dots and loops

Lately I've been interested in what some call the Just World Hypothesis, which is the idea that somehow reality is inherently Just. This is an idea that people have been struggling with since at least the time of the Book of Job. The eastern idea of Karma neatly handles the problem, as does the idea of an afterlife, with both a Heaven and Hell, and a Purgatory where one can do time to insure the scales of justice are properly balanced before moving on.

Surely this deep need for justice is behind the cycles of revenge and retribution we see throughout history and in the world today.

Why doesn't anybody bother to tell us these things?

Really cool virtual biology videos. You can take a tour of the cell, or watch chemiosmosis, like a hydroelectric dam, forge new ATP molecules.

Interesting article about the social psychological dimensions of Facebook. Not surprisingly, it's now a big contributor to status anxiety and low self-esteem as users judge their lives by their friends status updates. Also not surprisingly, these very status updates are often hand crafted for the purpose of impression management.

Sebastian Thrun taught a free online Artificial Intelligence course last semester for Stanford, and it looks like he is involved in some sort of educational start up now, with all sorts of free offerings in the works. There are a lot of free computer science classes on iTunes U and across the web, but the more offerings the better. The Stanford online classes were great partly because they used specifically designed for the web. They are even offering a theory of computation class, which is rare. The only other one I've seen is offered by Harvard on iTunes U, and it was great, but I could always use a refresher on FSM's and Turing machines.

A sneak peak at the new Windows 8 Metro UI.
Looks pretty cool to me, but I wonder how older apps will look? It also seems like this may be too geared towards phones, tablets, and pads.

A crazy 3D window manager for *nix systems. You can use this in place of metacity on a gnome desktop.

This thing is so fast I’m speechless. After fiddling with XRDP and VNC, I’ve decided this is the definitive remote desktop solution for Linux. And it all happens over ssh automagically (no tunneling required, like with VNC).

A handy tool for delivering RSS feeds to your email account.

Delicious for audio files.

An audioscrobbler (last.fm) client that works nice with the iPod. Very useful for those not using iTunes.