My brother and I were coming back from lunch when we passed a brand new Mini dealership. We got even more excited when we saw a blue Cooper turning into the lot. So of course we had to go in and look around. The Coopers look so nice in person. The interior is a little small, but not uncomfortable. Lots of neat little details too, like the toggle switches in the center console. The rear seats were just tiny though. I feel sorry for anyone who has to sit back there. We didn\’t get to test drive one though.

The Guide to Appearances of Mathematics on the Simpsons. I never realized math appeared so much.

Nelson:  Hey, look at what Skinner makes – $25,000 a year!
Bart:  [using calculator] Let’s see.  He’s 40 years old, times 25 grand … whoa, he’s a millionaire!
Skinner:  I wasn’t a principal when I was one!
Nelson:  Plus, in the summer, he paints houses!
Milhouse:  He’s a billionaire!
Skinner:  If I were a billionaire, why would I be living with my mother?

[ From Slashdot ]

French Intellectuals to be Deployed in Afghanistan to Convince Taliban of Non-Existence of God

Elements from the feared Jean-Paul Sartre Brigade, or ’Black Berets’, will be parachuted into the combat zones to spread doubt, despondency and existential anomie among the enemy. Hardened by numerous intellectual battles fought during their long occupation of Paris’s Left Bank, their first action will be to establish a number of sidewalk cafes at strategic points near the front lines.

Nice to see the French doing their part to fight terrorism.

How come I\’ve never heard of the roaming gnome prank before? It sounds soooo cool. An object is stolen and sent to faraway places, and the owner receives postcards and photos. I just have to do this prank now.
[ From Girlhacker\’s Random Log ]

Real life Onion headlines: Man Saws Down Tree, Kills Wife

At first I thought the story would be something like \”After sawing down an overgrown tree in his backyard, area resident John Smith drank a beer and then used a shotgun to kill his wife.\” But no, it was all an accident. Yeah, \”accident.\”

I\’m adding the Muji CD Player to my shopping list. It\’s a neat wall mounted CD player with a built-in speaker and a power cord which doubles as the on/off switch. Very minimalist.

The New Yorker has a great article about fashion in Japan.

In Japan, however, all the skill goes into engineering the scarcity: designers produce only limited editions of T-shirts or jackets, items of the sort that can be easily mass-produced. This means that shopping in Tokyo feels a little like a bizarre parody of grocery shopping in Soviet Russia: you might want to buy a bunch of bananas, but the only thing for sale is pickled cabbage. At the Bathing Ape store just off Takeshita Street, where T-shirts are displayed like prints in an art gallery, sandwiched between sheets of clear plastic, half the display cases are empty, since the company might produce only five hundred of any particular T-shirt design…

Pretty crazy stuff. I wanna visit Tokyo just to see what it\’s like.
[ From Boing Boing ]

I was on the freeway yesterday and I passed a strange sight. A man and a woman were standing on the side of the freeway with several pieces of luggage stacked between them. So I thought, are they hitchhiking? Lucky for them traffic was jammed, but still. Who the hell hitchhikes on a freeway? Must\’ve been foreigners.

E.T. will be rereleased Friday with several digital changes to it. Slate offers a few recommendations to Spielberg\’s other movies. Heh heh.

JP Brown\’s Serious LEGO CubeSolver. A serious Lego construct that solves Rubik\’s cubes. Seriously. It\’s all the more impressive cause he also wrote color recognition software for the quickcam.

He also has a contruct that solves the Towers of Hanoi problem. And there\’s a lot more serious Lego inventions on the main page. Man, now I want to get a set of Mindstorms to play around with.