Pain is invevitable.

Perhaps this was a portent of today's rapture: Angry Birds for the web.  At least it's apocalyptic for office productivity.

I'm not normally a big fan of photography but the TRIANGULATION blog's post about Eric Cahan got me interested.

Know yer ABCs: video game alphabet, and another video game alphabet.  If you like your letters a bit more interactive, check out a World of Qwert. Git yer chemistry on with CanvasMol, an 3D interactive visualization of various molecules.

Who knows if this article about things you can learn about people simply by looking at them is valid or not, but since reading it I can't stop looking at women's feet.

Aviation pr0n of the week: video of flying the U-2 at 70,000 feet and video of SpaceShip Two feathering its tail.

Google's Browser Size shows how much of your webpage people can see.  Not everyone has a super-wide monitor.

From November 2010, Business Insider presents their list of the 50 best colleges in America.  Georgia Tech is #42, Carnegie Mellon is #16, MIT is #1.  Regardless of where they went to school, engineers got higher salary offers than other majors in 2011.  Eleven PhD students were awarded $275,000 from NVIDIA's Graduate Fellowship Program.

If you prefer your learning to be online (at least the textbooks), here are Learning Modern 3D Graphic Programming and  Learning with Python.  Damn infographics!  Programming languages from Fortran to Ruby on Rails.

If you're not familiar with the work of Edward Tufte, graphic design theorist in data visualization, this article in Washington Monthly is a good introduction.  Warning: terms like "information sage", "graphics guru", "oracle", and "philosopher king" are overused.

While we're on the topic of data visualization, States of Design 01: Visualization is an overview of modern visualization design.

I'm not a fan of Bob Dylan, but I do like Oonce-Oonce.

INCREDIBOX is an interactive human beat-box.  And it's French.  Which explains a lot.

Industry Market Trends shares their list of small business trends for 2011.

1. Tech Investments on the Rise: The use of websites, online lead generation, and web-based technologies is on the rise and is seen as positive factors for business.  No real surprise here.
2. Social Media Embraced: Up to 62% of small firms are using social media to conduct business.  This trend is on the rise as the technology matures and more and more people get used to how it works and how to use it properly.  Again, no surprise.
3. Virtual Office toward Work/Life Balance: 60% of owners and managers admit to holding their mobile device more often than their significant other's hand.  More significantly, 98% say they've used their mobile device after hours for work.  As for work/life balance, the article suggests that a distracted parent thumbing a Blackberry at a child's soccer game is better than no parent in the bleachers at all.  I'll rate this one a fail.  First, work/life balance, the idea that you work from 9 to 5 and after that you're just plain ol' spouse/parent/friend, is false.  The key is being in the moment, whenever and wherever that moment is.  If you're at your kid's band concert, turn off the phone.  If you're at work, do work.  But don't constrain yourself to an outmoded idea of when work is and when it is not.

CAD Human is your source for 3D, high-quality CAD models of people for all your engineering or design purposes.

From the Follow-Up Department - A couple weeks ago I linked to an upcoming auction of animation art and other Hollywood memorabilia.  The auction is now complete and the results are in.  Here are some selected results (a production cel and pan background from Sleeping Beauty sold for $94,400).  The full results indicate that the car from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang didn't sell (maybe not too surprising with a pre-auction estimate of between $1 million and $2 million) but a production predator head from Predator 2 sold for $7,080.  Again, I urge you to browse the auction catalog just to see the cool stuff that was available.

Mark Rothko's Untitled No. 17 recently sold at auction for over $33 million.  I know this price will baffle my younger son.

I thought CFD was hard but computational metaphysics uses computers to derive conclusions from axioms in metaphysical thought on topics such as the nature of being and reality.  This brings us closer to Leibniz's goal: "there would be no more need of disputation between two philosophers than between two accountants."

Stanford folks are also responsible for this list of the best English-language fiction of the twentieth century.  What should be inferred from the fact that I haven't read novel #1, The Great Gatsby?  Faulkner first appears on the list at #13 with The Sound and the Fury.

In a college commencement address, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg urges women to be more ambitious, that it's the path to leadership, and that's the path to solving "this generation's central moral problem, which is gender inequality."

I HATE spiders.  They are vile, disgusting creatures covered with eyes and legs and fangs and venom and hairs and god knows what else.  Crawling around all sneaky and shit.  Simply evil.  Yuck. I mean, just look at it.  What the hell is that thing?  I even made this picture as small as I could.  But you don't often see one that's 49 million years old.

Texas A&M University is seeking donations totaling about $500,000 so they can accept and maintain the gift of a Space Shuttle simulator from NASA.

From the Scratching My Head Department: JS/Linux is an in-browser implementation of a Linux kernel done entirely in Javascript.  Windows 8 may have 128-bit support.  Syntaclet is a syntax bookmarklet that "makes boring code look pretty!" 

Dutch students created the world's largest working Nintendo NES controller that's 6 meters wide.  An exercise in egomania: a Google mapping app that finds streets with your name.

Can you resist the temptation to reset this website?  Six minutes 45 seconds is the longest I've seen it go.

Suffering is optional.