Great technology is designed to make your life easier…… and aid creative expression. The iPad might just do that. Apps like Brushes, Sketchbook Pro, and ArtStudio can help you draw. Here are some great examples……

Insect eggs. “When you find them, you might not know what you are seeing at first. The forms are unusual and embellished with ornaments and apparatuses. Some eggs breathe through long tubes that they extend up through water. Others dangle from silky stalks. Still others drift in the wind or ride on the backs of flies. They are as colorful as stones, shaded in turquoises, slates, and ambers. Spines are common, as are spots, helices, and stripes. More than biology, their designs suggest the work of an artist left to obsess among tiny forms. They are natural selection’s trillion masterpieces; inside each is an animal waiting for some cue to break free.” Rob Dunn in the National Geographic Magazine. The amazing photos are by Martin Oeggerli.

Here is what to get me for my birthday…..or just because: Star Wars™ Sandwich Cutters

“Rain flattened the impatiens edging corporate lawn, and Silicon Valley shimmered. The world was bountiful, the markets buoyant. Reflecting pools brimmed to overflowing, and already the tawny hills looked greener. Like money, the rain came in a rush, enveloping the Bay, delighting forecasters, exceeding expectations, charging the air.” This is how Allegra Goodman’s novel, The Cookbook Collector, begins. The book is about how we cope instead of going for what we want, about love, and the greed and glory of the exploits in the Silicon Valley at the end of the 1990s. A highly recommended read.

The Cookbook Collector

Peggy Orenstein writes about her positive experiences tweeting. You can find her on Twitter @peggyorenstein

A fun post by All Facebook showing how the Facebook “Like” button looks around the world. Das “Gefällt mir.”

Old Spice sales are up 107%. Of course, this innovative campaign worked . . . and gives us a great excuse to post a photo of  Isaiah Mustafa. And if you actually managed not to hear about the Old Spice campaign here is a link to the YouTube Channel

The top 20 countries on the Internet, by Pingdom

“Out of the top 20 countries, the five with the highest Internet penetration (not users) are: United Kingdom (82.5%), South Korea (81.1%), Germany (79.1%), Japan (78.2%), United States (76.3%).”

In this interview shortly before his death, computer scientist, Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930-2002) reflects on the state of computer science and his own experiences:

“There’s a curious story behind your “shortest path” algorithm.”

“What’s the shortest way to travel from Rotterdam to Groningen? It is the algorithm for the shortest path, which I designed in about 20 minutes. One morning I was shopping in Amsterdam with my young fiancée, and tired, we sat down on the café terrace to drink a cup of coffee and I was just thinking about whether I could do this, and I then designed the algorithm for the shortest path. As I said, it was a 20-minute invention. In fact, it was published in 1959, three years later. The publication is still quite nice. One of the reasons that it is so nice was that I designed it without pencil and paper. Without pencil and paper you are almost forced to avoid all avoidable complexities. Eventually that algorithm became, to my great amazement, one of the cornerstones of my fame. I found it in the early 1960s in a German book on management science—”Das Dijkstra’sche Verfahren” ["Dijkstra's procedure"]. Suddenly, there was a method named after me. And it jumped again recently because it is extensively used in all travel planners. If, these days, you want to go from here to there and you have a car with a GPS and a screen, it can give you the shortest way.”

Germany sure has a lot of robots. I blame Kraftwerk! (Source: IEEE Spectrum)