Minor good news on the obvious patent front: Apparently, the USPTO has finally processed a reexamination request that demonstrated prior art invalidating Amazon’s claim to innovation for the one-click patent. Even though the decision is not yet final, it looks like the one-click patent will be history rather soon. Here is the original source, and remember you read it here before it hit Slashdot.

The ever-interesting Edge has a fun new question/art project: WHAT IS YOUR FORMULA? YOUR EQUATION? YOUR ALGORITHM?

I wouldn’t really claim any equation as my own, but many of the existing entries seem to take the question more in the spirit of “your favourite…”. Since I’ve just had the opportunity to dig through an electrodynamics script that contains a puny 1111 numbered formulas (not counting letter-indexed sub-equations and the appendices), I have a couple of favourites to share, too. For sheer disgusting unintuitiveness, I propose this simple identity, which you can get from the continuity equation using just a few elementary transformations:

And for most awe-inspiring tensor trickery, this:

Ah, I’m almost sad that my life no longer revolves around electrodynamics. Note, however, that the stories of rainbows, a pony and eternal happiness after you pass the exam are greatly exaggerated. In reality, next week’s quantum theory problems and a growing realization of the festering heap of problems that were pushed aside for a month now is pretty much all you get. But at least there is the feeling that it’s an utterly natural thing to write a vector field as the divergence of its tensor product with the position vector if it satisfies natural boundary conditions. I guess that is something.