These days to do anything interesting with graphics or games you start with a fairly sophisticated graphic library or game engine. To learn programming you need to learn languages, data structures and algorithms. You don't get very far starting from scratch, although I think it is absolutely essentially to be proficient in the basics. A serious game developer needs to know a decent amount of humanities and the arts. You need to tell a 'story' an art millennia old. You need to learn literature, history and design.

The Disney movie Chimpanze shows chimps using tools. There is an article chimp tools in the NY Times this week.

At a Best Buy store on the anniversary of Moores Law. The salesmen said numbers like a "hundred?" or referred them to another department.

Chinese requires a visa at aminimum of $130. This was in reaponse to the visa increase by the US after 9-11.

The Constitution merely specifies the States should select Presidential Electors. Forty-eight states currently allocate all electors based on the popular vote winner. Two states by Congressional District winner. Congressional districts are currently draw to favor Republicans. If more states drop the winner-take-all method, that could strengthen republican presidency chances.

At every level of an election. There may be a hald dozen interesting positions in any election. Some are winowed out in the primary, the rest in the finals. Every few rounds a loud third voice makes it to the finals.

Its hard to get a summer office job if you dont know the major parts of Office, or an equivalent.

A steep price to pay. Hope his sacrifice makes air travel safer.

Rome replaced its monarchy with a Republic early on. But several centuries later ambitious generals took over the republic with a neo-monarchy called the Imperium.

Some clueless Newsweek reporter thought this was the inventors real name and started cheacking out all the namesakes in world. Outed some unfortuned southern California guy.

There were hundreds of automobile startups in the 1900s-1920s until standardization and consolidation. Electric and steam vehicles were competitors before internal combustion won out.

Where you want lots of pixels, multiple windows and the ability to quickly point to any pixel location. Note, these are apps where you create content as opposed to consuming it.

Seismologists have crushed rocks in labs and heavily instrumented likely fault areas. These have found some physical purcursors of quakes, but not reliable forecasts yet. The most famous and costly experiemnt was a segment of San Andreas near Garfield that broke four times reviously in apparent twenty year cycles. It was 13 years late the time it was instrumented in the 1980s and 1990s. The USGS was heavily criticized on devoting so much money to a single experiment.

Pattern recognis more pragmatic. It doesnt have to show a physical mechanism (though may point to such). No pattern recognition algorithm has worked in the past. But new ones developed ofr data mining show have their try.

I remember the Chinese claims of preduiction from folk observations and Russian claims from seismic velocity speed changes from stress microcracks in the 1970s. Although they may have "predicted" one or two qquakes, they did not work very well when intensely studied.

The most likely methods seem to be based on previous seismicitty- future quakes will occur where previous quakes have occurred, e.g. tectonic bondaries. There are tighter algorithms such as fore-shock and after-shock statistics: a larger quake will occure the week following another quake 5% of the time.

A Russian group had another interesting seismicity method. They drew cirlces around exisiting seismic activity of radius corresponding to quake size. These regions had increased seismic risk. this method sort of predicted the 1989 Santa Cruz quake from Tahoe area activity. The USGS studied this algorithm, but it hasnt been too fruitful.

True positives, true negatives, false-positives and false-negatives all contribute to the significance calculation. The problem is that damaging earthquakes are rather rare and it doesnt take much in the way of a missed prediction to clobber the statistics.