If you haven't heard of Project Gutenberg, I sugest you check it out. It's a huge resource of both free and public domain books, digitized for your electronic consumption. It's also a great resource for when you want to know how many times Shakespeare uses the word 'tup' in Othello, for instance. Just search over the whole text.

Anyway, it seems that in order to speed the digitizing of these books, someone scans all the pages and uploads them. The pages are then OCRed, but they still need to be checked. This is where the Distributed Proofreading system comes in. You go and get a page and check it for errors. Once all the pages are checked, it becomes an official e-book. Hooray!

I'm working on an online GRE prep course. It gives a question, then provides feedback. I got a tough one right, and here's what it said to me: "Wow! The light of a thousand suns is no brighter than you." Kind of effusive, if you ask me. Anyway, the prep is free to UC Berkeley people (and maybe others). Check it out.

My life is full of boxes. Some of the boxes contain memories. Mostly, they contain old phone bills and other junk.

How fast can you clickred? My best time in two tries is 74 seconds. It is supposed to be a demonstration that twitch gamers are better at tracking multiple objects than non-gamers.

I don't remember if I ever posted this, so here you go: Penny Arcade remixed by japanese school children.

You're in Cuba and you want to get to the US. How would you do it? These folks took a taxi cab.

Pretty Pictures make me happy.