Here comes the inkless printer! Frustrated by the lack of functionality in several strains of e-paper, the wonderful people at Xerox in Palo Alto and Canada have been hard at work creating a functional, erasable paper that might not perform as many gymnastics as e-paper, but could still throw a kink into the bottomless-salad world of present day office paper. This new kind of paper absorbs characters superimposed upon it by U.V. source printers for up to 24 hours, at which point the paper will begin its regression back to blank. So far, the paper can be recycled fifty times before it’s superannuated. Not as great as an Etch-a-Sketch, but what a boon to finally have a proper palimpsest in the workplace! You can read a great interview with a Xerox lab manager here. Link via TOFT.

Apparently it’s a competition now. A new study called the Global Peace Index, just released, ranks nations across the world according to their “peacefulness,” using factors like military spending, violent crime rates, the size of a country’s prison population and organized crime rings to reach their conclusions. The number one country? Norway, followed closely by New Zealand, Denmark, Ireland and Japan. (The high ranking of the latter country just goes to further illustrate the strange paradox of its recent spate of dismemberments. What’s up with that?) Not too surprisingly, the US ranks somewhere near the back of the pack, earning a ranking of 96th out of 121, Iraq being the 121st. Other nasty places to live, peace-wise, include Sudan (120), Israel (119), Russia (118) and Nigeria (117). Other factors the study used to determine rankings (which may explain why Israel is grouped among the former) include a country’s relations with its neighbors (natch) and political instability.

We’ve covered free stuff on the iTunes Store before, including educational material, but Apple has decided to make it official: today they introduced iTunes U, a new part of the iTunes Store (launch iTunes U in iTunes). iTunes U is an initiative to provide higher education institutions a mechanism for distributing digital content to students. Many of the original iTunes educational content providers are there: Stanford, UC Berkeley, and MIT (that last one is adapted from MIT OpenCourseWare, a _floss favorite).

Digging into the iTunes U collection, I found some winners:

• Phil 7: Existentialism in Literature and Film – from UC Berkeley (the intro lecture is currently the iTunes U top download)
• Modern Art History – from Otis College of Art and Design
• Elementary Greek – from Concordia Seminary

Time to get learnin’, people!

According to LiveScience, new research is suggesting that finger length can tell whether you’ll score higher on the math or verbal section of your SATs. Here’s the key: If your ring finger is longer than your index, apparently you’re math-minded. If it’s reversed however, you’re likely to have stronger reading and writing scores. Curious why? Here’s the explanation from the article:

Exposure to testosterone in the womb is said to promote development of areas of the brain often associated with spatial and mathematical skills, he said. That hormone makes the ring finger longer. Estrogen exposure does the same for areas of the brain associated with verbal ability and tends to lengthen the index finger relative to the ring finger.

And while all of that definitely sounds interesting, I’m a little curious what it means if all your fingers are short and stubby like mine. That said, I was so intrigued by the phenomenon that I looked up a bunch of stars’ handprints to see what their scores would be like. According to my shoddy internet findings Richard Gere, Sharon Stone and Akira Kurosawa all would have done better on their math portions than their English– which makes sense since English wasn’t Kurosawa’s first language. (Kidding!) So, the finger thing accurately predicted that I’d do better in math, which was true. Do your fingers match up with your test scores?
Link via YahooNews.

I had planned to post about the upcoming British reality show Bestseller. Think American Idol for hopeful novelists. Or, more accurately, Pop Idol. But then I read about the Dutch program Big Donor Show, where a terminally ill woman with an inoperable brain tumor will select a contestant to receive one of her kidneys after hearing pleas from their families.

Outrage has predictably ensued, and one politician is trying to get the show yanked. But let’s not debate the merits and morality of this particular program. Instead, let’s try to top the shock factor by coming up with even crazier ideas. I’ll get us started.

• Death row inmates compete against one another in beer pong; each week’s winners have their sentences commuted to life in prison.

• High school seniors have their college applications reviewed by a CSI-like team. Did you really spend six hours a week volunteering through the Latin National Honor Society? If not, you’re rejected. People with the most accurate resumes, regardless of merit, are accepted. Losers repeat twelfth-grade.

