Ten Simple Rules for Graduate Students in the Evil Sciences

Found via Neil Gaiman's blog.

You can read the post for yourself, but here are the rules in point form:

1. Have a passion for Evil
2. Select the right evil mentor, project, and laboratory
3. Independent, stubborn thinking is the true stock trait of an evil scientist
4. Balance your evil life
5. Think ahead and develop your evil career early
6. Always reevaluate your work for its evilness
7. Find flaws in your research before the good guys show up
8. Share your evil genius with the world
9. Kill anyone who points out flaws in your research
10. Demonstrate your readiness for graduation by destroying your mentor with your work

A very funny read. Be sure to check out the earlier entries in his blog.

Assorted stories

Woman claims she affects electrical devices - However, her claim has yet to withstand an empirical test of her abilities. Termed "sliders", she is one of many people who claim that their presence causes electrical devices to die, flicker, or otherwise go wonky. Found on Improbable Research.

Early Daylight Savings Time means no savings at all - With the new daylight savings time almost upon us we turn to this recently-released study, found via Slashdot, which concludes that Daylight Savings Time in general results in greater energy use and greater cost to consumers.

MagLev mouse for better haptics - Haptics, the ability to transmit touch information, is an emerging field, and  one research team may have come up with an easier way to do it. They use a bowl lined with electromagnets and a mouse containing a magnet and an LED. As one moves the mouse over the bowl, it's position is determined using the LED, and in response the magnetic field is subtly changed to emulate changes in resistance to the mouse's motion as if it were moving over the surface. The magnets are strong enough to make a surface feel solid, resisting with as much as 30 newtons of force, and do so with six degrees of freedom. They are currently working on commercializing the technology.

Nine Inch Nails sidesteps recording label to sell new album online - Trent Raznor continues his experiment with selling product online by offering the first nine of 36 songs from his latest CD online for free. For $5 you can download the entire CD, along with "extras", or you can get the 2-disc set with plenty of extras for $10. The result: he sold out of the $300 Limited Edition set which includes a copy of the music on vinyl version in a signed and numbered package with a few days of release, netting him an estimated $750,000.