California-only, and with 300-mile range for the hybrid version, we can't drive it cross-country to take back with us.

Ostensible predictions for 2000 made a hundred years earlier in 1900, via Cowen. This list is tripping up my hoax-meter, but if it's real, it's quite enjoyable, ranging from wild underestimates (New York to London in two days!) to wild overestimates (a strange obsession with large produce) to a few that are almost but not quite right (a strange obsession with networks of pneumatic tubes) and a couple that are frighteningly spot on. On which side will today's prediction of the singularity be?

Update: Not a hoax. A reader generously sends me a pdf, which I'd post but for the extensive (but perhaps incorrect) copyright notice. The sequence is different from the web-page, but the text (including the word "suburbs") is accurate every place I've double-checked.

Early NYT iPhone review. Assuming that it's called iPhone, of course.

In today's Nature: Archeologists reconstruct from a century-old find a 2100-year-old version of Posidonius' astronomical calculator, described by Cicero as accurately reproducing the movements of the sun, moon, and planets in the sky, and thought until now to be a myth. The 37-gear mechanism is more complicated than anything Christian society devised for over 1700 years, and suggests that the ancient Greeks might have had primitive computers capable of doing arithmetic. [Also: Times UK; LA Times; Java animation]

A must-read: How to Make Wealth by Paul Graham (via VP). Many, many great insights:

I can remember believing, as a child, that if a few rich people had all the money, it left less for everyone else. Many people seem to continue to believe something like this well into adulthood. This fallacy is usually there in the background when you hear someone talking about how x percent of the population have y percent of the wealth. If you plan to start a startup, then whether you realize it or not, you're planning to disprove the Pie Fallacy.

What leads people astray here is the abstraction of money. Money is not wealth. It's just something we use to move wealth around. So although there may be, in certain specific moments (like your family, this month) a fixed amount of money available to trade with other people for things you want, there is not a fixed amount of wealth in the world. You can make more wealth.

...

Few technologies have one clear inventor. So as a rule, if you know the "inventor" of something (the telephone, the assembly line, the airplane, the light bulb, the transistor) it is because their company made money from it, and the company's PR people worked hard to spread the story. If you don't know who invented something (the automobile, the television, the computer, the jet engine, the laser), it's because other companies made all the money.

...

This is a good plan for life in general. If you have two choices, choose the harder. If you're trying to decide whether to go out running or sit home and watch TV, go running. Probably the reason this trick works so well is that when you have two choices and one is harder, the only reason you're even considering the other is laziness. You know in the back of your mind what's the right thing to do, and this trick merely forces you to acknowledge it.

...

Understanding this may help to answer an important question: why Europe grew so powerful. Was it something about the geography of Europe? Was it that Europeans are somehow racially superior? Was it their religion? The answer (or at least the proximate cause) may be that the Europeans rode on the crest of a powerful new idea: allowing those who made a lot of money to keep it.

Once you're allowed to do that, people who want to get rich can do it by generating wealth instead of stealing it. The resulting technological growth translates not only into wealth but into military power. The theory that led to the stealth plane was developed by a Soviet mathematician. But because the Soviet Union didn't have a computer industry, it remained for them a theory; they didn't have hardware capable of executing the calculations fast enough to design an actual airplane.

In that respect the Cold War teaches the same lesson as World War II and, for that matter, most wars in recent history. Don't let a ruling class of warriors and politicians squash the entrepreneurs. The same recipe that makes individuals rich makes countries powerful. Let the nerds keep their lunch money, and you rule the world.

Is there a zombie flash mob in your hometown?

I'm not sure why I had my heart set on going to MIT as a kid. Even once I was accepted and started drawing up possible course schedules, I was drawn to the idea of majoring in economics, which means that it probably wouldn't have changed my life that much, since it was economics that led me into law. I settled for the full scholarship to Brandeis and buying a now-long-gone sweatshirt with the MIT Press-logo. Anyway, Katie Newmark writes about the MIT-Caltech prank wars. Which reminds me about the spectacular Mystery Hunts students put on.

What made this hunt so hard? Puzzles like the 192-letter cryptogram, for one thing. As Jean notes, "A cipher of that length should be a snap to break. And this one wouldn't have been bad at all if I'd thought to mention that the hidden message was in Spanish. But I didn't. I also neglected to note that the pairs 'll', 'rr,' and 'ch' stood for single letters, as they do in the Spanish alphabet."

Also:

"My biggest problem was making the things hard enough. Once I wrote a clue in Minoan Linear B, a totally obscure language that was used on clay tablets in ancient Crete. To make things tougher, I didn't tell them it was Linear B and I checked out the two library books on the subject. All the teams solved it anyway! One team had a person who was actually studying Linear B. Another just happened to have a book on the subject. It was incredible."

And

I entered my first Mystery Hunt in 1983, and the first puzzle that caught my eye was this: "One of the activities listed in this month's guide is a fake. Receive a vital clue at its ersatz meeting." That sounded pretty easy, so I began paging through the guide. I had forgotten I was at MIT. With real listings such as "How to Change the Color of Lightning" and "The Universe, With Three Examples," I was completely unable to deduce that the perfectly reasonable-sounding "Parrots Around the World" was a Brad Schaefer invention. It turned out I was not alone in failing to see through this subterfuge; several bird-lovers showed up only to receive the baffling advice "Switch the answers to subclues two and seven."

Actual Hunts through History. This blogger did a scaled-down version for his birthday party that seems like it would've been more my speed. I'm enjoying reading his gaming posts.

I don't remember which old fogey I was sharing a conversation with about M.U.L.E., but this site offers a Windows download for an online version—as well as a homepage with a replica of the state-of-the-1983-art Atari-800 graphics from the opening sequence.

Perhaps the most useful page on the entire Internet: a cheat-sheet for avoiding voice-mail hell (via TPE)

by the Daily Mail on Sunday.

"Double-Tongued Word Wrester records undocumented or under-documented words from the fringes of English. It focuses upon slang, jargon, and other niche categories which include new, foreign, hybrid, archaic, obsolete, and rare words. Special attention is paid to the lending and borrowing of words between the various Englishes and other languages, even where a word is not a fully naturalized citizen in its new language."

The power of the Internet finds the cutest kittens (via PtN).