An Enduring Legacy - Randy Pausch, The “Last Lecture Professor”, died at age 47. if you haven’t watched that lecture yet, you really really should.

Harvard’s baby brain research lab - Telegraph. some interesting things that seem to be humanly innate.


YouTube - Synchronization of 5 coupled metronomes with 2 soda cans. yes, science does rock.

Tighten Your Belt, Strengthen Your Mind - New York Times “The brain has a limited capacity for self-regulation, so exerting willpower in one area often leads to backsliding in others.”

Logo Can Make You ‘Think Different’. seeing the apple logo made people think more creatively. that’s just creepy to know.

Top 10 Amazing Chemistry Videos | Wired Science from Wired.com. amazing. via josh.

In the Windy City, prostitutes sleep with police more often than get arrested by them | FP Passport “Illusion, Michael. A trick is something a whore does for money” or to avoid arrest. via ram.

The Verdict Is In: Our Voting System Is a Loser. it’s interesting that an article about voting methodologies mentions hotornot.com.

GOOD Magazine | Big Ideas!. a random list of “big ideas”. some good ones in there.

The Self-Righting Object - New York Times “The Gomboc is a roundish piece of clear synthetic material with gently peaked, organic curves. It looks like a piece of modern art. But if you tip it over, something unusual happens: it rights itself.”

Memory - National Geographic Magazine. a fantastic article about our memory and how it relates to the human experience.

Gospel Truth. it seems National Geographic totally messed up the interpretation of the Book of Judas. Turns out the book actually says Judas was a demon. ya, a demon.

10 Plane Crashes That Changed Aviation - Popular Mechanics. Page 7 is pretty crazy. they managed to land the plane even though the roof tore off.

the new nostradamus

Good Magazine has a really interesting cover story this month entitled The New Nostradamus. The story is about an NYU political science professor named Bruce Bueno de Mesquita who uses game theory models to forecast political and foreign policy outcomes. One such example…

“His model predicted that upon [Ayatollah] Khomeini’s death, an ayatollah named Hojatolislam Khamenei and an obscure junior cleric named Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani would emerge to lead the country together. [...] Even more improbably, Khomeini had already designated his successor, and it was neither Ayatollah Khamenei nor Rafsanjani.”

The prediction, which was published 5 years prior to Khomeini’s death, was widely ridiculed at the time but ended up being exactly right.

An paper in Science claims that bee colony collapse disorder is linked to a virus called Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus. The researcher who wrote the paper was profiled in a New Yorker article I linked to last week.

New Yorker article about bees, beekeeping, and colony collapse disorder. who knew that bees are so damn interesting.

Federal Way schools restrict ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. Seems some inconvenient christians didn’t approve. This is so disappointing for Seattle.

BBC NEWS | Huge ‘hurricane’ rages on Saturn 8000km across, 550km/h winds, and it seems stuck at the pole, not drifting. crazy. via funkaoshi.

Slashdot | British Man Trades Frequent Flyer Miles for Space Shot. dude collected 2M airmiles flying virgin atlantic.

BBC NEWS | Maths genius declines top prize. crazy ass russians.