Good resolutions are...

The explosion of appendage-friendly garments continues with the Alien-inspired Peekaru and the ascot-on-steroids Necky. This fashion trend has only one inevitable conclusion and I can't wait to see what kind of fleece garment they design for that special appendage.

Time to cuddle up by the fire for The History of Numerical Linear Algebra. For your post-reading roundtable discussion, debate the Kronecker-Zehfuss scandal. Travel back in time with this gallery of vintage computers from Z4 to UNIVAC. Five dozen cool pics of the erf from outer space.

Get your weather forecast Star Wars style (today it's Naboo out there). The periodic table of beers is something only an anal-retentive alcoholic could create. Bacon Xmas ornaments (sold out, unfortunately). Ever want to search for 4 things at once? Then GoogleGoogleGoogleGoogle is for you.

U.S. to capture cow farts? I'd prefer we got bin Laden first. Make bacon cups for your next party. The Marketing Genius blog. This demonstration of how a curve ball is perceived was named best illusion of the year. Here's someone's list of the 33 essential free utilities for your PC. A new term for marketing: inbound interaction management.

For your CAE reading pleasure...

• Fluid-structure interaction in abdominal aortic aneurysms (uses Gridgen)
• Get 19 free models from T-Splines
• CFD simulations of your data center from EigenForge
• CFD simulations of foundries for EPA compliance
• STAR-CCM+ v4.06 is the most popular product in CD-adapco's history.
• Symscape's December newsletter
  

Working in a startup? Smart Bear suggests you ask yourself these 10 questions every month. Get your groove on with A Very Bootie Xmas 2. James Cameron will be giving the keynote presentation at SolidWorks World 2010. I have a feeling he won't be doing a demo of SolidWorks. Everything you never wanted to believe in: the James Randi Foundation.

Seth Godin's new ebook, What Matters Now, is available now for free download. Just in case you ever need a compact calendar for a planning meeting. RegExr is a cool online tool for learning regular expressions.

Dates for your events planner...

• CSIRO 7th Conference on CFD in the Minerals and Process Industries, 09-11 Dec 2009, Melbourne, Australia
  
• SAE 2010 Hybrid Vehicles Symposium, 10-11 Feb 2010, San Diego

You too can earn an advance degree at the Institute for Internet Studies. Lesson One: memes. Fantastic cutaway drawings of nuclear power plants around the world. Like Mario? Use this image generator from Mario World. You can do some pretty cool things with CSS, but I've never seen anything like this parallax effect on an image. Automatically generate your own annoying Xmas card year-in-review letter.

...checks drawn on an account where you have no balance. -- Oscar Wilde

A Smoothie Recipe for Tom

Several months ago I promised my friend, Tom, that I'd share with him my recipe for the fruit smoothie I have virtually every morning for breakfast. (After 40+ years of cereals I was due for a change.) This makes two very full glasses.


Peach & Blueberry Smoothie

• 1.75 cups apple juice
• 2 heaping tbsp wheat germ
• 2 heaping tbsp plain yogurt
• 1 banana (w/o peel)
• 1.5 cups frozen peaches
• 8 0z frozen blueberries

The following ingredients are optional.

• 1 envelope Carnation Instant Breakfast, vanilla
• 1 capful Source of Life Liquid (my boys call this stuff "snot")
• 1 tbsp cod liver oil

Combine all ingredients in smoothie maker or blender and blend until smooth.

For a strawberry smoothie, substitute strawberries for peaches and orange juice for apple juice.

The cleverest of all...

Just in time for the holiday, here's Everyting You Ever Wanted to Know About Christmas. Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea inspired many visions of what Captain Nemo's submarine looked like; here's a catalog of several dozen Nautilus designs. Use Yelp to find out what people thing of businesses in Fort Worth.

When on Long Island, be sure to dine at Stresa Italian Restaurant. I guess South Butt's logo hits too close to home and that's why they're being sued. Genesis is a 2010 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee. Now Hare This is the blog of the Chuck Jones Center for Creativity. Here's the blog for SU Alumni Reps.

Let's talk CAE.

• EasyCFD_G is 2D CFD software for boundary-fitted grids.
• CFDesign achieves 4-5.5 times speed-up on computer clusters.
• ESI Group's software license sales are down 5.7% this quarter relative to last year.
• Siemens PLM's JT file format accepted by ISO.
• Mindware was acquired by ESI Group. (old news)
• Exa uses Spatial's InterOp for CAD interoperability.
• TransMagic's 64-bit support improves performance for huge files.
• CT CoreTechnologie is the leading provider of CAD conversion software.
• COFES' keynote speakers were announced.

Will inbound marketing truly be the top marketing trend in 2010? TweetBeep is like Google Alerts for Twitter. Make your presentations and other documents available online with SlideShare. Find out what people are saying about you with BackType. Need a name or a tag line? Try this generator. OnStartups answers the question "how do I make Google Analytics actionable?" Read all about the fable of user-centered design.

