I’m a little late this time around.

• PyPy’s developers appear to have given it a boost and it’s now 50% faster than CPython in some tests. ‘Course, this is development code only, but I think it’s pretty impressive for what essentially mounts to a self-hosted Python interpreter.

• The German Tank Problem, explained. Yeah, it may be a pointless read for some, but I found it to be rather fascinating–and I’m not a math guy. This is the kind of real world stuff they ought to use in schools.

• Smashing Magazine has a fascinating article on 10 UI design patterns you should be paying attention to. It’s definitely worth a read for those of you with a knack for design. (I’m not exactly one of those types, but this is definitely worth a read for self-improvement. I know I’ll be putting these tips to good use in the future.)

• Did you know? There’s some extraordinarily fascinating evidence that your brain associates tools as if they’re temporary parts of your body. This is why we don’t have to watch our mouth while brushing our teeth. Since the brain views the toothbrush as an extension of our arms, it knows precisely where the brush is located in relation to our teeth. Neat stuff, huh?

• Besides the notion of China having a lottery, there are stranger coincidences when dealing with impressively large populations. If true, that has got to be the weirdest thing I’ve read.

• I couldn’t quite get the latest version of Py2EXE working without totally trashing distutils every time it attempted to run. I have found a suitable replacement called PyInstaller. It seems to work well and with minimal fuss. I like it. Oh, and you can bundle packages for most operating systems (though, I’d suggest looking at Freeze for *nix-specific distribution). I’m not sure how well it handles .eggs, though.

• Henrik Edberg has an uplifting post on Gandhis’ top 10 fundamentals for changing the world. Hey, I found it inspirational!

• Ever been curious about the release timeline of different web browsers including some you may have never heard of? Take a look at this chart on Wikipedia.