This month's issue of SIAM news had a beautiful story of how one hard problem in mathematics was solved in less than six weeks using online collaboration. SIAM's story is not online yet, but here is another link to the same story .   SIAM news refers to a "super-mathematician" coming out of several individual mathematician spread all over the world.

I was just wondering if a similar thing is possible in applied mechanics. imechania seems ideally suited for that. 

Holidays are coming, and you might have time to play around with new things.  Here is something really cool and really useful.  Early this year, Daniel Suo introduced me to a new online service, Dropbox.  Once you place a file in Dropbox on your computer, the service remembers the file online when the computer is connected to the Internet.  Subsequently, when you connect another computer to the Internet, Dropbox synchronizes the file for you.  The file now exists on both computers.  You can access the file rapidly even when both computers are offline.  The file is synchronized again once you go online.  I have been using Dropbox to synchronize files on my laptop at home and my desktop at work. 

Today I learned a neat web service, SharedCopy.  If you have a web page that you'd like to share with other people, you can click the SharedCopy bookmarklet, add notes and simple shapes, and send the annotated web page to other people.  It is easy to learn; see a write up at Lifehacker.  Here is an example that I made.

We mechanicians like to argue over a whiteboard, but we are often too far apart. Skype allows us to phone each other, and Google Doc allows us to write together. Both Skype and Google Doc work over long distance and free of charge. But still, we'd like to sketch a little figure and write a few equations. We miss our whiteboard.

What is RSS feed?
Really Simple Syndication, better known as RSS feed, updates posts and comments on your computer. To read RSS feeds, you will need to set up a feed reader, such as Google Reader.

Sample iMechanica feeds:

• Front page, http://imechanica.org/rss.xml
• All comments, http://imechanica.org/crss

You can also create your own feeds of iMechanica.

Other useful feeds:

Like many other communities, we mechanicians are scattered all over the world, often separated from families and colleagues. The Internet has promised for years to make long dstances irrelevant: anybody anywhere is just a click away. While nothing will ever be the same as being together in person, many Internet services can facilitate distant communication and collaboration. For example, Skype, an Internet phone service, allows you make free phone calls around the world. The sound quality is excellent.