Your turn…

(Also, here are some other ridiculous reality show ideas that actually aired. Via The BBC.)
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As someone who was forced to watch Dirty Dancing over and over by an ex as a particularly cruel brand of torture, I’m really hoping this isn’t true. According to G4 (my source for everything video game related), Codemasters and Lionsgate are working together to put out a Dirty Dancing video game?! Just the thought of it makes me want to put my laptop in the corner. Of course, I’m curious what 80’s movies you’d be even more surprised to see as video games. My money would’ve been on Beaches never making it, but now I’m not so sure.

I saw this spine lamp with marble base (and flexible neck!) on Boingboing and laughed. Especially, when I read that it was all the rage with chiropractors. Of course, it will set you back some. The lamp goes for $1500– shipping including — but with my slim wallet I’d probably have to pawn off one of my kidneys to get my paws on one. It might be worth it to get some extra backbone in my office, though! Click here to view the lamp via Boingboing.

(ps Special thanks to our art director Winslow Taft who conned me into using his awful header for this.)

I had no idea there was so much drama wrapped up in the evolution of algebra. For instance, did you know that George Boole, who invented algebraic ways to express logical arguments, died after his wife threw buckets of ice-water on him to – get this – treat a chill! Then there was the French mathematician, Evariste Galois, who became famous for his work on the algebraic structure of solutions, but only 10 years after his death. How’d the 20-year-old mathematician die? In a pistol duel, naturally.

Though not killed dramatically, nor even killed for that matter, some more algebraic drama unfolded in the 1870s when a Norwegian mathematician named Sophus Lie (no lie) was arrested when the police thought him a spy after finding him with a satchel full of indecipherable mathematical notes.

Anyway, if you’re wondering how I now know all this, it’s mostly thanks to a new book called Unknown Quantity: A Real and Imaginary History of Algebra, by John Derbyshire. In addition to those “killer” anecdotes, you can read all about Rene Descartes, who introduced the x and y stand-ins (a common belief is that Descartes choice of a printer was running low on y’s and z’s).

I’m fairly certain that if the itsy bitsy spider ever tried to climb up this water spout, he would end up miles away somewhere, amongst a rain of other itsy-bitsies. Thanks to The Cellar for some amazing pictures of a water spout that formed off the coast of Singapore the other day. Weaker than most of their land-based counterparts (tornadoes, obviously, and dust devils as well), some say water spouts don’t pose much of a threat (just don’t try to pilot your boat through one) though they do tend inspire onlookers to ponder the awesome power of nature. (Others say that waterspouts are pretty dangerous beasts, and may be responsible for many of the so-called “mysterious” Bermuda Triangle disappearances over the years.) Wind speeds in the columnar vortex of a waterspout (ooh, technical-sounding) can reach 190mph. Photos after the jump!
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I was watching someone’s excellent sketch audition reel the other day, and almost completely lost it during one of his requisite animal characters–it was an impersonation of a certain pupating insect, and it was genius. I’ll post as soon as it’s public. I’ve had my own regrettable, inadvertent run-ins with theater games, and shape shifting was never my, um, bailiwick. But even if I were really good, I still think I’d have a hard time capturing the essence of the alewife (Alosa pseudoharengus, of the herring family–not a married keeper of an alehouse). The only distinctive thing I knew about them before today was that they have a lifespan of about seven years, which is how I–and various Midwest urban legends–rationalized the droves of dead fish that seemed to flank the beaches of my youth every seventh year. But these mass deaths aren’t just the end of the line for seasoned ‘wives; the deaths actually take place whenever there’s a drastic temperature change in the water. When it’s warm, they’ll venture into nearshore waters to spawn, but if the temperature drops due to prolonged westerly winds, the die-offs start and there they are lining the lake shores. Most interestingly, though, Colonial Americans harvested them in order to make a high-proof pregnancy (well, purportedly just for labor) brew called “groaning ale.” So, bringing it back to the alehouse after all…