Fav5

My pick of the week's top 5 items of interest:

1. According to a RAND study, the US is still tops in science and technology. According to the report:
   

   The United States accounts for 40 percent of the total world's spending on scientific research and development, employs 70 percent of the world's Nobel Prize winners and is home to three-quarters of the world's top 40 universities.
   

   How long will we remain #1? Not very if we continue to make it difficult for foreigners to study here. Americans are just not majoring in technical fields like computer science like they used to.
   
   
2. Someone has actually made a play about the publicly released AOL search queries from 2006. The play focuses on User 927, one of the "anonymous" users whose queries ranged from innocuous to downright deviant. hmmm.... I think I'll skip this one.
   


3. Just this week, an Illinois public official dropped his requests to force MySpace to unveil the creators of several "defamatory" profiles that spoofed his identity. Stinks having web-savy enemies.
   


4. Matt Cutts confirmed that the file extension of your web pages is very important to Google. The Googlebot will not crawl pages with extensions for binary content like .exe, .dll, .tar, etc. (at least not yet). Matt gives an interesting example: a URL ending with "/web2.0" will be rejected by Googlebot, but "/web2.0/" will be accepted.
   


5. Just for fun: try the Bird Flocking Behavior Simulator. The Java applet models the flocking behavior of birds (blue and green flocks). You can place obstacles in their path (left click), give them food (right click), and add predators (red birds which eat the blue and green birds). I had a little fun trapping several of them inside a barrier. (Yes, I do have better things to do with my time. )