Interesting Miscellany

Here are some of the links I've found interesting enough to tweet or retweet in that past several weeks.

Math
Planck found in "Euler Identity" Crop Circle?!
Ten of the greatest: Math Puzzles
Russian math genius ignores $1 million Millennium Prize
A mathematician's clock...
werewolves and star wars: two exam questions

Science & Technology
Eyeborg bionic eye camera shows winks and all
Update on the diagnosis of the Voyager 2 data system - If you're in IT, this is the ultimate "Turn it off then back on again."

Programming
You don't need anyone's permission to get work experience in software.
Podcast interview with Donald Knuth. - This is a phone interview between Knuth and Larry Felton Johnson. They talk mostly about Literate Programming, but they also touch on TAOCP and a few other topics.


Random Statistics of the week
The LA Times reports that California welfare debit cards are accepted in over half of casinos in the state. Welfare recipients withdrew $1.8 million from casino ATMs between October 2009 and May 2010.


Finally, what I've been working on lately...
StackWrap4J, a Java wrapper for the recently released Stack Exchange API, has finally reached a semi-stable state. I teamed up with another prominent member of the Stack Overflow community, Justin 'jjnguy' Nelson, to work on this over the past couple of months and we've just released version 0.9. You can download it from the StackWrap4J project page on SourceForge. Please give us some feedback.

Now that the API is near stability, I should have more time soon to get back to SICP and my (ir)regular blogging schedule.

Interesting Miscellany

Here are some of the links I've found interesting enough to tweet or retweet in that past several weeks.

Programming
A beautiful obfuscated Pi calculator
Programming language trends of 2009
Tweetable game of life in MATLAB
Factorization of RSA768
Calculating Sines


Science
Leonardo da Vinci's resume
Richard Dawkins: Growing up in the universe
Richard Hamming: You and your research


Math
A quick little puzzle (in probability)
Euler Book Prize (A list to watch in the future. Since the site isn't updated for 2010 yet, the winner was Euler's Gem by David S. Richeson.)
A cryptic math advertisement


Miscellaneous
Succed Blog
RockYou.com's 20 most common passwords
50 Books Every Geek Should Read

Interesting Miscellany

Education

25 Incredible TED Talks for Educators (via @dorait). If you only have time to watch one, don't miss Alan Kay's talk on innovative ways to use computers in education.

BLOSSOMS Video Library - Video lectures for students and teachers on a wide range of topics including Math, Engineering, Physics, Biology, and (coming soon) Chemistry. All videos start with the section for students, then wrap up with a section for teachers, discussing some of the finer points of the student lecture and ideas for in-class activities.

Math

For Today’s Graduate, Just One Word: Statistics - “I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians,” said Hal Varian, chief economist at Google. “And I’m not kidding.”

Most lucrative college degrees - "The top 15 highest-earning college degrees all have one thing in common -- math skills."

Programming

Still More Java Puzzlers is a short PDF by Josh Bloch and Neal Gafter. These eight new Java language puzzles serve as a follow-up in miniature to Bloch and Gafter's earlier book Java Puzzlers.