding them behind password-protected portals. In that way, the Army appears to have found a middle ground between Internet proponents and skeptics. On this toehold, the land combat branch is steadily building new Internet tools that might help the United States catch up to Internet-savvy jihadists. In late April, the land-warfare branch even launched an official blogging service for officers.

The Military's Internet 'Civil War'

If Google were the United States government, the data that streams onto Nicholas Fox’s laptop every day would be classified as top secret.

Mr. Fox is among a small group of Google employees who keep a watchful eye on the vital signs of one of the most successful and profitable businesses on the Internet. The number of searches and clicks, the rate at which users click on ads, the revenue this generates — everything is tracked hour by hour, compared with the data from a week earlier and charted.

“You can see very, very quickly if anything is amiss,” said Mr. Fox, director of business product management at Google.

Mr. Fox and his “ads quality” team can also quickly see whether something is working particularly well. His group’s mission, to constantly fine-tune Google’s ad delivery system, has one overriding objective: show users only the ads they are most likely to be interested in and click on.

The Human Hands Behind the Google Money Machine

Michael Lewis:

Here's a question you probably have never asked yourself:

What, at bottom, is a toilet?

To an ordinary person, it's a device for transferring ordinary human waste from the body to the sewer, as discreetly and sanitarily as possible. But just as all humans are not ordinary, all human waste isn't ordinary, and the waste of Russians is no exception.

From the recent archive:

Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer's Fecopoetics

Pre-order now!

And also:

Having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, he asked, what did the turtle rest on?

Another turtle.

And that turtle?

"Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down."

Getting to the Bottom of a Russian's 26 Toilets

The JIT is an advanced JavaScript infovis toolkit based on 5 papers about different information visualization techniques.

The JIT implements advanced features of information visualization like Treemaps (with the slice and dice and squarified methods), an adapted visualization of trees based on the Spacetree, a focus+context technique to plot Hyperbolic Trees, and a radial layout of trees with advanced animations (RGraph).

JavaScript Information Visualization Toolkit (JIT)

From bird nests and beaver dams to spider webs and the display arenas of bowerbirds, the architecture of animals has fascinated our species from the dawn of history. The order and regularity of honey bee comb has inspired human builders and philosophers alike. Paper-making wasps and adobe-using birds may have opened our eyes to important technological innovations, and the relentless works of coral colonies dwarf human achievements. How do animals manage their feats of engineering, and what does it tell us about their minds?

Nature's greatest architects

"This place is really nice and tranquil."

At home on Pablo Escobar's ranch