This just in...

It's one of those weeks where I'm in one of those moods, and certain things seem to jump to the foreground.

You know how that is.

Without further ado...

• You may have been following the story from the University of Chicago (my alma mater), about the mysterious package received by the Admissions Office, addressed to Henry Walton Jones, Jr., who you of course know better as Indiana Jones.

  Little did we know what we were looking at. When our student mail worker snapped out of his finals-tired haze and realized who Dr. Jones was, we were sort of in luck: this package wasn’t meant for a random professor in the Stat department.

  Well, it turns out that it's a combination of art, and the above-and-beyond services of the United States Postal Service.

  Which doesn't make the story any less wonderful.

• Back in the classroom, I think there can be no dispute that one of the best ways to increase enrollment in Computer Science would be if there were more classes that led to launching rockets, or to scouting talent for the Forty Niners.

  The specification is for a (fake) launch interceptor system that takes a collection of parameters and a collection of points from a radar, applies a bunch of rules, and outputs a launch / no-launch decision for a missile interceptor.

  ...

  Since the students did an awesome job getting all of this working, we spent the last day of classes launching rockets in a field at the edge of campus; pictures follow.

• And lastly, lest you think that the Internet is worthless, and you can never find anything of value on it, may I present Tuning '77

  "Tuning '77" - a seamless audio supercut of an entire year of the Grateful Dead tuning their instruments, live on stage. Chronologically sequenced, this remix incorporates every publicly available recording from 1977, examining the divide between audience expectation and performance anxiety.

You're only on this earth for a short while, so don't forget to put on some music, read a good book or watch a good movie, play some games, and tell those you love that you love them.