Reason #1,649 that innovation is not dead: the Razorba. (But the photo of Rachel Ray on the site is creepy cuz it makes me think she's a satisfied customer.)

...is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month. --Fyodor Dostoevsky

Les sons et les parfums...

Let's begin by opening our wallets for the world's ten most expensive foods, of which I have had the pleasure of only one: Wagyu beef, specifically Kobe. If you're a fan of design, you might enjoy how a student at the Royal College of Arts redesigned the UK's electrical plug.

Yes, this article is fully of fancy pants math words, but these researchers have achieved a new high in packing tetrahedra, 4-sided triangular pyramids, into a volume: 78.2% full. For those of you more visually minded, here's a pretty picture of Platonic and Archimedean solids. I bet everyone wishes this blog could be remarkable.

All the CAE news that's fit to slap into a blog as bullets:

• ANSYS has a channel on YouTube.
• Mentor Graphics offers the FloVIZ Viewer for free.
• Videos and other info about SpaceClaim
• How Cart3D does surface modeling
• Aerospace Manufacturing and Design magazine (Isn't their title backwards? Doesn't design come first?)
  

No one is surprised anymore when you say Google has a blank, in this case a dictionary. Here's something I can't wait to try: call Steak-Out and have my steak delivered. Here's a cool panoramic photo of Stonehenge taken from the center of the formation where no tourists dare trod. Official web site of the Manchester-based duo, Marconi Union.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art seems to have a nice collection of abstract expressionist works including paintings by Barnett Newman, Rothko, de Kooning, and Pollock just to name a few. A visit is in order. Do not let your children look at this web site full of Sketchy Santas. Speaking of Xmas, say hello to my little friend: the world's smallest snowman only at 0.01 mm wide.

Rhythm is dashboard software for managing your business. The average American consumes 34 GB of information daily. 3Dconnexion makes 3d mice, devices for your left hand to pan, zoom, and rotate images on your screen. If you want to make some buttons for your web site, I suggest the generator from Cool Text.

If you thought tet packing was the end of this week's math stuff, think again. Here's how an engineer, not a mathematician, visualizes prime numbers. The sky is blue, bears crap in the woods, and men prefer bacon to babies. Learn the seven psychological principles that con artists exploit.

Interesting. Jing seems to be a free version of Tech Smith's Camtasia Studio. Unfortunately, my video production skills are so poor I would probably win Infosthetics' ugly infographic contest. The Buckeye Bullet is Ohio State's attempt at setting a land speed record for a hydrogen fuel cell powered vehicle.

Are sales people different from you and me? Yes, cuz they will convince you to buy this hovercraft. I don't like scotch, so why did I bookmark the web site of the Fort Worth Scotch Appreciation Society? However, I do recall why I bookmarked Grace's web site: everyone says the food there is great.

How to compute your viral coefficient and other viral marketing lessons. Mapping the geography of Wikipedia content. Seems that the Air Force has a cool new toy: the RQ-170 stealth UAV designed by those geniuses at Lockeed Martin's Skunk Works.

...tournent dans l'air du soir. -- Charles Baudelaire

To steal from one person is plagarism...

Never lose track of the Wienermobile again. Watch the orbits of the planets with this fully interactive solar system. Why take PhD classes in CFD when you can read about them all online: 2007, 2008, 2009. Reread for the first time Eric Raymond's thoughts on how to build better software systems in his classic work The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

Brian's take on PR 2.0. Shaun's thoughts on software engineering and product management. Sweetie Pie's does for steak what Babe's does for chicken - make it awesome! Official web site of (ex-Hackett) keyboardist Nick Magnus. 6dof.com claims to be a CAE web portal, but the last posting was in July.

The CAE news you've been waiting for...

• T-Splines 2.2 was released (be sure to watch the 3 min. video)
• CADIQ 6.1 was released
  

They say this plush T-Rex is adorable and fuzzy and wants only to cuddle and maybe nibble on your nose. Be a Santa's Helper. Here's a great collection of vintage ammunition packages. The blueprints database. A pearltree is a visualization tool for viewing your web content as a network graph. Mashable offers these 8 tips for managing your LinkedIn group.

...to steal from many is research. - Steven Wright

To goodness and wisdom we only make promises...

Truly this bacon sandwich is indeed deluxe. But served with Wild Turkey? Really? Wouldn't a nice lager be better? I'm sure Joel would recommend a wheat beer. Instead of spending this weekend with 537,821 of your closest friends at Walmart saving $2.50 on Tickle Hands Elmo, why not swing by the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History in their brand new building?

Bacon. Dental. Floss. Advice I can get behind from management guru
Tom Peters: outread the other guy - read wide, read long, read deep. Along those lines, here's Seth Godin's reading list for November. For fans of Lattice Boltzmann numerical methods here's LBMethod.org and OpenLB. Here's the solar system scaled down to fit in your browser (hope you like to scroll to the right).

