I’m sitting in the nation’s largest courthouse right now. I was hoping to write a Word Wrap follow-up post and give you my 3 favorite newly-coined words, but jury duty called. And there’s no wifi in the jurors’ room, so I can’t really read the blog and sift through all your what-I’m-sure-are wonderfully inventive comments.

But I can type into a blank WORD .doc and post during my lunch break on a few jury-duty related factoids I picked up from the remarkably out-of-date video they forced us to struggle through earlier this morning.

• Factoid #1: As just mentioned, the Los Angeles Superior Court, where I’m serving, is the largest court in the US
• Factoid #2: The building I’m sitting in now, the Stanley Mosk Courthouse, has 100 courtrooms in it; again, a national record.
• Factoid #3: Some of you might recall my post on Catalina Island last year. California’s smallest courthouse, with one, part-time courtroom, is located there.
• Factoid #4: The California Constitution of 1850 mandated that Spanish and English were co-equals for legal and judicial purposes. Everything in the CA court was bilingual until 1879. (Now, only the ATMs are…. Joking!)
• Factoid #5: 1.7 million of the 2.7 million new cases filed every year are traffic ticket-related.

Other than that, it’s pretty dull here. And judging by the guy drooling on himself the next row over from me, you wouldn’t want most of these people deciding your fate. Most of the time, I’m all for professional juries. How about you all? You still believe in this form of democracy? Or do you think pros, who are paid well and well informed would do a better job making the important decisions?

Despite our endorsement, Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip will not see a second season. I’ve been struggling to get through the last few episodes via iTunes, which is hard for a Sports Night and West Wing enthusiast like me to admit.

But one little bump in the road won’t knock me off Sorkin’s bandwagon, which is headed back to Broadway. The Farnsworth Invention, his first new play since A Few Good Men in 1989, opens later this year.

From Playbill:

The Farnsworth Invention concerns the battle for the patent for the invention of the television set. The race pitted a young genius, Philo T. Farnsworth, who came up with the idea as a high school student, against David Sarnoff, the head of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA).

Sorkin’s work has always been a vehicle for trivia, like Andrew Jackson’s 1,400-pound block of cheese, the Gail-Peters Projection and Bill Russell’s elbow-throwing on national television. And perhaps my favorite Sorkin-written moment referred to his play’s protagonist, Mr. Farnsworth (transcript here).

To paraphrase another Sorkin quote, the length of this post may be way out of proportion to your interest in it. So let me close by saying The Farnsworth Invention sounds like a good way to spend an evening. Field trip?

THE INVENTION: Cruise control’s that (wonderful, wonderful) thing that helps you avoid speeding tickets. Yup, everybody loves cruise control. Unlike many of the other ignored inventions, this handy accessory does get some acknowledgement. Unfortunately, that’s only when it’s either impossible to find on that little stick that turns on the blinkers, or when it’s broken.

WHO TO THANK: a blind man. No, seriously! His name’s Ralph Teetor, and he spent his whole life inventing things to make cars better. Teetor was blinded in a shop accident at age five, but apparently harbored no resentment for sharp tools. He went on to attend college and became one of the most respected mechanical engineers of his era. Although he was responsible for a lot of vehicular improvements, including automatic transmission, he’s best known for making it possible for even lead-foots to stick to one speed. Inspiration struck during World War II, when the government set a 35 mph speed limit to conserve gas and tires—which is great and all, but some people just can’t drive 35. Like, for instance, Teetor’s lawyer. After a particularly bad trip during which the lawyer’s jerky driving made Teetor carsick, the inventor came up with a device that could regulate car speed without the driver touching the gas pedal. A few tweaks and many dubious names (including “controlomatic” and “speedostat”) later, cruise control premiered in selected 1958 Chrysler models. It was then an $86 option known as “Auto-Pilot.”

BUT THE TRULY AMAZING THING IS THAT: Teetor’s blindness actually improved his ability to invent new things. In the process of learning how to function in a world he couldn’t see, he developed an exceptional ability to visualize objects and guide himself via touch. In 1902, he built an automobile that let him tool around town at up to 25 mph. A neat feat by itself, but he was only 12 at the time. Later, he applied his skills to engineering and was able to solve problems sighted engineers couldn’t. During World War I, he developed a new technique for balancing steam turbines on torpedo boat destroyers. Other engineers had tried for years to solve the problem, but Teetor’s heightened sense of touch gave him the advantage. His expertise was so well known that he later became president of the Society of Automotive Engineers.

–note– if you liked this entry, it’s thanks to Maggie Koerth and her wonderful Inventions Cover story. I believe that issue’s sold out, but other back issues of the floss are available at our online store.

