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Thank you to Mary Robinette Kowal and Yes, You're A Racist who led me to the video.

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I am briefly breaking my vowed silence to share something too cool not to tell you about.

Someone actually built a Babbage difference engine---and it works! (For those who don't know, that's one of the first computers designed by the mathematician Charles Babbage in the mid 19th century. A working prototype was never completed in his lifetime.)

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This video hits many of my favorite subjects: math, history, and pretty graphs. In a fun, approachable manner, taking only four minutes, Hans Rosling describes what has happened to 200 countries over the course of 200 years using 120,000 numbers, and it all makes perfect sense. It's great!

Thank you Chad Orzel for the link.

In February 1976, our gym teacher asked for volunteers to learn a series of dance routines for a performance. I had missed the announcement, but a couple of my friends dragged me along. “It’ll be fun,” they had said.

We were a motley assortment of girls, aged 13 to 16, and only a handful of us had any real dancing experience. (I was not one of them ( Read more... )

Check it out: someone made a replica of a 2000 year old computer, out of Legos!  Be sure to watch the video which explains how totally cool this really is.

Thanks to Teresa Nielsen Hayden for the link.

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