From the CAE news desk:

• SGI unveiled the Altix UV, configurable from 32 to 2,048 cores (with provisions for up to 262,144 cores).
• Exa released PowerFLOW 4.2 with true rotating geometry for improved noise simulations from fans and wheels
• Symscape's Caedium CFD solver sends text and picture updates of your CFD solution via Twitter.
• ANSYS released Engineering Knowledge Manager (EKM) 2.0
• This video about the Cray CX1 also features work by Intel, Microsoft HPC, CEI Ensight, Star-CCM+, and Advantage CFD. (Registration required to download 62 MB Flash executable.)
• ACUSIM is hosting a webinar on CFD modeling of wind turbines on 15 Dec.
• Steve Legensky from Intelligent Light gave a masterworks presentation at Supercomputing the challenges of wind energy simulation for HPC.
• CD-adapco and Access announced starcast, new casting simulation software.
• CD-adapco also released STAR-CCM+ V4.06
• Tom I-P. Shih is the new head of the Aero and Astro department at Purdue
• Flow Analysis Solutions was formed to market the CFD techniques developed by John Steinhoff.
• Flow Science released FLOW-3D/MP V4.0
  

Applied Aerodynamics is a freely available digital textbook and includes an interesting section on airfoil geometry. Create your own social network using Ning. PC World presents 9 Twitter tips for business. As though I don't have enough online music services already (last.fm, Blip, Pandora) here comes Grooveshark. The alphabet as made from die-stained tissue samples.

An online clock made from scroll bars. Computer trivia from A to Z (who knew that Gmail was original codenamed Caribou). Not to be outdone, here's the history of the internet. And its weight. And proof that the internet didn't invent idiocy. Sideways Google and 80 degrees Google (darn those CSS pranksters).

Time remains to submit your entry for the ugliest visualization contest. 'tis the season for contests: TraceParts wants you to create a Christmas tree. Printed Space delivers custom, high quality digital prints for interior design. Where science meets art: Lichtenburg figures turned into lightning scupltures.

Sweet funky jimmy! Check out these Mandelbulbs, Mandelbrot fractals in 3D. Where does Microsoft get off trying to patent Tufte's sparklines? (Note: I am not an attorney, but I'd like to play one on TV because the pay's better.) Check out the image gallery at the Census of Marine Life; if your body is translucent so I can see your intestines, you deserve to live at the bottom of the ocean.

CAD Message is a blog about news from the CAE market. Want to give TinyURL some competition? Try bit.ly. The longest list of Twitter resources I have ever seen. Too bad these Christmas tree ornaments shaped like video game controllers have already sold out. No, I don't know anything about regular expressions. Lifehacker is thankful for these free apps. HubSpot's internet marketing blog and Dave Kurlan's sales blog. Inbound marketing Q&A. A list of free web analytic tools.

Turbaconducken.

...pain we obey. -- Proust

Business of Software 2009 Roundup

If you're interested in building a long-term, sustainable and profitable software business you'd probably be interested in the the Business of Software Conference 2009 which was held in San Francisco on 09-11 November.

• Conference Web Site: www.businessofsoftware.org
• Conference Network: network.businessofsoftware.org
• Conference Wiki: wiki.businessofsoftware.org
• Conference Crowdvine: crowdvine.businessofsoftware.org
• Conference Flickr page

Here's a list of the speakers along with the one thing I took away from each of their presentations.

Geoffrey Moore (Dealing with Darwin): Excel at the features that amplify your differentiation from the competition (your core) while just being good enough at everything else (context).

Paul Graham (PaulGraham.com): From a VC's standpoint, companies that provide super good company service are good bets.

Heidi Roizen (Heidi.Roizen.com): More than half of a VC's investments lose money while the top 3% of deals return 50% of their profits.

Dharmesh Shah (OnStartups.com, @dharmesh): Use social media tools to create user pull rather than the traditional marketing push - Inbound Marketing.

Mat Clayton (MatClayton.com, @matclayton): Be social, be relevant, and disintermediate.

Don Norman (jnd.org): Good design is all about the complete experience so build (or partner) to create an A-Z system.

Ryan Carson (RyanCarson.com, @RyanCarson): Make your company remarkable by being passionate, loving your customers, treating them like royalty, giving back to your community, making kick ass products, investing in good design, being more creative than you need to be, and begin good at publicity. (He says you must do all 8 to succeed which is why I listed all of them.)

Paul Kenny (Ocean Learning's Forum): Discover your sales story by starting with the customer's need behind the need.

Chris Capossela: Geographic based pricing (setting lower prices in certain countries) works as a hedge against piracy.

Neil Davidson (NeilDavidson.com, @NeilDavidson): When setting price consider your product's value relative to the customer's needs and then discourage comparisons that work against value.

Kathy Sierra (Creating Passionate Users, @KathySierra): Understand what the user does and help them, teach them to be awesome at it.

Jennifer Aaker (@Aaker): The pillars of happiness are autonomy, competence, relatedness, self esteem, and being part of something bigger.


Michael Lopp (RandsInRepose.com, @Rands): Learn how to make little decisions better and faster by developing improvisational skills, delegating, and knowing what you want.

Luke Hohmann (LukeHohmann.com, @LukeHohmann): True innovation comes from the things we don't know we don't know.

