Drew's View

Letters to Obama

There must be countless things that are hard about being the President of the United States, but here is one I had not thought of before: reading mail from ordinary citizens.

Tens of thousands of letters, e-mail messages and faxes arrive at the White House every day. A few hundred are culled and end up each weekday afternoon on a round wooden table in the office of Mr. Kelleher, the director of the White House Office of Correspondence.

He chooses 10 letters, which are slipped into a purple folder and put in the daily briefing book that is delivered to President Obama at the White House residence. Designed to offer a sampling of what Americans are thinking, the letters are read by the president, and he sometimes answers them by hand, in black ink on azure paper.

“We pick messages that are compelling, things people say that, when you read it, you get a chill,” said Mr. Kelleher, 47. “I send him letters that are uncomfortable messages.”

Article: New York Times: Picking Letters, 10 a Day, That Reach Obama
Some of the Letters: New York Times documents: Writing to the President

A Magazine With a Puzzle Buried Inside

I've always been fascinated with complex and secret puzzles (see this earlier post), although I do not always have the patience to finish them. Watching the TV series LOST unfold has been a great pleasure. J.J. Abrams, one of the creators of LOST and Fringe, took over as guest editor of WIRED Magazine's May 2009 print issue. He filled the magazine with an intricate and partially hidden puzzle. One reader has it cracked:

Steven Bevacqua was flipping through the May issue of Wired magazine when he thought he started seeing secret messages. So he spent the next several days following the hidden clues he believed he’d found, using Morse code, alternative computer keyboard layouts and even electrician’s wiring codes to solve the covert brainteasers. Finally he was directed to a hidden Web site, from which he sent an e-mail message to a secret account. A short while later he learned that he was the first Wired reader to solve an extensive hidden puzzle embedded throughout the magazine.

Article: New York Times: A Magazine With a Puzzle Buried Inside

The New and Improved Prius

I've been reading a lot about the new Prius coming out this spring. The car has been re-designed in and out, has a new more powerful and more efficient engine, is even quieter than previous models, and has solar panels on the roof.

Scott Burgess writes for The Detroit News and wanted to hate the new Prius. He came away convinced:

"...With so many improvements, even at its worst, when it arrives later this spring, it's one of the best cars out there."

Article: The Detroit News: Toyota's Revamped Prius Hybrid Gains Higher Mileage, Better Interior

Do we have too many financiers?

Career advice from President Obama, speaking at Georgetown University last week:

“One of the changes that I would like to see — and I’m going to be talking about in this in weeks to come — is seeing our best and our brightest commit themselves to making things — engineers, scientists, innovators. For so long, we have placed at the top of our pinnacle folks who can manipulate numbers and engage in complex financial calculations. And — and that’s good. We need some of that. But you know what we can really use is some more scientists and some more engineers who are building and making things that we can export to other countries.”

Article: Wall Street Journal: Career Advice from Obama and Bernanke

Mysteries of Science

New Scientist has published a list of 13 things that do not make sense. They are all mysteries of science like The Pioneer Effect:

THIS is a tale of two spacecraft. Pioneer 10 was launched in 1972; Pioneer 11 a year later. By now both craft should be drifting off into deep space with no one watching. However, their trajectories have proved far too fascinating to ignore.

That's because something has been pulling - or pushing - on them, causing them to speed up. The resulting acceleration is tiny, less than a nanometre per second per second. That's equivalent to just one ten-billionth of the gravity at Earth's surface, but it is enough to have shifted Pioneer 10 some 400,000 kilometres off track. NASA lost touch with Pioneer 11 in 1995, but up to that point it was experiencing exactly the same deviation as its sister probe. So what is causing it?

It could mean we don't fully understand the laws of Physics.

Other favorites on the list are The Kuiper Cliff and The Wow Signal.

Article: New Scientist: 13 Things That Do Not Make Sense