Rough Drafts

There are 11 different ways you can misspell “pedal to the metal,” all of which use legitimate words that Word won’t flag as misspelled: {pedal, petal, peddle} to the {metal, mettle, medal, meddle} = 12 permutations, only one of which is correct.

Researchers studying the behavior of software agents set up a test, called the “minority game,” where agents are competing for limited resources. In each round, the agents make choices, attempting to wind up in the successful minority. When the researchers added the ability for agents to communicate

Paul Graham, in What the Bubble Got Right: “someone who doesn’t expend any effort on marketing himself. A nerd, in other words, is someone who concentrates on substance.”

Dutch artist Theo Jansen makes gigantic, wind-powered, walking “animals” out of steel and polyester sheeting, such as this 2-ton Animalis Rhinoceros Transport. (via Engadget)

I can’t figure this out. With crude oil prices almost at a record-high $50/barrel, you’d think gasoline prices would be shooting up, too. But they’re not. In fact, the price of gasoline remains at historically low levels, when adjusted for inflation. (See graph of gas prices). The Big Picture explai

The molecules making up microtubules, the protein filaments that form the internal “scaffolding” of your body’s cells, are replaced every 10 minutes. Actin filaments in the dendrites of your neurons are recycled even quicker: every 40 seconds. In fact, the entire brain’s composition turns over every

I have to admit I’m insanely jealous: The multitalented Xeni Jardin will be flying on one of Zero-G’s first commercial zero-gravity air flights, 32,000 feet up. NASA has used parabolic flight trajectories to train astronauts in weightlessness for years. Now, Zero-G will begin selling these flights —

Police in Paris discovered a fully equipped movie theater in a large and previously uncharted part of Les Catacombes, underneath the 16th arondissement. A smaller cave next door had been turned into a restaurant and bar. When police returned a few days later, the secret theater’s power and phone lin

Want to know what happened on a particular day in history? dMarie’s Time Capsuler will tell you: Just enter a date and it gives you the top headlines, songs, and more. Very fun!

This BusinessWeek interview with Linus Torvalds contains a very interesting point: Torvalds compares the open-source way of developing software to the scientific method. Programmers put ideas forward; they’re critiqued publicly; and, if they stand up to scrutiny and to repeated testing, these ideas

“Oedipus, as you know, was the tragic king who killed his father, then married his mother — a sequence of events that seldom turns out well.” -Bob Costas, commenting on the 2004 Athens Olympics opening ceremony

NASA Technology Transfer Bulletin #A101-753B explains it all for you.