Joel Spolsky (JoelonSoftware.com, @Spolsky): Design is the act of making decisions for the user so they don't have to.

And here are the notes, summaries, and commentaries by other attendees (I'm certain there are more out there).

• Greg Kilwein
• Jurgen Appelo
• Kyle Cordes
• Martin Kleppmmann
• Marco Botton
  

Mark your calendar: BoS2010 will be held 04-06 October 2010 in Boston.

UPDATE [20 Mar 2010]: Video of Geoffrey Moore's talk on innovation from BoS2009.

UPDATE [27 Mar 2010]: Video of Mark Stephens' winning Pecha Kucha from BoS2009.

UPDATE [08 May 2010]: Video of Kathy Sierra's talk on social media from BoS2009.

UPDATE [05 Jun 2010]: Video of Paul Kenny's talk about sales from BoS2009.

UPDATE [26 Jun 2010]: Video of Don Norman's talk about design from BoS2009.

UPDATE [24 Aug 2010]: Video of Darmesh Shah's talk about building better software businesses from BoS2009.

UPDATE [24 Aug 2010]: Video of Joel Spolsky's talk about simplicity versus choice from BoS2009.

UPDATE [31 Aug 2010]: Video of Paul Graham's talk on trends for the future from BoS2009.

Tell me and I'll forget...

Don't you need a little Chewbacca right now? The ERCOFTAC nexus is a portal to fluid dynamics resources like experimental databases (can that sentence be any more indecipherable?). While I'm posting resources, here are a bunch for agile programming: NetObjectives, InfoQ, Mountain Goat. NASA has patented a technique for automated generation of airfoil performance tables using CFD.

The winner of the Pecha Kucha (look it up) competition at the Business of Software conference writes the Java PDF blog. Joining the Society for Technical Communication (STC) might improve this blog. All these people say Outlook is broken because it uses Word to render HTML. Use Get Satisfaction to create a web site where companies and customers can interact.

The folks at exosphere have made a highly accurate graphical reproduction of Flight 1549 from take off to unplanned air-water interface with the Hudson River. Acresso Software is now Flexera Software (would've been nice to have heard about this in advance guys). Trying hard to get my head (ears?) around the music of MMW and Grizzly Bear.

The edible bacon lamp is both illuminating and delicious. Couldn't agree more: befriend the apostrophe or risk writing stuffy, dull, awkward prose. While we're on the topic of writing, when you write product requirements thou shall not write "the product shall" but rather "the user wants to..." Turn your entire wall into a dry erase white board with IdeaPaint.

News about your favorite CAE products:

• XYZ Scientific released TrueGrid V2.3.3 for FEA meshing
• FloEFD is envisioned as providing concurrent CFD
  

How much do you know about influence and persuasion? Take Robert Cialdini's quiz and find out. (Me? apparently not so much, only 50%.) Fortune magazine named Apple's Steve Jobs the CEO of the decade. New York's Animazing Gallery has a blog. Does your web site have Feng-Shui? Use Feng-GUI to find out.

ANSYS is number 75 on Software Top 100. I was sitting next to the guy who took this photo of Steve Hackett playing at SUNY Oswego in 1981. There's a blog for SolidWorks. What indeed is going on at Adobe for 3D CAD? Ars Technica provides this introduction to wikis in the workplace. An interesting essay on Harold Budd's Perhaps ("...his music derives its singular potency not from the new materials added to his sonic palette but from Budd's relentless process of subtraction and refinement.").

Try Google Swirl, a new way to search for related images. For example, search for Rothko. This blog is a public service announcement for the Society to Prevent Internet Posting After Two Margaritas.

...show me and I may remember, involve me and I'll understand.

Doing difficult things takes time...

First there was the Snuggie and then there was the Slanket (or is it the other way around?). But why limit your appendage-friendly linens to lounging? Now there's the Dreamie.

What makes good information design? The NSSE reports that a variety of colleges and universities have shown steady improvement in the quality of undergraduate education, as measured by students' exposure to and involvement in effective educational practices.

From the events calendar:

• RAPID 2010 (additive manufacturing aka rapid prototyping), 18-20 May 2010, Anaheim, CA
• COFES 2010 (Congress on the Future of Engineering Software), 15-18 Apr 2010, Scottsdale, AZ
  

A couple of videos for you: What's New in Patran 2009 and David Allen on getting started with GTD. If you're a contractor you can figure your hourly rate using John Soer's technique or try eLance.com. I'm sure you've all heard by now that NASA found water on the moon.

Go Mustangs!

...but doing the impossible takes just slightly longer.

Education is what remains...

The folks at Lehman Brothers sure had collected some nice modern art before going bankrupt. Texas-based Armadillo Aerospace collected a cool $500,000 from NASA's lunar lander challenge. Do not confuse an engineering adventure with an engineering mind.

For fine Lebanese and Italian cuisine, try Chadra Mezza. This is supposed to be a photo blog about epic kludges, but it looks like my home workshop. My son thought this was cool, but I didn't get it. Maybe it doesn't work with bifocals. Animazing Gallery, featuring animation and fine art, has a blog.

