That title deserves a double-take. I saw the article at Wired, did a double-take of my own and then cracked a fat grin: "La Vida Robot: How four underdogs from the mean streets of Phoenix took on the best from M.I.T. in the national underwater bot championship".

You have to read that article. It's rad. Four kids from Carl Hayden High School in Downtown Phoenix put together a robot that spanked robots from MIT and other universities in a NASA sponsored competition.

The kids are undocumented immigrants from Mexico, which means that they are not eligible for loans or most scholarship money. A fund has been setup to help support their post-secondary education. I e-mailed one of the instructors, Allan Cameron (the gentleman in the picture above, at left) and he helped answer my questions about the fund.

The high points:

• 100% of the money goes to the four students
• no administrative fee for the fund
• no cut to general school fund
• it will be divided equally among the four students
• the two teachers that led the team will decide what educational expenses are appropriate

Allan said that written guidelines will be formalized within the next week. Also, Allan noted that there are other programs that the school runs in math and the sciences. If you'd like to support an ongoing project, I'm sure they could use the help.

"No shortage of women who dream of snaring a husband on Death Row"

In the pressure to get married, women tend to look for the most macho man around. He's the guy who pulled the trigger. We tend to venerate the most violent men in our society. Sometimes, it's the good guys, the cops on TV shows, sometimes the bad guys.

If working hard, cleaning up, and acting right doesn't land you a wife, there's always heinous crime.

"These are the same women who might correspond with a rock star or a rap artist," Levin said. When such a woman writes to a rock star, he said, "the best she can hope for is a computerized signature on a photograph." When she writes to a serial killer on Death Row, "she might get a marriage proposal."

That's gotta be the most unfortunate way to get groupies. [thanks to George]

At Gear Live -- another gadget blog, it appears -- they found what I had been looking for: a device that tracks sleep through the night, and then wakes the user when she is sleeping the lightest within a given time window. We know that people cycle in and out of deep sleep throughout the night, and we know that rousing people from the deepest of sleep leaves them feeling disoriented and sluggish. And that's no way to start the day, so why not figure out how to wake up when it's best? It seems like the people at Sleeptracker have built a device to do just that. And the people at Gear Live found it and reviewed it. Progress!

I have not driven a freeway as nice as Interstate 280, which connects San Jose and San Francisco and runs through the mountains on the San Francisco Bay Peninsula. Somebody put their commute on the web, so you can check it out. The other major peninsula freeway, the 101, sucks. Sucks. Sucks. It's has all the troubles the 280 doesn't: poor surface, traffic and billboards.