Mathematics is like love...

Can anything bring back childhood memories like a crayon? Its feel in your hand, its smell as you color, its peeled back paper wrapper. This infographic from Flowing Data illustrates the explosion in colors from 1910 to 2010: 8 to 120.

In the tradition of "your clothes are now red", and "my pork is beef" comes "my can is now a bottle" - the Bottle Top. Got an idea for a Kindle app? Here's the Kindle Development Kit. Mashable presents advice on integrating social media with your e-mail marketing. And PR 20/20 offers advice on building your inbound marketing game plan.

Top 10

• How could belly button lint and the face on Mars end up in the same top 10 list?
• MediaTrust presents their top-10 list of marketing books of 2009. I have read exactly one, Inbound Marketing by Halliwell and Shah, which is a pretty good how-to for integrating social media into your marketing plan. However, the list includes two books by Malcom Gladwell that I have absolutely no intention of reading after wasting an airline flight with Blink.
• IEEE presents the top 10 ways engineers waste time at work. (No, polishing your slide rule is not on the list and neither is reading blogs which makes me feel a little better.)
• Given my ho-hum attitude toward travel, I like this top-10 list of places you can't go. (However, Disneyland's Club 33 is interesting.)
• Elance provides these top 6 (6? really?) small business resources.

Your laser pointer shoots a beam in a straight line. Now if you apply a little fibered knot theory and a hologram, you could tie that laser beam into a light knot. Symscape asks whether it's time to reconsider the 3D interaction controls in our CAE software. An essay on realism in UI design (as I like to paraphrase Cooper, it doesn't have to be intuitive but it does have to be idiomatic).

Keep up with your NFL referees. And while you're at it, read the rule book so I don't have to endure any more of your unfounded complaints about what is and what isn't interference or holding. Follow the Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo on the Hog Blog. Speaking of blogs, here's a quick checklist for your blog. (This blog fails the checklist miserably, especially on the matter of "is there a succinct point?")

The Common Core State Standards Initiative is an effort by 48 states (Texas not among them) for developing common standards for language arts and mathematics education in grades K-12. How engineers are using social media. Quiz time: What kind of military aircraft are you? Me? EA-6B Prowler.

When the date on the milk bottle is yesterday, do you pour it out? Worse yet, are you the one who has to smell it to check whether it's gone bad? StillTasty is the ultimate guide to shelf life. (Answer: you can keep milk refrigerated for 1 week after the sell-by date.) While we're on the subject of vittles, when it comes to pretzels Rold Gold is the best.

Shopping List:

• Space Shuttle: $28.8 million
• Airbus 320 (slight water damaged): auction
  

Pull up a couch for a little small business psychology from Smart Bear. To paraphrase: if you ain't scared shitless, you ain't tryin'. By now everyone, including you and your mother-in-law, is following Bill Gates on Twitter. Here's his web site, Gates Notes.

The Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering in the L.C. Smith College of Engineering at Syracuse University is seeking a Department Chair/Professor.

Computer Aided Engineering News:

• Desktop Engineering bring us these video previews of Pro/E Wildfire 5.
• Learn Adina by watching their training videos.
• AutoSolids, solid modeling for AutoCAD, is now free.
• InsideHPC is where supercomputing professionals get their news.
• As is Supercomputing Online.
• Symscape's January newsletter is up including a report from AIAA Aerospace Sciences.
• Blue Ride Numerics announced Windows 7 support for CFDesign.
• CD-adapco released STAR-CD v4.12.
• Siemens PLM released FEMAP 10.1.1.

...a simple idea that can get very complicated.