The day after 9/11, my boss was scheduled to lecture undergrads. He talked about the idea of using terrain maps to prevent planes from flying in to buildings. The system is called Softwalls, which was discussed on Slashdot. The really interesting thing about this is how strongly pilots and others objected. There is a FAQ that covers common objections.

This brings me back to the April, 1977 issue of (I think) Popular Electronics that had a recipe for creating solar cells at home using "3'7 Dimethylpentadecon-2-ol propionate". At the time, I was 13 and spent quite a bit of time bothering my science teaching trying figure out what 3'7 Dimethylpentadecon-2-ol propionate was and how to get some. Years later, I happened to look at the May issue and it turns out it was an April Fools' joke. Even at that time, I did laugh out loud. Anyway, if you want to see a description, check out Don Lancaster's "The worst of Marcia Swampfelder"

In addition, Marcia does have some suggestions about car stereo speaker orientation that are useful for winter driving :-^

A somewhat different question is: What helps acceptance of Academic Software. Off the top of my head:

• An open source license
• High quality, readable code
• An active community
• Test cases and nightly builds
• Regular releases
• A faculty member who is a programmer, or at least was a programmer.

There are many other factors, does anyone have favorites? Note that not all academic software is destined to be used outside of academia or to even survive past the end of the semester. That's ok.

I have 30874 on the Ptolemy II repository, see http://www.ohloh.net/accounts/cxbrx. Hauke Fuhrmann put up Codeswarm videos of the software evolution of the Ptolemy II project. See Chaotic, Less Chaotic. The number of commits is a poor measure though. I tend to make lots of small commits while cleaning code. A student doing a Ph.D., may make many fewer commits, but their commits have greater impact in the form of support for their Ph.D. We see software as a form of publication, see Software Practice in the Ptolemy Project.

Sandia says "along a journey by train across Kazakhstan to Kurchatov; while it was at another interim storage pad there; and along a truck route to a long-term concrete storage pad in northeast Kazakhstan." Wiki says "In its heyday Kurchatov (which was known by its postal code Semipalatinsk-16) was a closed city, one of the most secretive and restricted places in the Soviet Union."

In a few months, when new satellite data is uploaded to your favorite map site, these should be fun to find. http://www.sandia.gov/LabNews/110128.html says "transport nuclear materials 1,860 miles by train across the Central Asian country of Kazakhstan". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_stations_in_Kazakhstan has two maps of railways in Kazahkstan. The Sandia site also has pictures.

Agreed. When watching a presentation, I have a corollary to Moore's Law, where if a slide mentions Moore's Law and has "the graph", then it is ok to ignore that slide and the following two slides because no new information will be transmitted. It is like a nicer (and temporary) version of Godwin's Law.

The submission has a typo, this happened in Beebe, Arkansas.

I saw this great art car once, it had an immense amount of detail and was huge. There was not much clear space on it except in an area about 6"x8" that had a sign in the middle that said, "I made this while you were watching TV." I've been thinking of updating the saying to "I made this while you were $^&*ing with FarmVille". FWIW, I built a Snail art car instead of watching TV of frobbing with Farmville. Now, if I could only get away from Slashdot . . .

See also this Good Samaritan Cartoon:
Guy in street, prone man at his feet:
"Oh, Great, as if I have the time or inclination to help a dying homeless man"
Same guy in front of computer:
" What's this?!! Sally needs a bag of fertilizer for her FarmVille Farm? I better get right on it."