Wacky, immature, postpostmodern Gen-X silliness — or genius? Either way, Teen Girl Squad, a flash cartoon within the world flash cartoon Homestar Runner, usually succeeds in making me pee my pants laughing. To truly appreciate it, you need to know a little about its parent cartoon (the aforementioned Homestar), which co-stars a strange, angry little man in an absurdly large Mexican wrestling mask named Strong Bad. When Strong Bad isn’t checking his email or playing tricks on Homestar’s titular hero, he’s hand-drawing a crude cartoon of his own called Teen Girl Squad. The trouble with Squad — and 90% of the humor — comes from the fact that Strong Bad isn’t much of a storyteller, and as such his narratives are filled with bizarre, inexplicably violent plot twists, and that he voices all of Squad’s four female protagonists, which is about the closest he gets to actual contact with real females on a regular basis. Here’s a typical episode:

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Fifteen distinctive electric guitars and basses, and fifteen renowned players. Can you match up each instrument to its owner? See how well you … pick.

Although it has existed since 2003, BookBlog’s Gender Genie was news to me. Based on the research of Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology, the Gender Genie implements an algorithm that (sometimes) predicts the sex of the author of a piece of text.

I must say, this premise seemed odd to me. I don’t tend to assume that there is some algorithmically determinable masculinity or femininity to any text, but of course, the first thing I tried was pasting in my own writing sample (from a piece of fiction). And the results…correct! “The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!” With a “Male Score” of 843 and a “Female Score” of 403, my 663-word passage was apparently way-male.

So what’s the story here? Here’s info from the author of the Gender Genie:

Most of the time, people drop their writing into [The Gender Genie] and, when they don’t get the result they expect, declare it to be wrong, wrong, wrong. Yet, a lot of its users still find it and its analysis to be a fun time waster. Despite having written the program, I didn’t come up with the algorithm and believe that the Genie works no better than the flip of a coin. However, I don’t think it to be a complete time waster since there actually is some academic study that went into it.

In the most basic terms, the computational linguists behind the algorithm, Koppel and Argamon, took a bunch of fiction and looked for trends based on gender. Using complicated formulas, they determined that male writers tended to write more about specific things like an apple, a book, or the car. In contrast, female writers wrote about connections to things like my apple, your book, or our car. The nouns themselves (apple, book, car) didn’t matter much but the preceding qualifier, whether an article (a, an, the) or possessive (my, your, our), did.

Read more about the Gender Genie or try the Gender Genie yourself.

I did not remember ordering anything so flat. Was it an autographed picture? A contract of sorts? A letter too important for folding?

Like anyone without known enemies, I love unexpected mail. So I was thrilled when the above package greeted me on Friday.* Larger and less malleable than bills, magazines and junk mail, it sat beneath our mailbox like a present on Christmas morning.

I tore right in. And just like that, my excitement level cratered. After the wild success of our “count my change” contest, I’m tempted to ask you to guess what was inside. But after one person guesses correctly, the fun will be gone. And I’m not entirely sure fun was there to begin with.

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1) Carpet Alarm Clocks: The simple notion that you have to get out of bed and place both feet on the thing to shut it up in the morning makes it seem like this carpet alarm clock should work. Of course, while it might do wonders for lighter sleepers, I’m pretty certain that unless it’s placed on the other side of a bed of hot coals, it won’t have much of an effect on me. Link via Popgadget.

2) A Flintstones-style bathroom helper snake: I don’t really need the additional help getting my morning dab of toothpaste, but I’m guessing finding a helpful snake in my tiny apartment might get me out of bed faster than a carpet alarm clock. Photo via ettf.

One would be Gordon Bell, a Microsoft research scientist who’s been doing a darn good job at living a relentlessly documented, paperless life. He’s been deemed the guinea pig for the MS lifeblogging project, MyLifeBits. The Bits software enables users to save every email, IM transcript, phone call, a new jpg every 30 seconds–basically all your lovely ephemera; as ars technica explains:

Bell generates 1GB of data each month, and says that having a computer store this much information frees his mind for other things. “It gives you kind of a feeling of cleanliness,” he says. “I can offload my memory. I feel much freer about remembering something now. I’ve got this machine, this slave, that does it.

Do you consider yourself a lifeblogger? If not, what kind of an archivist are you? I just read Alison Bechdel’s intrepid Fun House, and feel inspired by her diligence in documenting & the ensuing pay-off. My friend saved all his receipts for a year and then used them as a backdrop for a giant painting. Another takes a picture of herself everyday at 3 p.m. How do you document your life?

Remember Will’s old “Show Off Your Smarts!” feature? He’d throw out a topic and turn the microphone over to our brilliant readers. Sounds to me like a great way to kill time on a Friday. Let’s revive “Show Off Your Smarts” and talk about amazing animal facts. I’ll throw out a few:

• A crocodile can digest a steel nail without chewing.
• Sand tiger sharks attack each other in their mother’s womb.
• An octopus has three hearts.
• Bees and dogs can smell fear.*

*I’m taking the kid in Jerry Maguire at his word here. Probably should have fact-checked. Your turn.