Links for November 12th through November 19th

Sometime between November 12th and November 19th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Official Google Blog: Finding the laws that govern us: Starting today, we're enabling people everywhere to find and read full text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts using Google Scholar. You can find these opinions by searching for cases (like Planned Parenthood v. Casey), or by topics (like desegregation) or other queries that you are interested in. For example, go to Google Scholar, click on the "Legal opinions and journals" radio button, and try the query separate but equal. Your search results will include links to cases familiar to many of us in the U.S. such as Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education, which explore the acceptablity of "separate but equal" facilities for citizens at two different points in the history of the U.S. But your results will also include opinions from cases that you might be less familiar with, but which have played an important role.
• The History of the Internet in a Nutshell: If you’re reading this article, it’s likely that you spend a fair amount of time online. However, considering how much of an influence the Internet has in our daily lives, how many of us actually know the story of how it got its start? Here’s a brief history of the Internet, including important dates, people, projects, sites, and other information that should give you at least a partial picture of what this thing we call the Internet really is, and where it came from.
• It’s true: all the taken men are best: Women: do you have a man? If you do, better beware. Chances are that some lone female has her eye on him. A new study provides evidence for what many have long suspected: that single women are much keener on pursuing a man who's already taken than a singleton. "The single women really, really liked the guy when he was taken," says Melissa Burkley of Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, who conducted the "mate-poaching" study with her colleague Jessica Parker.
• Meep! Nonsense Word Gets Students in Hot Water: "Bob Thompson, a pop culture professor at Syracuse University, said he first heard students meep about a year ago during a class screening of a television show. 'Something happened and one of them said 'Meep,'' he said. 'And then they all started doing it.' The meeps, he said, came from all of the students in the class in rapid-fire succession. When he asked them what that meant, they said it didn't really mean anything. 'It's almost like they look at you like it's a silly question,' he said. But meeping doesn't seem to be funny to Danvers High School Principal Thomas Murray, who threatened to suspend students caught meeping in school." Wow, dumb (the principal, not the kids). Also, lots of fun silliness and stories of teenage silliness in the Metafilter post about this article.
• Mandelbulb: The Unravelling of the Real 3D Mandelbrot Fractal: "The original Mandelbrot is an amazing object that has captured the public's imagination for 30 years with its cascading patterns and hypnotically colourful detail. It's known as a 'fractal' – a type of shape that yields (sometimes elaborate) detail forever, no matter how far you 'zoom' into it (think of the trunk of a tree sprouting branches, which in turn split off into smaller branches, which themselves yield twigs etc.). It's found by following a relatively simple math formula. But in the end, it's still only 2D and flat – there's no depth, shadows, perspective, or light sourcing. What we have featured in this article is a potential 3D version of the same fractal." I don't get the math in all of this, but there are some gorgeous pictures. A lot of them look to me like perfect sets for the home planet of Giger's Alien.