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POPS80-Year-Old Indian Math Mystery Solved A few months into 2007 and already another long-standing mathematical mystery has been more-or-less put to rest. It will be hard to top Perelman's stunning proof of the legendary Poincaré Conjecture from last year, but in math and science, you never know when the next breakthrough will come. (If you haven't already, read up on some of the incredible anecdotes about the life of the Indian genius, Ramanujan. He was truly one of a kind.)
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POPSThe Stick Figure Guide to Winning in Iraq As described in the article, the creator of this humorous, optimistic cartoon, a young Captain Travis Patriquin, was killed by an improvised explosive device in Iraq just last Wednesday. His creation has been circulating among the troops and, lately, across the internet. PDF version of the presentation .
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POPSHuman Wins in "Man vs. Machine" Scrabble Competition! Fighting the evil robot uprising, one Scrabble tile at a time. Kramer had the choice of spelling a five-letter word and picking up all the remaining tiles. Rather, he used four tiles to complete the word "meeter" on the board, leaving one available tile and confounding the computer. Kramer explained that if he had picked up all the remaining tiles, the computer would have known exactly what he had in his rack. But by leaving one behind, he stymied it. "That's just something hard for the program to solve. There are too many possibilities," Kramer said. Who's the Genius now?
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POPSGraphic: Timeline of the Big Bang An informative graphical timeline of the very creation of time, space, matter, and energy in our universe. Cool! I just clipped the first paragraph of the nicely written description that accompanies it. Of course, cosmology, cosmogony, and quantum physics, and the origins of space-time are some of the hardest fields of study being pursued right now. Any other pointers to clip-size explanations would be welcome additions to Clipmarks.
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POPSUS intelligence Reports: Iraq War fuels global terror threat. At the end of the article the author reports, "McCain told CBS that the United States needs to prevail in Iraq, saying that failure in that country would only further complicate problems." In this instance, I agree. If we quit now I have little doubt that neighboring countries would openly and/or covertly vie for Iraqi controlled soil. The region is too resource rich to go uncontested. I just wish we had had the foresight to realize that invading Iraq would leave the United States militarily over-committed. Right now the President can’t outright threaten Iran or its nuclear program, because we don’t have the military might to oppose them. And what’s worse Iran knows it. In effect we’ve diminished our place at the bargaining table, because our military is stretched so thin that we could barely muster an effective counter-attack even in a worst-case scenario – like North Korea launching an ICBM.
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POPSETs, the government, and the Disclosure Project - Oh my! Normally I'd read this sort of thing, mentally register it as drivel and move on. But the reporter asks some insightful questions. "If the witnesses are telling the truth, even one out of 400 plus, is it not strange that only a few million Americans know about the Project? ... Is there something, deep down, within all of us, that hopes that the elite cabals of the world are somewhat truthful with us? ... Are we afraid of thinking something absurd, even if it may be true?"
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POPSRumsfeld believes there should be more positive news about the war in Iraq. The line that really bothers me, "More media attention was given to U.S. soldiers' abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib than to the fact that Sgt. 1st Class Paul Ray Smith received the Medal of Honor." I have to ask, does Rumsfeld honestly believe that a Medal of Honor winner is more newsworthy than the United States torturing it's captives and breaking the rules set in place by the Geneva convention? And if so, does Rumsfeld have the perspective needed to address the problems we are now facing as the war heads in to its fourth year? Comments welcomed.
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POPSBush doesn't answer why his administration invokes 9/11 as reason for invading Iraq. The closest Bush comes to answering the question, "I mean, there was a serious international effort to say to Saddamn Hussein, you're a threat. And the 9/11 attacks that threat, as far as I concerned." It almost sounds as though he's saying we invoke 9/11 as reason for invading Iraq because we saw Saddam Hussein as a threat and we see terrorists as a threat, and that's enough of a connection to consider the two one in the same. Scary indeed.
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POPSHow to control public opinion on the war MoJo interviews Rick Scavetta, an officer formerly working in Army media relations in Afghanistan, who talks about the ways the war is "marketed" to civilians (for example: no one's really looking for Osama any more).
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POPSWhy 'Second Life' is crap!
Very interesting negative review... "Second Life’ is praised as one of the ‘new chances to life your live’ like you want it to, but this seems unreal for the following reasons: 1. I don’t like a world with Smurfs 2. I don’t want to live in a world with goddamn zebras talking to me 3. Second Life is already commercialized, at two different spots a person was offering ‘free ipods’ if you’d click on his shinny backpack. 4. Second Life features a world which is empty, or at least not really populated. 5. Second Life features cheap adult material, sleazy hookers and strippers. If one wants porn, simply fire up google and look for it. 6. Second Life makes it rather impossible to earn money big style, exceptions are rare. Why would you earn more in an E-True cybergame then at McDonalds around the corner? 7. Why can these people fly? 8. Weapons welcome in Second Life, so at least, was my impression. They can either be bought in arms shops or created using the ‘no limitations create
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POPSA Portrait of Bush as a Victim of His Own Certitude (Book Review) The New York Times with what promises to be only the first in many reviews of Bob Woodward's highly anticiapted new book, State of Denial . The writer said that when Bush invited key Republicans to the White House to discuss Iraq, the president told them, 'I will not withdraw even if Laura and Barney are the only ones supporting me,"' referring to his wife and Scottish terrier.
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POPSWord wrap bookmarklet for Firefox I keep losing this superb bookmarklet, but now it's clipped for eternity! If you've never used bookmarklets in Firefox before, copy the code above into a new bookmark, and save it to some place handy like the toolbar. Then the next time you come across a page whose text extends off the right side ( like this one ), just click the bookmarklet, and voilà ...it's reformatted on the fly. No more sidescrolling. (I tried to create a one-click install link in the comments but I couldn't get around the bullet-proof defenses of coder EricW. Curses! :) )
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