From the CAE newswire...

• ANSYS released an academic bundle for Ansoft.
• Symscape published their November 2009 newsletter.
• OpenFOAM and Fluent are virtually tied in Symscape's favorite RANS solver poll.
• Exa released PowerACOUSTICS.
• ANSYS' revenue is up about 7% YTD over last year.
  

City Journal asks "What Happened to the Work Ethic?" Cadalyst provides this interesting overview of history versus explicit modelers. How much does Google know about you? Try their privacy dashboard and see. The do's and don'ts of modern web page design.

...after you forget everything you've learned. -- Albert Einstein

Art is an experience...

If you're a fan of David Allen's Getting Things Done, you'll appreciate this list of free GTD resources. Read all about domestic and commercial robots, like iRobot's Roomba, at Robot Reviews. It's a bit of a misnomer, but VizUp decreases polygon count in faceted models. The official web site of guitarist Steve Hackett.

I've finally found my calling: Baragami, the ancient Welsh art of toast arranging. Who whould've known that changing your socks would provide a burst of energy. ITI Transcendata released Proficiency Collaboration Gateway v8.1. Subscribe today to the International Journal of Fluid Dynamics and Aerospace Engineering, IJFDAE.

Just in time for Christmas: meggings. Employers should ban worker-manager online friendships, or so say lawyers. When in San Francisco, visit the Cartoon Art Museum. Here are links to visualization talks from CaT 2009. Dassault buys from IBM their entire PLM sales operation. A gallery of CFD visualizations from the Institute for CFD in Tokyo.

ANSYS was named to Forbes 200 Best Small Companies list for the seventh time in the past nine years. Hanley Innovations cut the price of their multi-element airfoil software. A day too late: War of the Worlds was rebroadcast online. What are the world's strongest natural flavors? More than 100 tricks using Google.

As I type this, Freeman's is auctioning a great collection of modern art including some from Lehman Brothers' collection.

Things for your calendar:

• Numerical Analysis Techniques Using FEA and CFD, Ohio Northern U, 06-07 Nov 2009

...not an object. --Robert Motherwell

It behooves a father to be blameless...

Proof that one's perspective makes all the difference: see the Earth from Mars. Instead of looking at Earth from far away, let's see Saturn closeup. Get answers for your startup from OnStartups. The 4-Hour Workweek dude has thoughts about Google's web optimizer and vanity metrics. A truly remarkable aircraft: the XB-70A.

A guide to regional hamburger styles. (The "stacked" style reminds me vaguely of Charlies' here in Fort Worth.) Rheolef is a C++ finite element environment for solving partial differential equations. Siemens PLM Software blog. Neil Davidson has written a guide to software pricing. Here's a recap of IEEE VisWeek 2009.

Ever wonder what a nuclear detonation looks like after only 10 ms? Find out with these rapatronic photographs. Rare magnetic monopoles, particles with only one magnetic pole, might find use in computers if we can figure out how to harness magnetricity. Here's a shotgun blast of some of Seth Godin's web sites: Permission Marketing, Idea Virus, The Big Red Fez. Autodesk's Project Cooper: going after Google Sketch-Up?

From the CAE newswire...

• FLOW-3D CFD Software Version 9.4 Released
• CD-adapco Launches 2010 Calendar Competition (I've had one of these calendars on my desk for the past two years.)
• NcNeel Updated RhinoScript for Rhino V4.0
• Tecplot Updated Tecplot 360 and Tecplot Focus
  

Balloon artist Jason Hackenwerth goes way beyond making a puppy dog. With apologies to Frank Sinatra, "Fly me to the moon..." on the Ares I-X rocket which is set to launch on 27 Oct at 8am. I may be having a beer at the Thirsty Bear soon. Ever have text message regret? These people should. Here are some photographs of nothing more than light. European languages are mapped.

One might argue that all web pages are always under construction, but this page really is. The National Air and Space Museum has put its collection of aviation posters, called Fly Now!, online. Surgery on his neck vertebrae has left Phil Collins unable to play drums due to a loss of sensation in his fingers. Before you haters start chortling, I will remind you of Phil's drumming with jazz fusion group Brand X. (And now some haters can ask "Who's Brand X?" and "What does chortling mean?")

...if he expects his son to be. --Homer

He that can have patience...

I'm not certain that Good and Plenty belongs on this list of the worst Halloween candy. 37 Signals blogs about their products, including Basecamp. And Basecamp also appears on this list of free tools for running a small business. fusion29, visual communication studio, has updated their web site. If you have an iPhone and you use Solidworks, there's an app for that.

Open CASCADE is a geometry software kernel for 3D modeling applications. Jakob Nielsen applies the concept of powers of 10 to the user experience including the startling result that users can distinguish a web page's visual appeal in 1/20th of a second. From the "I can't remember why I bookmarked this" category, the NelsonQuick Group. If you use OpenFOAM, get your OpenFOAM Extensions.

