About 18 months ago, in late January 2009, during the tempestuous cyclone Klaus in France, which killed 26 people and wreaked enormous damage to the nearby once ancient region of Aquitaine, a new island suddenly appeared, 7 miles out to sea in the mouth of the Gironde estuary in the Bay of Biscay.

The French have called it the l'île mystérieuse or "the mysterious island," after the Jules Verne novel and film as depicted in youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Os0l808oM9g but officially the newly formed mysterious island remains unnamed, and does not appear on maps of the region.

Propaganda - An Application Of The Forgetting Curve

Learning curves,  forgetting curves, adjacency and the scientific roots of the black art of propaganda.

The responsibility of Twitter updates got you down? D'you think about tweeting but never actually get around to it? Never fear, Adam Wilson is here. The University of Wisconsin-Madison biomedical engineering grad student removes the clunky and outdated interface of keyboard and lets his brain tweet for him.

That's right, he straps an electrode-coated swim cap to his head and watches as letters scroll across his computer screen. When his brain recognizes the letter he wants, the swim cap knows and uploads it directly to Twitter.

This week a computer science researcher named Vinay Deolalikar claimed to have a proof that P is not equal to NP.

Let’s set aside what this means for another day, lest I get distracted.  The important thing now is that this is big. Huge, even!

If, that is, he’s correct.

But correct or not, that’s the kind of thing one expects to see in academia. Tenure gives professors job security and research freedom, exactly the conditions needed to enable them to make the non-incremental breakthroughs that fundamentally alter the intellectual landscape. (And in the case of P not equal to NP, to acquire fame and fortune.)

Ever been stuck in an airport? A foreign country? Try being stuck in orbit! Poor Air Force Major Abacha Tunde plus a colleague were trapped on a Soyuz in orbit for over 14 years. Fortunately, thanks to email, they were (presumably) able to get help getting down. Here is their tale.

As related by Steve Johnson and verified using teh Internets, "the writer claimed to be an astronaut on the International Space Station who couldn't return from space due to a revolution in his country putting a halt to its space program. Fortunately, his rich uncle had just died, and if you'd let him use your bank account to route the money to China (for which you'd of course be rewarded), the Chinese would sell him a spot on their space shuttle."