If you are not a software developer and just want to add something geeky to your resume, then you’d probably love the idea of signing up for Code Year. So just how does signing up for Code Year up your geekiness level?

Code Year participants, who are exactly 341,648 people as of this writing, are sent interactive programming lessons every Monday, which they are expected to complete within the week. So far the topics finished have are “Getting Started with Programming” and “Functions in Javascript”. Note that all of the lessons assume that you have no background in programming, so you shouldn’t be afraid that they would be too difficult for you. If anything, they might be a tad to easy for you if you already have some background in programming.

So why is it again that you should sign up for Code Year? Frankly, I don’t know. To each his own. Some might want to sign up for the fun, some to learn something new, and some because they want a taste of programming to see if they would maybe like to someday really get into programming. Whatever your reasons are (and one of mine is to gain better appreciation of what my husband does on a daily basis), you can bet that you’ll learn something new if only you give it a try.

Veteran programmer already? Then Code Year is definitely not for you, but maybe you can spread the word and have your non-programmer friends try it out.

Image via CodeYear

That’s right, while you won’t get a Stanford or MIT degree, nor even a certification for learning these free courses, you’ll still know what you learned and get to brag that you’ve somehow gotten a Stanford and/or MIT education.

According to DigitalHobo, the live lectures for the free Stanford courses will start on January 2012. Most of the free courses are in the field of Computer Science, although there’s also at least one course each under Medicine, Civil Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Complex Systems, and Entrepreneurship. The courses will be delivered in the form of lecture videos that are supplemented by assignments and stand-alone quizzes. Students get to interact and help each other learn through a Q&A forum where everyone gets a chance to ask questions and answer that of their classmates. Teaching staff will be monitoring the forums to ensure that all important questions will be answered correctly.

MIT, on the other hand, has a lot more free courses you can take via the MIT OpenCourseWare. However, not all of these courses offer lecture videos like the Stanford courses all do. This is because the material you will find on MIT OCW are simple course materials that professors decided to make publicly available, which means that the kind of available content for each course varies greatly. Course materials you will find can be in the form of lecture notes, assignments (with or without solutions), online textbooks, projects (with or without examples), exams (with or without solutions), image galleries, videos, and study groups.

The new supercomputer is known as the Vayu, and is the result of joint funding between the federal government, the CSIRO, and the Australian National University. The people who are in charge of operating and overseeing the Vayu, however, are from the National Computational Infrastructure.

So what is there to drool about? After all, just because a machine has been dubbed a supercomputer, it doesn’t mean that it’s THAT great, does it?

Let’s begin with this: the Vayu falls under the Sun Microsystems Constellation class. It has 11,936 processing cores – yes, THAT MANY. It’s not a SUPERcomputer for nothing. If you’re overwhelmed by the figure, just think of it as roundabouts 6,000 of your desktop PCs put together.

As for the memory, the Vayu has an impressive 36 terrabytes of RAM. That is about 18,000 times as much as the average PC at home has! The storage space, when formatted, is about 600 terrabytes. The unformatted state is 1 petabyte. Last, but definitely not the least, the Vayu can operate at 140 terraflops.

Impressed yet? Maybe the price of this big baby will take your breath away even more. From what I hear the Vayu costs AT LEAST $6 million. Whew.

Hitachi has developed a new fat simulation technology that can “simulate” visceral fat. This is shown through cross section images of the abdomen.

Visceral fat, the fats that are found inside our abdomen and peritoneal cavity are usually hard to see with present medical equipment.

The technology uses the body weight and the abdominal size to display the simulated image of the visceral fat. The equipment is being targetted towards people who want to lose weight or those with metabolic problems.

The targets for this device are people with metabolic problems characterized by excessive visceral fat development.

I’m such a big fan that I try to collect as many of his books as I can. Case in point is his new book The Physics of The Impossible. In this amazing book, Kaku talks about stuff that we only hear about in science fiction novels–perpetual engines, telekinesis, teleportation, time travel, invisibility. The thing here is that Kaku explains it using current physical laws and suggests that for some of these fanciful flights of the imagination, reality could well be possible.

Frankly, this book is miles better than the pulp SF books I devour.