s_p_lee

It's the cover art to an edition of The Martian Chronicles. See:

http://www.michaelwhelan.com/galleries/descent/

Mentioned elsewhere in these comments is Daniel Kahneman's book "Thinking, Fast and Slow." It's a great read and full of concrete examples.

Are you using OS X / mac OS? If so, have you tried Mitsuharu Yamamoto's Emacs Mac Port? Available as Homebrew tap: https://github.com/railwaycat/homebrew-emacsmacport

About ten years ago, there was the R63 AMG:

http://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/first-drives/reviews/a1...

Although it was a total slouch and did 0-60 in 5.0s, not 2.5s.

Here's an introductory lecture on some aspects of spintronics from 2013 by Stuart Parkin of IBM:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cID4fKraWkE

One application that he discusses is IBM's use of spintronics in the read heads of hard drives (i.e., spinning rust), which allowed them to increase sensitivity and to increase the storage density of the disks.

Also, spin transfer torque (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin-transfer_torque) is one technique for implementing magnetoresistive memory (MRAM) ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetoresistive_random-access...), which some people find exciting for its promise of DRAM-like read/write/erase speeds with data that persists after powered off.

Did you take the class in Los Angeles in 1997?

Wow, I had completely forgotten about writing that interpreter for the PURPLE language [1] in that class. Thanks for the memories!

[1] http://www.mattababy.org/~belmonte/Teaching/CS1/PURPLE_proje...

I felt that Manaugh's repeating the some concept in consecutive paragraphs had a nice parallel to Roofman's repeating the same crime in consecutive burglaries.

That said, I was turned off by the low information density and ended up skimming those paragraphs.