* There's a lot of evidence that you can train computers to grade essays as well as human beings can (within limits). 80beats discusses it.
* Jon McGinnis, A medieval Arabic analysis of motion at an instant: the Avicennan sources to the forma fluens/fluxus formae debate (PDF)
* The Tricorder Project
* "On the Main Line" has a post on a delightful children's introduction to Moses Mendelssohn, the Enlightenment philosopher.
* The History of Stagger Lee. The case of Stack Lee Shelton, who murdered a man named Billy Lyons after a gambling game, became sung about all over the country. This eventually resulted in what is one of the most famous murder ballads of the twentieth price, Lloyd Price's version of the story, which was the first number one song that had to be censored for radio and television (due to the violence, which is actually rather enthusiastically cheered on):
It really swings, doesn't it? In the censored version, the violence is cut down and it's all a quarrel over a girl that ends OK. But even though the censored version was the one on American Bandstand and usually played on radio, it was the uncensored version that exploded the charts. The history of the folk legend makes for very interesting reading.
* Baerista has an interesting guest post at "Renaissance Mathematicus" on Goldblatt's The Swerve and the history of Lucretius's De Rerum Natura.
* Giuseppe Toniolo has become the first economist to be beatified by the Catholic Church.
