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Ian Stewart has written numerous popular mathematics books that are lucid, educational, and entertaining. _Letters to a Young Mathematics_ (review) is likely a good bet.

  _Chaos: Making a New Science_ by James Gleick was a book I read in high school that was a classic about chaos (dynamic non-linear systems) and one of books I can point to as and fractals that inspired me to maintain a heavy mathematical bend in additional to the trendy (profitable, and for me at least, easy) Computer Science courses in university.

  The classic autobiographical _A Mathematician's Apology_ by G. H. Hardy might be worth considering.

  Others have already mentioned _Flatland_ by Edwin A. Abbott, but the writing style might be off-putting for some readers who find its dated style strange. _Flatterland_ (review) by Ian Stewart might by an alternative.

  Others have already mentioned Simon Singh's books, which I can endorse as well. In general anything about deciphering the Enigma crypto-machines during World War II, and Alan Turing are potential books to consider as well. Anything about Paul Erdos (_The Man Who Loved Only Numbers_), and the classic book turned into a movie about John Nash, _A Beautiful Mind_, by Sylvia Nasar.

As long as the book shows that mathematics is about critical thinking and problem solving, not about pushing around numbers in equations, any popular mathematics is likely worth considering.

For hands-on math education / experience, that's a different question, that's a problem to be left to the interested student...

Google uses aptitude tests, which it has even placed in technical magazines, hoping some really big brains would tackle the hardest problems

Almost all hightech companies look for big brains. Typical questions would look like this:

five pirates have 100 gold coins. they have to divide up the loot. in order of seniority (suppose pirate 5 is most senior, pirate 1 is least senior), the most senior pirate proposes a distribution of the loot. they vote and if at least 50% accept the proposal, the loot is divided as proposed. otherwise the most senior pirate is executed, and they start over again with the next senior pirate. what solution does the most senior pirate propose? assume they are very intelligent and extremely greedy (and that they would prefer not to die).

The answer is in the no. 63 of techInterview. Don't feel depress when you couldn't come up with the right answer, and don't bother memorizing all those answers before going to interview. They probably wouldn't reuse any of them anyway. If you don't have extremely high IQ, you probably want to learn techniques to solve those problems.

As a matter of fact, questions as such are mostly problems in Game Theory(Yes, Game Theory as in the movie A Beautiful Mind). Pirates problem above is a typical game that can be solved by backward induction on an extended subgame. I've actually seen this question in a final examination of Game Theory in my prograduate Economics studies.

"I remember that the *"People of Han" (as they called themselves) who founded the original Chin Dynasty considered themselves the center of the universe. So naturally, they too considered themselves the center of all culture and refinement. I see modern communism as a more contemporary expression of this belief. It seems almost bred into their cultural psychology. A very deep meme that is very difficult to erase." So.....nothing like the modern-day USA then ?

No, you're absolutely right. American's do think that they're the center of the universe. I know because I am one. I'm a Jerseyite, I live very near Princeton which had beautiful minds and where Einstein's Unified Field Theory was first concocted. Plains, trains, automobiles, computers, networks all invented her in the good ol' rockin' US of friggin' A!

We are jingoisitic and think we are the center of the universe. But compare our piddling few hundred odd years to China's 7000 years or more!

But if you trace American culture, we basically go back to ye olde England to about the time of Cromwell or slightly before (history is not my forte). Until the late 1800s, most of American Society (around 70% I believe) was English/Irish in descent. After the turn of that century American Society was essentially re-made with an influx of new immigrants from the rest of Europe, including Germany, Poland, and Italy (for example). It was a time when our culture was "unravelling" (according to Strauss and Howe) in a period that was not unlike the what the past 20 years of American Society has been like. Scarily, eerily similar. No, no OJ's getting chased by police in White Ford Broncos down the 405, no Monica Lewinsky, no Punk Rock. But just like today, America was being thought anew to include all of the new cultures that were calling america home. It was also being shaken to it's foundations by spasmodic bursts of new technological developments like Movies, Telephones, the Automobile, and Flight. It was also a time when we first heard the beginnings of a dirty and dissident form of music known as...brace yourself...JAZZ!!!!!! *GASP*. I know hard to imagine, but Jazz was really regarded just that way by prominent members of our society instead of the rich subtle tapestry of powerful creative expression that it is.

So, what's been happening for the past 20 years? Well, computers have been around for a long while, but I really don't think the couch potatoes started buying them until they became of the internet at about the same time. We had dirty dissident punk and instrial, and indie rock and underground cinema. And the immigration is ENORMOUS and will definitely chage the way America thinks of itself. Latin American immigration is simply jaw-dropping. In the town I used to live in, almost everyone there is mono-lingual. And it ain't english! Whether your in a "latin neighborhood" or no, Spanish is on all the ATMs and an option for nearly all phone support calls. I think Spanish should be a high school requirement! Asian immigration is completely boundless as well. Up in Fort Lee NJ (right by the GW bridge) almost all of the street signs and business are in both Korean and English...or in just Korean. Including some street signs!

So a *DEFINITE* on my to-do list is to bone up on Spanish and to give Korean a serious go. While wer'e at it, why stop there? I'd also like to get to speaking

I can hide my entire pr0n collection in a single gigpixel image?

Seriously, though, I read a news article some time ago describing how the FBI are onto such data hiding techniques after discovering terrorists (ok, "Arabs") had been posting stego encrypted messages in images posted to various popular terrorist (there I go again!) websites.

Don't know to what extent they're "onto" it (they never say, do they?), but I imagine looking for secret clues can be a full-time job.

They gave one to a guy who's best friend was a figment of his imagination, didn't they?

If Watson & Crick had believed the world sat on the back of a giant turtle, they still discovered DNA, and that's still a Nobel-worthy achievement.

For pete's sake, Alfred Nobel himself believed that if he created a destructive enough weapon, it would end mankind's penchant for war!

Ergo, the Nobel Prize signifies ACHIEVEMENT, not BELIEF.

Sounds like John Nash's computer :)