Doubt is not a pleasant condition...

How big is Graham's number? Bigger than a googol, larger than Moser's number. According to the sandwich price calculator, yesterday's lunch cost 79 cents. 6 reasons bacon is better than true love. 15 wonders of the Lego world. 15 women who look better (?) with mustaches.

The tactical triangle simplifies your marketing efforts. All information is beautiful, some more so than others. Disapproving rabbits? Since when did hares get their dander up? Doesn't anyone need gloves or a hat? Spatial added JT support to their CAD translators. One might argue that T-Pain has overused auto-tuning, but does it help or hurt Carl Sagan? While you're watching videos, get an eyeful of these crosswind landings.

I have great fondness for my HP-11C scientific calculator (and I know at least one person who lusts for it). In accordance with recently updated FTC guidelines, no material connection exists between this blogger and HP. SpaceClaim provides CAD software. The dean of the L.C. Smith College of Engineering at Syracuse University has a blog. MSC.Software agreed to be acquired by private investors, Maximus Holdings. Now what?

View the galactic center in 1 billion pixels. Other uses for books. When in San Fransisco, visit the Toronado Pub and sample their expansive stock of beers. Atlassian offers starter licenses of their software for $10. Michael Pollan chose his favorite 20 food rules from readers. Why can't the periodic table be round? Altair's Hyperworks community has grown to 200 partners in the first year.

For your event calendar:

• IEEE InfoVis, 11-16 Oct 2009, Atlantic City, NJ
• Global Product Data Interoperability Summit, 09-12 Nov 2009, esa, AZ
  
• Collaboration and Interoperability Congress, 03-05 May 2010, Estes Park, CO

Unroll the world of bathroom tissue with the Toilet Paper Encyclopedia. Generate a customized ransom note. ITI Transcendata's 8.0 release of CADfix has some interesting features including shrink wrapping and support for 64-bit operating systems. A U.S. court has ruled that software is owned not licensed. Take a moment amongst yourself to discuss the implications and generality of this ruling. (Hint: the ruling is relevant to the particularized details of this case.)

For those of you asking "why?", discover how nonsense sharpens the intellect.

...but certainty is absurd. -- Voltaire

How do you know when you're finished painting?

Can't you see I'm busy? I think fast food value meals have gotten a little bit ridiculous and to counter them you should try all 2,645 calories of the Super Scooby. The perfect word for the modern office is bosshole - don't be one. But if you are one, perhaps Keith Ferrazzi's blog can get you back on track. Add Twitter to Outlook with TwInbox. For the person who has everything: the ponytail cap.

Where's the nearest McDonalds? This joins my collection of online maps (not to be confused with my collection of rental car maps - seriously).

• Religion in the U.S.
• North American plate tectonics
• Gravity map of the earth
• The U.S. interstate highway system
• Interstates simplified
  
• Soda vs. Pop vs. Tonic vs. Coke in the U.S.
• World sunlight map
• News map
• Zip codes connected in ascending order
• World GDP density
• U.S. States renamed by countries with similar GDP
  
• World Atlas of faiths
• Animated history of NYC subways
• U.S. population density
• U.S. per capita roadless volume
• Video of U.S. Walmarts over time
• Top level domains of the world
• Gas prices in the U.S.
• World map done with Web 2.0 logos
• Antipode map of the world
• Olympic medals by country over time
• History's greatest journeys
• U.S. housing foreclosures
• World discretionary spending
• NFL TV Distribution
• U.S. autumn foliage
• Legal drinking age around the world
• World CO2 emissions

Did Jackson Pollock hide his name in his 1943 painting Mural? (Probably not. You could probably find your name in there.) While I'm on the subject, Pollock's Lavender Mist is one of the most awesome paintings I have ever seen. Ohio is a piano. (Never noticed that while I lived there.)

The Cullinan mine in South Africa produced a 507-carat Type II diamond. (No one tell my wife.) Texas Motor Speedway. VSG released Avizo Wind for visualizing simulation data. ANSYS announced ANSYS HPC, a bundling of multi-physics, parallel computing applications. Symscape's SymLab integrates open source applications. The Shiner brewery in Shiner, Texas. Go Virtual distributes FieldView, CFD++, and other applications in Sweden. ESI Group announced the latest release of the ACE+ suite of CFD software. NVIDIA released the new Fermi CUDA architecture. Invitations to Google Wave are closed.

Terrorism plumbs the depths of credibility with the introduction (unsuccessful) of keister bombs. To combat this, TSA has teamed up with the folks at Sky Mall to bring us the travel bidet. (I swear, sometimes this stuff writes itself.)

How do you know when you're finished making love? -- Jackson Pollock

Better three hours too soon...

Seems everyone has a blog these days, even Death. From the one week late department, make your plans for next year's GrapeFest, the largest wine festival in the southwest. Convert a document from PDF to Word. Here's a list of infographics resources for all your data visualization needs. Adobe provides these samples of 3D PDF files: a PDF file with embedded 3D geometric data you can spin and zoom.