We missed NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference but keynotes and other presentations are online. Secure your home with Schlage LiNK. Research wages by area and occupation at the Dept. of Labor. ISV Community is a network for people in the software industry and On Startups is for entrepreneurs. All the GTD information that's fit to blog: GTDtimes. Exa added Spatial's InterOp CAD translators to their products.

For those of you with no time to read, see 50 years of space exploration in a single picture. Symscape's October newsletter is out. Read how product managers can use Twitter. The FOAM Documentation Project has been shut down.

...can have what he will. --Benjamin Franklin

Doubt is not a pleasant condition...

How big is Graham's number? Bigger than a googol, larger than Moser's number. According to the sandwich price calculator, yesterday's lunch cost 79 cents. 6 reasons bacon is better than true love. 15 wonders of the Lego world. 15 women who look better (?) with mustaches.

The tactical triangle simplifies your marketing efforts. All information is beautiful, some more so than others. Disapproving rabbits? Since when did hares get their dander up? Doesn't anyone need gloves or a hat? Spatial added JT support to their CAD translators. One might argue that T-Pain has overused auto-tuning, but does it help or hurt Carl Sagan? While you're watching videos, get an eyeful of these crosswind landings.

I have great fondness for my HP-11C scientific calculator (and I know at least one person who lusts for it). In accordance with recently updated FTC guidelines, no material connection exists between this blogger and HP. SpaceClaim provides CAD software. The dean of the L.C. Smith College of Engineering at Syracuse University has a blog. MSC.Software agreed to be acquired by private investors, Maximus Holdings. Now what?

View the galactic center in 1 billion pixels. Other uses for books. When in San Fransisco, visit the Toronado Pub and sample their expansive stock of beers. Atlassian offers starter licenses of their software for $10. Michael Pollan chose his favorite 20 food rules from readers. Why can't the periodic table be round? Altair's Hyperworks community has grown to 200 partners in the first year.

For your event calendar:

• IEEE InfoVis, 11-16 Oct 2009, Atlantic City, NJ
• Global Product Data Interoperability Summit, 09-12 Nov 2009, esa, AZ
  
• Collaboration and Interoperability Congress, 03-05 May 2010, Estes Park, CO

Unroll the world of bathroom tissue with the Toilet Paper Encyclopedia. Generate a customized ransom note. ITI Transcendata's 8.0 release of CADfix has some interesting features including shrink wrapping and support for 64-bit operating systems. A U.S. court has ruled that software is owned not licensed. Take a moment amongst yourself to discuss the implications and generality of this ruling. (Hint: the ruling is relevant to the particularized details of this case.)

For those of you asking "why?", discover how nonsense sharpens the intellect.

...but certainty is absurd. -- Voltaire

How do you know when you're finished painting?

Can't you see I'm busy? I think fast food value meals have gotten a little bit ridiculous and to counter them you should try all 2,645 calories of the Super Scooby. The perfect word for the modern office is bosshole - don't be one. But if you are one, perhaps Keith Ferrazzi's blog can get you back on track. Add Twitter to Outlook with TwInbox. For the person who has everything: the ponytail cap.

Where's the nearest McDonalds? This joins my collection of online maps (not to be confused with my collection of rental car maps - seriously).

• Religion in the U.S.
• North American plate tectonics
• Gravity map of the earth
• The U.S. interstate highway system
• Interstates simplified
  
• Soda vs. Pop vs. Tonic vs. Coke in the U.S.
• World sunlight map
• News map
• Zip codes connected in ascending order
• World GDP density
• U.S. States renamed by countries with similar GDP
  
• World Atlas of faiths
• Animated history of NYC subways
• U.S. population density
• U.S. per capita roadless volume
• Video of U.S. Walmarts over time
• Top level domains of the world
• Gas prices in the U.S.
• World map done with Web 2.0 logos
• Antipode map of the world
• Olympic medals by country over time
• History's greatest journeys
• U.S. housing foreclosures
• World discretionary spending
• NFL TV Distribution
• U.S. autumn foliage
• Legal drinking age around the world
• World CO2 emissions

Did Jackson Pollock hide his name in his 1943 painting Mural? (Probably not. You could probably find your name in there.) While I'm on the subject, Pollock's Lavender Mist is one of the most awesome paintings I have ever seen. Ohio is a piano. (Never noticed that while I lived there.)

The Cullinan mine in South Africa produced a 507-carat Type II diamond. (No one tell my wife.) Texas Motor Speedway. VSG released Avizo Wind for visualizing simulation data. ANSYS announced ANSYS HPC, a bundling of multi-physics, parallel computing applications. Symscape's SymLab integrates open source applications. The Shiner brewery in Shiner, Texas. Go Virtual distributes FieldView, CFD++, and other applications in Sweden. ESI Group announced the latest release of the ACE+ suite of CFD software. NVIDIA released the new Fermi CUDA architecture. Invitations to Google Wave are closed.

Terrorism plumbs the depths of credibility with the introduction (unsuccessful) of keister bombs. To combat this, TSA has teamed up with the folks at Sky Mall to bring us the travel bidet. (I swear, sometimes this stuff writes itself.)

