The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes...

From the Lost and Found department, 17 lost minutes from 2001: A Space Odyssey have been found.  This footage was cut from the film by Kubrick after its premier to improve pacing.  Here is an awesome collection of title screens from movies.

Damn.  Big.  Ego.  Post the three words you think describe me at Three Words Me.

I seem to recall posting this before but it's an infographic I actually like - the many varieties of beer.

Stephen Wolfe's When Bad Things Happen to Good CAD Users goes into quite a bit of background about how problems occur in 3D CAD geometry.  You may have heard the quote about the annual cost of CAD interoperability problems exceeding the market capitalization of all CAD companies combined.  Even though this article appears to be a pitch for the CAD/IQ product (which helps find errors in CAD models) it does a pretty good job of explaining many of the issues involved.  In the big scheme of things, the 3D spatial reasoning required to determine whether a geometric feature is junk or real is quite difficult.

PTC's Creo blog offers 4 CAD trends for 2011 including PLM, social, mobile, and customization.  Personally, I don't see mobile being that big of a deal but they're concerned about security issues related to design data on personal mobile devices.

The American Dialect Society has voted app as Word of the Year for 2010.  More interesting to me is the selection of nom (as in om nom nom) as Most Useful Word. 

In What it Takes to be a Great Employer, we learn that only 20% of a company's employees are fully engaged, 40% are "enrolled", and the remaining 40% are disenchanted.   The author cites a person's four core needs (physical, emtional, mental, physical) and describes how employers might address them.  With respect to the physical, the author rhetorically asks "How crazy is it that companies are willing to invest in preventative maintenance on fixed assets such as their machinery, but typically won't make a comparable investment to enhance and sustain the health and well-being of their employees?"  Let me take a shot at that one.  One might take the position that employees are mature adults for whom health is their own responsibility.  An analogy is public schools and what one might call their obsession with giving children (achievement-free) self esteem.  Isn't that the parents' job?  And engineering colleges that are required to teach an ethics class.  Isn't that the family's job?  The author's other points are less controversial IMO.

Some questions are best left unanswered: Are you a good boss?

The Chinese have themselves a stealth fighter - the J-20.  [Addition: Bigger photo here.]

One might argue that turnabout is fair play, that we did this to the Russians so why shouldn't someone do it to us.  But I have a problem with the Chinese aiding the Taliban.

What are 5 enemies of business?  (#1 Uncertainty.  "Even just the threat of increased regulation causes us to wait. We won't make decisions until we know what we are up against. Once the regulation is set in motion, we must try to understand and comply, in spite of the usual lack of clear instructions.")

• XFlow is a mesh-less, fully Langrangian, particle-based CFD solver.
• Need cloud computing in OpenFOAM?  Try cloudflu.
• I love this CFD software for its name only: FAHTSO.
• They are inescapably intertwined: CAE without CAD is Lame, CAD without CAE is Blind.
• Aerodine offers CFD services.  
• So does Innovations Optima.

I think we've all been there at one time or another but this past December there was a special conference in London: Boring 2010.

Old data can still be interesting. The number of taxpayers using health savings accounts (HSAs) increased 41% from 2007 to 2008 and the average balance increased 4.4% to $2,210 during the same period.  Given what has happened since (the Great Recession and health care reform), I'd like to know what the current stats are.

Here are 5 reasons your web site isn't generating any leads.   (#5 There's no point of differentiation.)  Not a fan of Google Analytics?  Here are 8 alternatives for web site analytics.  I hear that a lot of people like Paint.NET, free software for photo editing.  I use GIMP.  A video series: Vim from novice to professional.

Ever wonder what the Dow Jones Industrial Average sounds like?

Science meets vittles in this restaurant's periodic table menu.

Researchers say that our standard body temperature of 98.6 degrees is the perfect balance between warding off fungi and having to eat continuously.  But the problem is that other researchers have shown that the actual range of standard body temperatures tends to fluctuate.

From the Only In California department: spas now offer vaginal steam baths.

And finally, in a moment of feigned humility and obvious self promotion, I am honored that this blog was named "Best New-to-Me Fort Worth Blog" in Food and Fort Worth's Best of Fort Worth 2010 post.

...but in having new eyes.  ~Marcel Proust