Online dissertation

My dissertation is now an online book in the Internet Archive, thanks to the George A. Smathers Libraries UF Retrospective Dissertation Scanning Project at the University of Florida.

My thanks to Cathleen L. Martyniak, a preservation librarian there, for her help with this.

Diversifying the Supreme Court

In today's Washington Post, an article by Robert Barnes discusses the lack of diversity on the U.S. Supreme Court. Although race, ethnicity, and sex are the normal measures of diversity, the article points out some other important aspects: the current members are all from private universities, eight went to Harvard or Yale for law school, and all were appellate judges.

The future seems to be a court filled with justices who look very different from each other but all attended the same schools and had the same experience.

UPDATE: Sonia Sotomayor, who was just nominated, follows the same pattern, for she went to Princeton as an undergraduate, then attended Yale Law School, and served as appellate judge in New York.

Ping Pong invention

Aaron Scott, a Georgia Tech mechanical engineering graduate, invented a mechanism to pitch ping-pong balls. He and some classmates created a computer model, and then he built and tested a prototype. See the YouTube video. (Thanks to the final edition of Tech Topics for the pointer.)

A Ferrari for the dining room

From the British car show called Top Gear, an interview with a telecommunications engineer who spent 22,000 hrs building a functional Ferrari 312 at 1/4 scale.

Online lectures

Stephanie sent me a link to Academic Earth, which has online lectures on a variety of lectures, including entire courses on Game Theory (under Economics).