This is a pretty incredible simulation and it's the best thing I've seen all day.

A flight through the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, the most distant visible-light view of the universe. The redshifts of 5,333 galaxies were converted to distances to assemble a 3-D model of the data. This scientific visualization flies through the data to showcase its true 3-D nature.

I'm biased, but I love discussions of the nature of mathematics, especially when they're targeted at mathematical novices. Algebra was one of the areas of math that I spent quite a lot of time on in college, and it holds my interest like no other. Keith Devlin has a very interesting analysis of what algebra actually is:

The important thing to realize is that doing algebra is a way of thinking and that it is a way of thinking that is different from arithmetical thinking. Those formulas and equations, involving all those x’s and y’s, are merely a way to represent that thinking on paper. They no more are algebra than a page of musical notation is music. It is possible to do algebra without symbols, just as you can play and instrument without being ably to read music.

It's this kind of insight that is typically not present in most mathematical courses, and I feel it's a huge part of why so many people have significant math anxiety. They don't really know what they're doing, and more importantly, they don't know why they're doing it. Removing the big picture means that the entire context of math is gone, and so each new chapter in the mathematics text book becomes disconnected from every other.

There are a hard-core group of conspiracy theorists who continue to insist that William Shakespeare was somehow not the actual author of the plays and poems that are attributed to him. In an attempt to stop the madness, Tom Reedy and David Kathman have created the most extensive list of evidence I've seen. Here's the conclusion, but reading the actual list of evidence is fascinating:

How do we know that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare? We know because the historical record tells us so, strongly and unequivocally. The historical evidence demonstrates that one and the same man, William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, was William Shakespeare the player, William Shakespeare the Globe-sharer, and William Shakespeare the author of the plays and poems that bear his name -- and no person of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras ever doubted the attribution. No Elizabethan ever suggested that Shakespeare's plays and poems were written by someone else, or that Shakespeare the player was not Shakespeare the author, or that Shakespeare the Globe-sharer was not Shakespeare of Stratford. No contemporary of Shakespeare's ever suggested that the name used by the player, the Globe-sharer, or the author was a pseudonym; and none of the major alternative candidates -- not Francis Bacon, not the Earl of Oxford, not Christopher Marlowe -- had any connection with Shakespeare's acting company or with his friends and fellow actors.

Coming on the heels of the various revelations about the NSA's activities, this article in MIT News is fascinating reading:

When Médard, Duffy and their students used these alternate measures of entropy, they found that slight deviations from perfect uniformity in source files, which seemed trivial in the light of Shannon entropy, suddenly loomed much larger. The upshot is that a computer turned loose to simply guess correlations between the encrypted and unencrypted versions of a file would make headway much faster than previously expected.

The point here is that encryption is still secure. It's just not *as* secure as we might have assumed.

Are you into math? Want to show off your skills? Then Project Euler is for you:

Project Euler is a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve. Although mathematics will help you arrive at elegant and efficient methods, the use of a computer and programming skills will be required to solve most problems.The motivation for starting Project Euler, and its continuation, is to provide a platform for the inquiring mind to delve into unfamiliar areas and learn new concepts in a fun and recreational context.

Iodine deficiency today is the leading cause of preventable mental retardation in the world. It’s estimated that nearly one-third of the world’s population has a diet with too little iodine in it, and the problem isn’t limited to developing countries—perhaps one-fifth of those cases are in Europe (pdf), where iodized salt is still not the norm...

The economists found that in the lowest-iodine areas—the bottom quarter of the study population—the introduction of iodized salt had stark effects. Men from these regions born in 1924 or later were significantly more likely to get into the Air Force and had an average IQ that was 15 points higher than their predecessors.