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