Jason Calacanis twittered about a really neat panoramic display of the cockpit of an A380.

Apparently, Pixar is going to be remastering Toy Story and Toy Story 2 in Disney Digital 3D to prepare for the release of Toy Story 3. I forsee a few extra trips to my parents’ over the next couple of years…

Laura points at this rather-painful article about how the education system today is doing everything it can to stomp out the development of creativity and genius.

It reminded me strongly of the Advanced Math teacher at Classical who marked most of my answers on the polar coordinates homework wrong, because I had read a couple of sections ahead in the book and seen that you could write, for example, a 315° angle as a -45° one. But that wasn’t the answer he was looking for, so even though it was perfectly correct, I lost credit.

(Of course, this was the same teacher who gave me the Martin Gardner math puzzle book he saw me reading over and over, so he wasn’t all bad…)

We just watched the Season 2 premiere of Torchwood on BBC America, guest-starring James Marsters.

Oh, my. Marsters has still got it. :-)

What do you get when you cross “My favorite books” on Facebook with the average SAT scores at American Universities?

Booksthatmakeyoudumb :-)

Top book, surprisingly enough, is Lolita: Harry Potter is squarely in the middle of the pack, with a fairly low Marge Inovera.

Glenn Greenwald reminds us of Woodrow Wilson’s opinion on the proper function of the U.S. Congress.

It is the proper duty of a representative body to look diligently into every affair of government and to talk much about what it sees. It is meant to be the eyes and the voice, and to embody the wisdom and will of its constituents. . . .

Unless Congress have and use every means of acquainting itself with the acts and the disposition of the administrative agents of the government, the country must be helpless to learn how it is being served; and unless Congress both scrutinize these things and sift them by every form of discussion, the country must remain in embarrassing, crippling ignorance of the very affairs which it is most important that it should understand and direct. The informing function of Congress should be preferred even to its legislative function.

The AP reports that the Eyak language became extinct on Monday when the last fluent speaker, Chief Marie Smith Jones, died in her sleep. A linguist at UAK Fairbanks had collaborated with her for years in an attempt to preserve the language, but it’s not the same as having a native speaker around…

I consider it a major blow to my geek cred that I never memorized Tom Lehrer’s “The Elements”. Oh, well. At least I have this Flash animation to console me…

So, as mentioned earlier, I picked up Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog. Unfortunately, I haven’t gotten to it yet, because I’m too busy with Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series. It’s Horatio Hornblower/Jack Aubrey with dragons, basically. Highly recommended.

How did I miss this interview in Time a couple of years back starring two of my favorite writers?

NG: I always loved, most of all with doing comics, the fact that I knew I was in the gutter. I kind of miss that, even these days, whenever people come up and inform me, oh, you do graphic novels. No. I wrote comic books, for heaven’s sake. They’re creepy and I was down in the gutter and you despised me. ‘No, no, we love you! We want to give you awards! You write graphic novels!’ We like it here in the gutter!