How do you know when you're finished making love? -- Jackson Pollock

Better three hours too soon...

Seems everyone has a blog these days, even Death. From the one week late department, make your plans for next year's GrapeFest, the largest wine festival in the southwest. Convert a document from PDF to Word. Here's a list of infographics resources for all your data visualization needs. Adobe provides these samples of 3D PDF files: a PDF file with embedded 3D geometric data you can spin and zoom.

How to use bacon to make your life incredible. (My favorite is the Sun Tzu-like "If defeated in war, use bacon to feign death.") How to make Facebook your company newsroom (as long as your company wants everyone to know what Walton's Family character it's most like). OpenFVM is an open source, general purpose CFD solver. pdnmesh is an automatic mesh solver for finite element applications. Geompack++ is a comprehensive object-oriented C++ software package for finite element mesh generation (triangular, quadrilateral, surface, tetrahedral, hexahedral-dominant).

Intelligent Light released FieldView 12.2 for CFD postprocessing. SGI unveiled the Octane III supercomputer. See what Kanye has to say about your web site using Kanyelicio.us. Symscape released their Windows patch for OpenFOAM v1.6. Rhino's Paneling Tools plug-in (i.e. quad surface meshing) was updated. A bidding war for MSC.Software? ANSYS was included in the top 100 of the Software 500 list.

Shove 8 game consoles into your R2D2 (that's not a euphemism). Generate CSS grids using the aptly named grid system generator. Mint is a web site analytics program. The CFD labs at University West Virginia and UVic. 100 tools and tips for marketing on Facebook. Choose and use color palettes that account for color blindness. PPC Airfoils makes turbine blades and other stuff.

I misplaced two music CDs a couple weeks ago and searching for them is driving me nuts. At least China was able to find a missing section of the Great Wall. 10x10 presents 100 words and pictures that describe now. Google announced the release of SketchUp 7.1. A lot of Aggies are going to be using SolidWorks.

Stewart Dickinson's site, MathArt, represents his pioneering work in visualizing mathematical objects. Any word with two umlauts has to be cool (but too cool for me to figure out how to reproduce them here), and the Gomboc definitely is. If only I could find an STL or VRML file of one. Enjoy the Oops Design Award winners for 2009.

A collection of bottle caps. Carl wants your CFD solutions for research into the correlation between mesh quality and solution accuracy. The Dirt Doctor provides organic gardening tips.

...than one minute late. -- William Shakespeare

He is the happiest...

Do you know how many people are in space right now? Closer to home, do you know the world's 50 best foods and the best place to eat them? Google's Fast Flip is going to cause some news junkies to o.d. DARPA has funded development of a robot that can jump over walls, but Speed Racer's Mach 5 had that capability40 years ago (button A, auto jack).

With our weather the way it's been for the past couple of weeks, it seems only natural to make music using raindrops. Need a patent? Maybe this guy can help. Kitware maintains a wiki for all their software products. ISAAC is another open source CFD code. ParaView is open source scientific visualization software. Read about Adobe's 3D OEM platform. NPOWER Software provides 3D NURBS modeling software.

Kliban said to never give a gun to ducks, but apparently it's OK to give lightsabers to animals.

...who finds peace in his home. -- J.W. Goethe

The quality of mercy is not strained...

"A man doesn't grow a beard, a beard grows a man" and other pearls from The Beardley. NEi Software is celebrating 15 years of supporting Femap, finite element pre- and post-processing software. Finally, science is put to good use to quantity the negative olfactory sensations caused by flatulence.

The bacon dress is truly high fashion, but I recommend against wearing it outdoors on sunny days. The newest way to waste time on the internet is Assembler, a physics-based game about stacking stuff. Tired of having every tweet update your Facebook status? Try Selective Twitter. Stuff about speeches from American Rhetoric.

101 uses for bacon (I'm certain there are more - many, many more.) Read all about the Center for CFD Research at Japan's National Maritime Research Institute. Build sales through referrals with help from the No More Cold Calling blog. Not too far from here, Armadillo Aerospace is trying to win the 2009 X-Prize Lunar Lander Challenge.

The United Steaks of America. From the man who brought you How to Dance Properly, zefrank presents craymachine. Talking to an attractive woman can make a man lose his mind. (Duh.) Ever wonder what's in a TETIN file? SimCosm is a CAE software consultancy. Somebody send this to Brendan.

National Bacon Day was 05 September. (Sorry for the lack of advance notice.) Do not click here. TotalSim is a CFD consultancy. CentaurSoft provides CFD meshing software. See how CFD provides design guidance in this article from Desktop Engineering. The latest pictures from the refurbished Hubble Space Telescope are awesome. Speaking of space, these negative space illustrations are kinda interesting too.

For your calendar:

• ECCOMAS CFD 2010, 14-17 June 2010, Lisbon

FreeFOAM is a fork of OpenFOAM that provides portability to other operating systems. I'm not sure how if at all it's related to CentFOAM. Desktop Engineering provides this analysis of the partnership between ANSYS and SpaceClaim. This video is a cool way to look at Beethoven's 5th. Eight things your dreams may be telling you.


