now reading: R.K. Narayan, Malgudi Days

Interesting New Yorker article about.. elevators (supplementary video). It strikes a great balance by weaving a true story with a fascinating inside look at the industry. According to the author, the door-close button in any modern elevator has no effect, which took me a while to accept as truth. I'm surprised, however, that some people think crosswalk buttons have no effect as well. Not only does it make the light change faster, the walk signal won't even come on at most intersections unless you press the button. Is that different outside of California?

Another long but worthwhile read - NY Times article on cellphones spreading in the Third World. They also published a nice complementary article in January - The Afterlife of Cellphones.

The world is running out of helium!? I'm no expert, but isn't running out of an element kind of a big deal?

Complex results from small amounts of data:
Super Mario in 14kB of Javascript
20-second clarinet solo in 1KB
Complex patterns that come out of Conway's Game of Life
The Demoscene - minute-plus animations (some with soundtracks!) generated with 64KB or less
Some demos are as small as 256 bytes

This post was inspired by this month's Seed, which has an interview with fractal pioneer Benoît Mandelbrot. I thought fractals were only good for generating pretty pictures until I heard a lecture about the coastline paradox. It seems only fitting that the deeper one digs into the field of fractals, the more interesting it gets. And if not from the pretty pictures, the names alone would be enough to draw anyone in. Who can resist terms like Cantor Dust, Sierpiński Carpet, and Menger Sponge? Especially when it's a Level 3 Menger Sponge!