The difficulty of literature is not to write...

While this isn't necessarily what I alluded to last week, the Snuggie Sutra is a step in that direction. It's not too late to take the survey for the Project On Women Engineers' Retention to help find out why women leave the career at a rate more than twice that of men. What intrigues me most about stylish mustaches for girls is not the obvious. Rather, they are said to go great with almost any outfit. With what outfit would a girl not wear a mustache?

This is interesting. Using IRS data from 2007, Kiplinger compiled the following stats regarding the distribution of income in the U.S. population. It's summarized below. Keep in mind that the poverty threshold for a single person is $11,000.

• If your income exceeds $410,000, you're in the top 1% of the population.
• If your income exceeds $160,000, you're in the top 5% of the population.
• If your income exceeds $113,000, you're in the top 10% of the population.
• If your income exceeds $66,000, you're in the top 25% of the population.
• If your income exceeds $32,000, you're in the top 50% of the population.
  

If you listen to only one mashup a year, it should be DJ Earworm's United State of Pop. If you think only sissies use a CAD system with a GUI, the command-line script-based OpenSCAD is for you. SEOmoz shares his 10 favorite sites. DesignWorld presents something like YouTube for engineers. The Aggregate offers this list of programming tricks. Viz Worth Watching is the official blog of EnSight.

This guide to what beer I should drink may come in handy (or at least save on phone calls to Joel). Not quite sure what to make of this CFD/FEA portal called Arthemia. Moon June Records presents this live recording of Blues for Tony featuring Allan Holdsworth. Power Presentations for communication skills coaching. Wordr is like Twitter but one word at a time.

Wanna start an argument? Play Cirkis. This historical timeline of computer graphics apparently missed recent advances in web page design. But then again, they may disagree with oft-quoted web design rules such as "thou shall not scroll." Check these out: the blueprints of Monsieur Eiffel. Cause and effect: feed turtles brussel sprouts, flatulence raises water level and triggers alarm. (Next week's menu includes sauerkraut and a 12-pack of Schlitz.)

DoubleCAD XT works like AutoCAD LT, but it's free. MeshMixer is an experimental bit of software for creating new 3D models from existing meshes. Watch the video: it's pretty cool. Aligned CAE is a Michigan-based CFD consultancy. The obligatory "top of the last decade" post: five best CAD-related innovations: 3d mice, web-based model libraries, direct modeling, rendering-modeling integration, 3D printing.

CAE News:

• RBF Morph 1.2, the morphing and shape optimization software tailored for Fluent, was released.
• Enter Flow Science's 30th Anniversary Simulation Contest (and maybe wiin a Wii).
• Parallel CFD 2010 will be held 17-21 May in Taiwan.
  

The folks at Duct Tape Marketing show us how Facebook pages are more business friendly. Here's an interesting editorial about how engineers saved Xmas. Speaking of Xmas and over-eating, dig into the Cherpumple: a cake with a pie stuffed in each layer (CHERry, PUMPkin, and apPLE pie). If you got a netbook for Xmas, Web Worker Daily recommends that you install this software: Evernote, Chrome, Pidgin, Dropbox, and Jing. (They recommended Google's office suite but I went with OpenOffice.)

The interwebs is a big place (e.g. 5 million tweets per day) as evidenced by these social media counts. And if you're into numbers, Number Gossip is the place to find out everything about any number. For example, 42 is the smallest abundant odious number. (And, no, that number was not the first one I checked. It was the second. 42 was the third.)

Yummy = Topsy's Popcorn. HubSpot offers this "must read" list of inbound marketing predictions for 2010. How to setup a basic CSS template. The third edition of the web style guide. Google joins the URL shortening game with goo.gl (but we can't use it yet). WebDev Mania's top 10 CSS snippets. Use MailChimp for email marketing.

Local DFW stuff: military history museum, Food and Fort Worth blog.

Award for outstanding use of technology: Weekly World News covers in Google Books. This guy is pretty proud of his marketing checklist. The official blog of self-help guru Stephen Covey. My Betta is too cold and other nuggets can be learned at BettaFish.com. Web analytics guru Avinash Kaushik has a blog, Occam's Razor, and a book, Web Analytics: An Hour a Day. 3D Builder is a powerful tool for automatically/interactively creating structured or unstructured 3D meshes.

Blah, blah, bacon: candles, mat, lip balm, and thank god someone did the work for me, Random Good Stuff's bacon mega post. Silly stuff: putty and walks.


...but to write what you mean. --Robert Louis Stevenson