...it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven. --William Shakespeare

Nature abhors a vacuum...

The dullest blog in the world. (No comparisons, please.) Daat Research released Coolit v.9. In Mexico? Try Cavendish CFD. In Russia? Try Grid CFD. Learn more about ANSYS Workbench or read ANSYS Advantage magazine. ANSYS announced a new immersed boundary capability. The folks at Moceon claim to have made the first all-hex mesh with 52 million cells for a Formula-1 car using their cheetahSTC technology.

Odes to cured pork: Bacon Haikus. Taitech is developing the Dragon Grid software. Donald Hawken has some grid pictures on his site. The Ocean Modeling Group at Rutgers develops a lot of software including gridpak for orthogonal structured grids. Why shouldn't engineers learn to program in C? Five places to see things blown up real good.

The bacon explosion just sounds delicious. (I mean it sounds like it would taste delicious. I'm sure it just sounds like sizzling meat.) The official web site of marketing guru David Meerman Scott. Cartoon Modern is Amid Amidi's blog about animation in the 50s. Find out what your friends (and enemies) are up to on the interwebs using Spokeo. The official blog of Duarte Design. Interesting speakers often visit Google, now they can visit you too on YouTube's Talks@Google channel.

Will there be bacon in the future? Yes! Panda's Cloud Antivirus is free and uses the cloud for its work so your computer hardly knows it's running. Protovis is a visualization toolkit for JavaScript using SVG. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon have developed a really fast, building block approach to fluid dynamics called Modular Bases.

Ever wonder what a molecule looks like up close? Do not read this. CFD for aircraft. CGAL is a computational geometry algorithm library. Can't remember exactly what Followerlap does with Twitter accounts. Hopefully, none of your pictures have been posted to Awkward Family Photos.

Get your next super computer from PSSC Labs. The folks at Social Media Today claim to be the best thinkers on social media. From their Best Practices for Corporate Twittering, "Only 20% or so of your tweets should be related to your company or include a marketing or ‘advertising’ message." With a name like HootSuite, can they really still claim to be the professional Twitter client? The Antikythera mechanism and other unexplained artifacts.

The State Fair of Texas brings us fried butter. Either Stuff White People Like is totally wrong or I am not white because I do not like any of their recent topics (camping, Where The Wild Things Are, Vespa Scooters, Bob Marley, hating people who wear Ed Hardy, Mad Men, moleskin notebooks, and funny tattoos). However, I will give SWPL props for turning me on to doga.

...but we should avoid the temptation to fill the voids with crap.

Truth is like a football...

Teh interwebs was made for stuff like this: a collection of dice. Proof that it doesn't matter how you say it: the preamble to the Constitution done with license plates. Head cheese and other delicacies. Get your Orange on (no, not burnt orange). Cool pictures of airplanes in flight.

Stone Brewing: visit the site, read the blog, drink the beer.

Here's a blast of related product marketing blogs and sites: ProductMarketing.com, Launch Clinic, Buyer Persona, Tuned In (retired), and Web Ink Now. Get on the squirrel bandwagon with the Squirrelizer. Entrepreneur.com offers tips to make you Web Smart. Sign of the apocalypse #38: there's a Twitter conference.

This video shows how to use CFDesign for design (hence the name). SmartFish is an airplane (go figure). CADspan is software from creating 3D printable files from CAD data. You may have to read this a couple times to believe it. The folks at Winkers customize jeans so they wink while you walk. The folks at Gum Alert review Bacon Gumballs.

KFC has introduced the Double Down, a sandwich without bread. (I thought this whole sandwich thing was a solved problem.) It's very fitting that the Humanure Handbook is in the downloads folder. Volcanoes are awesome when seen from space, but be careful while you're looking so one of these lightning jets doesn't shoot up and hit you in the eye.

Usually there's nothing better than monkey actors, but the mouth animations just ain't right. Lancelot Link didn't need no CGI. Why are the number of immaculate innings (3 strike outs on 9 pitches) ballooning this decade? (Not to be confused with 3 pitch innings.) Go the state fair and try some chicken fried bacon and other fried fare.

Super Mario Bros. for the Wii. Hirsute t-shirts. Visualization Library is a C++ middleware for high-performance 2D and 3D graphics applications based on the industry standard OpenGL 2.1, designed to develop portable applications for the Windows, Linux and Mac OS X operating systems. They want to demolish the Langley Full Scale Wind Tunnel.

See some of the world's largest foods. (Bigger is better, right?) My favorite is the 288 meter long stuffed cabbage, although I'm certain it's not a good as my grandmother's. Ever wonder how a sewing machine works? Sorry I missed Go Topless Day on 23 August. Odd stuff abounds on the Bits & Pieces blog. The Math Book, 250 milestones in the history of mathematics.

...you can kick it around all day, but in the end it's still round and full. -- Mark Twain