Maybe just better run. Mark Thoma at <I>Economist's View</I> has some thoughts. So do his readers.

Over at <I>Popular Science</I>, there's a post about a gargantuan "cruise blimp" that just seems too cool to ever get built. Check out the illustration of the observation deck&mdash;it's like an irony-free <A HREF="http://www.jamesgoodmangallery.com/mccall/pages/exhibframez.html">Bruce McCall</A> illo, which is kind of disorienting.

<i>JA captured the image: I watch as Michael Bishop works with a dirty pot. Robert Baird sits in the hotspot. Lukas Lipinski monitors the session.</i>

Hours of mindless fun!

The BTP posits that it's possible to take a solid sphere, cut it into pieces, rearrange the pieces using nothing more than rotation and translation, and then re-assemble them into two identical copies of the original sphere. "In other words," <I>www.kiro5hin.org</I&gt; explains, "you've doubled the volume of the original sphere."

Teaching Buddhist precepts with a cartoon kitty. Probably won't cause riots.

Turns out, it might reinforce a bad call rather than correct one. What works better? Maybe the pause button.

Although 1905 is remembered as Einstein's <I>annus mirabilis</I>, there were other scientists doing good work then, too. Tony Rothman gives a few of them a shout-out.

Glad to learn these are myths. I've always wondered if my year in Peru was wasted just because I could never determine if the water swirled in the wrong direction in my basin. I still can't tell you which way it flows when I flush.