New Mersenne prime number

UCLA found a new Mersenne Prime in August.

Mathematical sculpture

http://www.bathsheba.com/math/

closures in functional programming

i ran across this blog posting about the use of a closure to make code maintenance and organization easier. i could use more information, but it seemed useful in terms of getting to know when a function like that would be helpful. i don't really understand very well exactly what a closure is, but i have an idea from the example and from the wikipedia article. it is function that may be used when doing functional programming and may involve anonymous functions accessing variables outside the function's scope.

Houdini Training Product for Python scripting

A friend sent me this link for a training product called "Python: Creating Tools in Houdini". It sounds interesting because I've wanted to make a graphics related tool for some time now.

panda 3d

I played a little with Panda 3d on a couple of nights. It has a Python interface and Linux installer that makes trying the initial tutorial pretty easy, but the engine is written in C++ for speed.