Hulleye Comes By!

Wired News has a series starting on internet crime. The first piece they have up covers the story of a cybercrook who specialized in credit card fraud. Caught in a sting operation in November of 2002, the man who identified himself as ‘El Mariachi’ on message boards would lead a double life for the next two years working for the FBI. As he reported on credit card scammers, dodged his former associates, and stopped criminals from defrauding the 2004 presidential campaign, he also tried to keep his life together. A fascinating tale that looks at the face of modern crime, and crime-stopping techniques. via /.

Try envisioning the tenth dimension from this fascinating flash presentation that explains everything from the first to the tenth dimension. My head started to tingle after the fifth. It’s meant to illustrate Rob Bryanton’s book Imagining the 10th Dimension, which largely concerns itself with superstring theory. However, the easy confidence Brytanton uses to explain all possible dimensions is just a completely joy. I’m particularly delighted that I understood every single concept he mentioned and I’m sure most of you can as well.

Today, British autistic savant Daniel Tammet is 10,220 days, or 245,280 hours old (that’s 28 years for you non-savants out there). He is blessed/cursed with the kind of savantism made famous by Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man (formerly known as “idiot” savantism), but Daniel manages to sustain relatively normal social interaction with others. (He credits growing up in a family of nine children, and thus being forced to socialize, for his normalcy relative to other savants, of which there are only about 50 known in the world.)

A lot of savants can do things that no normal person can do, like tell you what day of the week August 18, 1876 was without consulting an almanac, in about five seconds (it was a Friday), multiply 27 to the power of four in his head (531,441) or memorize and recite long strings of numbers with ease. But there are a few things he can do that even most savants cannot. For instance, he once learned functional Icelandic in a week, and recited pi to several thousand places from memory (without errors — it took more than five hours).

So how does he do it? As a recent profile of Daniel on 60 Minutes revealed, the answer may shed light on the abilities of all savants: he is a synesthetic. That is to say, he associates numbers with colors, just as composer Franz Liszt claimed to have associated music with color. (Hip-hop artist Pharrell Williams also claims to have synesthesia.)

Interesting note: one man who has done some crucial research in this area is Oxford professor of developmental psychopathology Simon Baron-Cohen, cousin of Borat star Sascha Baron-Cohen.

Also seems like Daniel has a blog.
via mental floss

Wordy is very addicting once you get the hang of it! This game is a cross between Boggle and Tetris, or maybe a wordfind puzzle. As the letters drop, click on adjacent letters to spell a word. You can go in any and all directions, and even change direction, as long as the letters are next to each other. Then click again on the last letter. If that word (of at least three letters) is in their dictionary, the tiles will disappear. But you have to hurry!

this is why people think americans are stupid. it’s most likely been edited to only show the stupid ones but man it is shockingly scary.

i can’t wait for this to be released. by the way, it’s been almost two months and i still haven’t been able to find a wii anywhere in this damn city. every time i go to a store, they get sold out the day before. it’s blood frustrating. eventually i’ll get my hands on one. don’t you worry. like i said, wii all love cricket.