Slashdot passed an interesting article on about the value of math education. One little bit from it:

Americans like technology but seldom have a grasp of the science behind it. And the mathematics that is behind the science is regarded as even more mysterious, like an inner sanctum into which only initiates may gain entry. They see the rich and nourishing technological fruit on this tree of knowledge, but they see no deeper than the surface branches and twigs on which these fruits grow. To them, the region behind this exterior of the tree, where the trunk and limbs grow, is pointless and purposeless. “What’s the use of math?” is the common query. “I’ll never use it.” When a nation’s leaders are composed primarily of lawyers, administrators, military men and stars of the entertainment industry rather than statesmen, philosophers, the spiritual, and the men and women of science, then it should be no surprise that there is so little grasp of the simple reality that one cannot dispense with the trunk and limbs and still continue to enjoy the fruit.

I do think the idea has merit. After all, how many people can say that have the faintest clue how their iPhone works under the hood?

MIT has started an automated system to extract a value similar to the consumer price index, only do it every day. They call it the Billion Prices Project. This is a brilliant match of internet automation and economics! And it appears to track the CPI reasonably well over the long-term. This is what they’re doing:

We currently monitor daily price fluctuations of ~5 million items sold by ~300 online retailers in more than 70 countries.

An Apple engineer has reproduced the Antikythera mechanism with legos.  From The Unofficial Apple Weblog.

Really weird. Really…

I stumbled on the artist Ben Heine and found these pencil plus photograph drawings pretty sweet.

Way too much time on his hands, but really cool at the same time. Yes, you too can build your own lightsabre

An article that turned up in ScienceNews has tripped me out a bit. It’s a thought experiment on how seemingly unrelated data affects the odds in, um, odd ways.

I have two children, one of whom is a son born on a Tuesday. What is the probability that I have two boys?

Gary Foshee, a puzzle designer from Issaquah, Wash., posed this puzzle during his talk this past March at Gathering 4 Gardner, a convention of mathematicians, magicians and puzzle enthusiasts held biannually in Atlanta. The convention is inspired by Martin Gardner, the recreational mathematician, expositor and philosopher who died May 22 at age 95. Foshee’s riddle is a beautiful example of the kind of simple, surprising and sometimes controversial bits of mathematics that Gardner prized and shared with others.

This article turned up back during the .com madness of 2000. At the time, I found it rather insightful, but the concepts apply just as well to my preferred profession, microchip design, as they do to software. From Things You Should Never Do, Part I.

Netscape 6.0 is finally going into its first public beta. There never was a version 5.0. The last major release, version 4.0, was released almost three years ago. Three years is an awfully long time in the Internet world. During this time, Netscape sat by, helplessly, as their market share plummeted.

It’s a bit smarmy of me to criticize them for waiting so long between releases. They didn’t do it on purpose, now, did they?

Well, yes. They did. They did it by making the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make:

They decided to rewrite the code from scratch.