If you believe you are by now immune to gory novels, here’s one with enough malevolence to give even the most hardened readers nightmares. “The Seven Days of Peter Crumb,” a chronicle of the final week in a psychopath’s life by the British actor and writer Jonny Glynn, is gruesome, obscene and utterly disturbing. It is also absorbing and well written. Reading it, I fought the urge to throw up. Needless to say, I was transfixed.

Everybody Hurts

Dean Kamen's “Luke arm”—a prosthesis named for the remarkably lifelike prosthetic worn by Luke Skywalker in Star Wars—came to the end of its two-year funding last month. Its fate now rests in the hands of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which funded the project. If DARPA gives the project the green light—and some greenbacks—the state-of-the-art bionic arm will go into clinical trials. If all goes well, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gives its approval, returning veterans could be wearing the new artificial limb by next year.

Dean Kamen's "Luke Arm" Prosthesis Readies for Clinical Trials

Our brains are terrible at assessing modern risks.

Here's how to think straight about dangers in your midst.

I. We Fear Snakes, Not Cars
II. We Fear Spectacular, Unlikely Events
III. We Fear Cancer But Not Heart Disease
IV. No Pesticide in My Backyard—Unless I Put it There
V. We Speed Up When We Put Our Seat belts On
VI. Teens May Think Too Much About Risk—And Not Feel Enough
VII. Why Young Men Will Never Get Good Rates on Car Insurance
VIII. We Worry About Teen Marijuana Use, But Not About Teen Sports
IX. We Love Sunlight But Fear Nuclear Power
X. We Should Fear Fear Itself

Psychology Today: 10 Ways We Get the Odds Wrong

There are a number of well-known systems for classifying people's personalities according to various measures such as introversion-extroversion, and organisations often use these schemes to categorize their staff. Unfortunately, such methods do not capture a number of the most important aspects of an individual within an organisation; any corporate employee knows that whether someone is (for example) extroverted or introverted is much less critical than (say) how important they are. The Lipson-Shiu test attempts to remedy this and other oversights by classifying along four alternative axes:

* Intelligent-Stupid
* Lawful-Chaotic
* Important-Unimportant
* Good-Evil

The Lipson-Shiu Corporate Type Test

Dynamite is a Ruby interface to the Processing graphics API. This is done via JRuby, a Ruby interpreter written in Java.

Dynamite

Extrema is a powerful visualization and data analysis tool that enables researchers to quickly distill their large, complex data sets into meaningful information. Its flexibility, sophistication, and power allow you to easily develop your own commands and create highly customized graphs.

Extrema

Zendo is a game about debugging. Ok, it's not really about debugging, but you'll see what I mean in a moment.

About Zendo:

Zendo is a game of inductive logic in which one player, the Master, creates a rule that the rest of the players, as Students, try to figure out by building and studying configurations of Icehouse pieces. The first student to correctly guess the rule wins.

Games for Programmers: Zendo

Orange is a component-based data mining software. It includes a range of preprocessing, modeling and data exploration techniques. It is based on C++ components, that are accessed either directly (not very common), through Python scripts (easier and better), or through GUI objects called Orange Widgets.

Orange

Many Americans are jumping into the fast, mobile, participatory Web without considering all the implications. If nothing really bad has happened to someone, they tend neither to worry about their personal information nor to take steps to limit the amount of information that can be found about them online. This finding dovetails with our previous work related to spyware -- software that covertly tracks a user as they navigate the net. Internet users who said they had not encountered spyware were less likely to view it as a serious threat and more likely to say it's just part of life online.

Privacy Implications of Fast, Mobile Internet Access

Some writers complain that semicolons are subversively ambiguous, that they vaguely imply a connection between two statements without having to specify what that connection is.

Punctuated (Pause) With a Semicolon