I watched the video and I must say, it doesn't really sound that innovative.
They can't even retrieve each single book automatically, but must get 99 others with? That's a lot of wasted work there.
Also: barcodes? Which century do they live in? Even at our 'conventional' library they have tagged books with RFID so that you can borrow it yourself at a terminal and give it back as easily.
And they do it so they can store the books in 1/7th the space. I didn't think space was such a big problem for the US...
So in my opinion the price tag is a little too high for such a small gain.

The summary is a bit misleading. I did read the article and it contains a long enumeration of historical facts and stories about mnemonics, then goes over to describing the training of Joshua Foer and finally says something about his win of the 2006 WMC.

So Ed Cooke, did not really invent a fundamentally new method. He just adjusted an existing method a little bit. Although I must acknowledge that he is quite a good athlete (http://memocamp.de/highscore?type=user&user=118&daten=wrl). While that other guy from the article, Joshua Foer, has not participated in any championship since 2006 (http://memocamp.de/highscore?type=user&user=197&daten=wrl).

So I guess the article is just about promoting that book. Because Foer is not a memory athlete anymore. (Not even in the worlds top100: http://memocamp.de/highscore?daten=wrl&type=gesamt)

Would anybody care to comment, why this story is tagged 'python'? Also I like the general idea of the new layout, but must agree with previous commenters, that there is far too much white space around. dark matter ftw ;-)

Fixed on monday? I'm running "PHP 5.3.4-pl0-gentoo (cli) (built: Jan 1 2011 15:31:19)" in an interactive shell, but I can't seem to trigger the bug...

This just reminded me of the game 'Braid' which I got with the Humble Indie Bundle 2. Although the game play contains a lot of messing with time, which certainly is a little unfamiliar, you get introduced to it quite nicely through the level design. It is also shown by David Rosen of Wolfire Games in his design tour through the bundle: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVsWDmSrv5I