Sometimes, Kickstarter Projects Don’t Make It

In general, no one likes to fail or even hear about failures.  I found this story, though about failure, to be quite encouraging.  They were trying to raise $20k, but only got $3k worth of pledges; thus the failure.  Someone who had seen them on the site invested $200k; and thus the encouragement.  I guess it's a sign that even failures can be a good thing -- in their case giving them a 10-fold increase in desired investment.

Patented Gestures

Ok, it's bad enough that Apple has a patent on "slide to unlock"... I am actually offended that Lucent filed a patent in 1998 (awarded in 2001) for VR-based interface.  VPL Research had already built goggle/glove systems 13 years before Lucent filed that patent.  Hell, I had already played Dactyl Nightmare (image right) before that patent was filed.  In fact, take a look here and see what prior art you find.

Slashdot: National Academies Release Over 4,000 Free Science Books

I'm always a big fan of huge tomes of learning being released to the public. Similar to the MIT OpenCourseware, the National Academies have released lots of PDF books to the public for free.  For example, maybe you'd like a free copy of "The Rise of Games and High Performance Computing for Modeling and Simulation"?