How to use bacon to make your life incredible. (My favorite is the Sun Tzu-like "If defeated in war, use bacon to feign death.") How to make Facebook your company newsroom (as long as your company wants everyone to know what Walton's Family character it's most like). OpenFVM is an open source, general purpose CFD solver. pdnmesh is an automatic mesh solver for finite element applications. Geompack++ is a comprehensive object-oriented C++ software package for finite element mesh generation (triangular, quadrilateral, surface, tetrahedral, hexahedral-dominant).

Intelligent Light released FieldView 12.2 for CFD postprocessing. SGI unveiled the Octane III supercomputer. See what Kanye has to say about your web site using Kanyelicio.us. Symscape released their Windows patch for OpenFOAM v1.6. Rhino's Paneling Tools plug-in (i.e. quad surface meshing) was updated. A bidding war for MSC.Software? ANSYS was included in the top 100 of the Software 500 list.

Shove 8 game consoles into your R2D2 (that's not a euphemism). Generate CSS grids using the aptly named grid system generator. Mint is a web site analytics program. The CFD labs at University West Virginia and UVic. 100 tools and tips for marketing on Facebook. Choose and use color palettes that account for color blindness. PPC Airfoils makes turbine blades and other stuff.

I misplaced two music CDs a couple weeks ago and searching for them is driving me nuts. At least China was able to find a missing section of the Great Wall. 10x10 presents 100 words and pictures that describe now. Google announced the release of SketchUp 7.1. A lot of Aggies are going to be using SolidWorks.

Stewart Dickinson's site, MathArt, represents his pioneering work in visualizing mathematical objects. Any word with two umlauts has to be cool (but too cool for me to figure out how to reproduce them here), and the Gomboc definitely is. If only I could find an STL or VRML file of one. Enjoy the Oops Design Award winners for 2009.

A collection of bottle caps. Carl wants your CFD solutions for research into the correlation between mesh quality and solution accuracy. The Dirt Doctor provides organic gardening tips.

...than one minute late. -- William Shakespeare

He is the happiest...

Do you know how many people are in space right now? Closer to home, do you know the world's 50 best foods and the best place to eat them? Google's Fast Flip is going to cause some news junkies to o.d. DARPA has funded development of a robot that can jump over walls, but Speed Racer's Mach 5 had that capability40 years ago (button A, auto jack).

With our weather the way it's been for the past couple of weeks, it seems only natural to make music using raindrops. Need a patent? Maybe this guy can help. Kitware maintains a wiki for all their software products. ISAAC is another open source CFD code. ParaView is open source scientific visualization software. Read about Adobe's 3D OEM platform. NPOWER Software provides 3D NURBS modeling software.

Kliban said to never give a gun to ducks, but apparently it's OK to give lightsabers to animals.

...who finds peace in his home. -- J.W. Goethe

The quality of mercy is not strained...

"A man doesn't grow a beard, a beard grows a man" and other pearls from The Beardley. NEi Software is celebrating 15 years of supporting Femap, finite element pre- and post-processing software. Finally, science is put to good use to quantity the negative olfactory sensations caused by flatulence.

The bacon dress is truly high fashion, but I recommend against wearing it outdoors on sunny days. The newest way to waste time on the internet is Assembler, a physics-based game about stacking stuff. Tired of having every tweet update your Facebook status? Try Selective Twitter. Stuff about speeches from American Rhetoric.

101 uses for bacon (I'm certain there are more - many, many more.) Read all about the Center for CFD Research at Japan's National Maritime Research Institute. Build sales through referrals with help from the No More Cold Calling blog. Not too far from here, Armadillo Aerospace is trying to win the 2009 X-Prize Lunar Lander Challenge.

The United Steaks of America. From the man who brought you How to Dance Properly, zefrank presents craymachine. Talking to an attractive woman can make a man lose his mind. (Duh.) Ever wonder what's in a TETIN file? SimCosm is a CAE software consultancy. Somebody send this to Brendan.

National Bacon Day was 05 September. (Sorry for the lack of advance notice.) Do not click here. TotalSim is a CFD consultancy. CentaurSoft provides CFD meshing software. See how CFD provides design guidance in this article from Desktop Engineering. The latest pictures from the refurbished Hubble Space Telescope are awesome. Speaking of space, these negative space illustrations are kinda interesting too.

For your calendar:

• ECCOMAS CFD 2010, 14-17 June 2010, Lisbon

FreeFOAM is a fork of OpenFOAM that provides portability to other operating systems. I'm not sure how if at all it's related to CentFOAM. Desktop Engineering provides this analysis of the partnership between ANSYS and SpaceClaim. This video is a cool way to look at Beethoven's 5th. Eight things your dreams may be telling you.


