NPR has a great audio segment on the randomness of the coin toss. They also interview statistician Persi Diaconis who asked Harvard University engineers to build him a mechanical coin flipper (seen below) that can always make the perfect coin flip. It appears that the randomness in a coin toss is introduced by sloppy humans.

They also bring up the issue of American Football games that are started with a coin flip. Listen to the segment in Real or Windows Media formats.

Sun Microsystems has developed a ‘data center in a box’ concept that may just alter the business model of computing. Here’s Sun’s Project Blackbox site.

The system is intended for computing projects that need to come to market or to scale up quickly. The datacenter looks like a simple cargo container that can be deployed anywhere. You can take a video tour to see the box inside and out using the box in Sun’s parking lot.

From the NYTimes article:

The expandable computer system, called Project Blackbox, is based on a standard 20-foot shipping container and can be deployed virtually anywhere there is electricity, chilled water and an Internet connection.

The system is planned for commercial availability in the second half of 2007, with prices beginning around $500,000.

medGadget has an interesting article about ?a teen with epiliepsy and a unique experiment.

“A team of physicians and graduate engineering students on Monday helped a 14 year old boy suffering from epilepsy to become the first teenager to play a game with his mind.”

Read the article

According to Goog’s blog post the other day, they’ve enhanced their mobile site with tutorials and instructions on how to use their services from your mobile device. Services include Maps, Search, GMail and News.

 

There’s a new search engine on the scene: Ms.Dewey.

That’s her to the left. Ms. Dewey is a new, interactive, Flash based search engine. To assist you in your search, the website is hosted by smoking hot model/actress/vocalist, Janina Gavankar.

For a fun time, try entering these queries:

“fastest bittorrent client”
“Who are you?” (enter this several times for different results)
“how to fight a ninja”
“world of warcraft”
“Janina Gavankar“