...it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven. --William Shakespeare

Nature abhors a vacuum...

The dullest blog in the world. (No comparisons, please.) Daat Research released Coolit v.9. In Mexico? Try Cavendish CFD. In Russia? Try Grid CFD. Learn more about ANSYS Workbench or read ANSYS Advantage magazine. ANSYS announced a new immersed boundary capability. The folks at Moceon claim to have made the first all-hex mesh with 52 million cells for a Formula-1 car using their cheetahSTC technology.

Odes to cured pork: Bacon Haikus. Taitech is developing the Dragon Grid software. Donald Hawken has some grid pictures on his site. The Ocean Modeling Group at Rutgers develops a lot of software including gridpak for orthogonal structured grids. Why shouldn't engineers learn to program in C? Five places to see things blown up real good.

The bacon explosion just sounds delicious. (I mean it sounds like it would taste delicious. I'm sure it just sounds like sizzling meat.) The official web site of marketing guru David Meerman Scott. Cartoon Modern is Amid Amidi's blog about animation in the 50s. Find out what your friends (and enemies) are up to on the interwebs using Spokeo. The official blog of Duarte Design. Interesting speakers often visit Google, now they can visit you too on YouTube's Talks@Google channel.

Will there be bacon in the future? Yes! Panda's Cloud Antivirus is free and uses the cloud for its work so your computer hardly knows it's running. Protovis is a visualization toolkit for JavaScript using SVG. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon have developed a really fast, building block approach to fluid dynamics called Modular Bases.

Ever wonder what a molecule looks like up close? Do not read this. CFD for aircraft. CGAL is a computational geometry algorithm library. Can't remember exactly what Followerlap does with Twitter accounts. Hopefully, none of your pictures have been posted to Awkward Family Photos.

Get your next super computer from PSSC Labs. The folks at Social Media Today claim to be the best thinkers on social media. From their Best Practices for Corporate Twittering, "Only 20% or so of your tweets should be related to your company or include a marketing or ‘advertising’ message." With a name like HootSuite, can they really still claim to be the professional Twitter client? The Antikythera mechanism and other unexplained artifacts.

The State Fair of Texas brings us fried butter. Either Stuff White People Like is totally wrong or I am not white because I do not like any of their recent topics (camping, Where The Wild Things Are, Vespa Scooters, Bob Marley, hating people who wear Ed Hardy, Mad Men, moleskin notebooks, and funny tattoos). However, I will give SWPL props for turning me on to doga.

...but we should avoid the temptation to fill the voids with crap.

Truth is like a football...

Teh interwebs was made for stuff like this: a collection of dice. Proof that it doesn't matter how you say it: the preamble to the Constitution done with license plates. Head cheese and other delicacies. Get your Orange on (no, not burnt orange). Cool pictures of airplanes in flight.

Stone Brewing: visit the site, read the blog, drink the beer.

Here's a blast of related product marketing blogs and sites: ProductMarketing.com, Launch Clinic, Buyer Persona, Tuned In (retired), and Web Ink Now. Get on the squirrel bandwagon with the Squirrelizer. Entrepreneur.com offers tips to make you Web Smart. Sign of the apocalypse #38: there's a Twitter conference.

This video shows how to use CFDesign for design (hence the name). SmartFish is an airplane (go figure). CADspan is software from creating 3D printable files from CAD data. You may have to read this a couple times to believe it. The folks at Winkers customize jeans so they wink while you walk. The folks at Gum Alert review Bacon Gumballs.

KFC has introduced the Double Down, a sandwich without bread. (I thought this whole sandwich thing was a solved problem.) It's very fitting that the Humanure Handbook is in the downloads folder. Volcanoes are awesome when seen from space, but be careful while you're looking so one of these lightning jets doesn't shoot up and hit you in the eye.

Usually there's nothing better than monkey actors, but the mouth animations just ain't right. Lancelot Link didn't need no CGI. Why are the number of immaculate innings (3 strike outs on 9 pitches) ballooning this decade? (Not to be confused with 3 pitch innings.) Go the state fair and try some chicken fried bacon and other fried fare.

Super Mario Bros. for the Wii. Hirsute t-shirts. Visualization Library is a C++ middleware for high-performance 2D and 3D graphics applications based on the industry standard OpenGL 2.1, designed to develop portable applications for the Windows, Linux and Mac OS X operating systems. They want to demolish the Langley Full Scale Wind Tunnel.

See some of the world's largest foods. (Bigger is better, right?) My favorite is the 288 meter long stuffed cabbage, although I'm certain it's not a good as my grandmother's. Ever wonder how a sewing machine works? Sorry I missed Go Topless Day on 23 August. Odd stuff abounds on the Bits & Pieces blog. The Math Book, 250 milestones in the history of mathematics.

...you can kick it around all day, but in the end it's still round and full. -- Mark Twain