It's a reliable rule of thumb for the rest of the year, made invaluable by the Black Friday hype: Unless you are planning on buying a smartphone anyway—a specific smartphone, on a specific carrier—upfront price deals are a trap. And even though this may seem obvious to a lot of people, some advice is worth repeating, especially with National Irresponsible Impulse Buy Day bearing down on us like some kind of perfectly prophesied minipocalypse. A friendly reminder, about math and the human psyche, from your Gizmodo!

Take the $80 Motorola Cliq at Radio Shack. It's advertised as a huge cut; implicit in the deal is that you're getting 60% off of your new Android phone, which feels great. But what you're really getting is a 6% discount off your total cumulative cost of owning the phone, which, if you get a data plan, is originally at least $1880.

Granted, $120 is still $120, and if you were planning on entering a multi-thousand-dollar two-year contract with T-Mobile anyway, the deal is worth a look. Just don't decide to start a new contract because of one of these deals. You're going to be living with this phone, this carrier, and this contract for two whole years—hen you're standing in line at Best Buy, with a misleadingly-priced cellphone in hand and four months left on your current contract, make sure that the five bucks you're going to be saving each month is really worth it to you.

Because chances are, it's not. [Deal via PC Mag (not PCW, as previously written)]

While you're busy not buying a new smartphone, make sure to check out Sean's definitive master list of other crappy deals to avoid.

The T2K Tsukuba System is a 640-computer cluster with a processing speed of 95 trillion floating-point operations per second. The T2K calculated a total of 2,576,980,377,524 decimal places in 73 hours 36 minutes, which is a small fraction of the 600 hours taken by the previous record holders—Hitachi and the University of Tokyo—who calculated only 1.2 trillion places.

Why people keep calculating this, when you just can round it and get a nice three instead? Because they wanted to test their new toy, according to team leader professor Daisuke Takahashi.

I just want those pi cookies.

First, some background. They based their methodology around three groups: zombies, those susceptible to zombie attacks, and those who are unaffected (dead zombies). They based their model around zombies who infect humans with saliva via bites, and walk in slow, irregular strides. They also allowed a 24 hour incubation period from the moment of infection to complete zombification.

What did they learn? Well if left unaddressed, a zombie attack on a sizable city would wipe out the population in a matter of 4-8 hours. If you tried to quarantine the zombies, it would essentially have no effect on the outcome because the zombies would inevitably escape, or infect the humans attempting to quarantine zombies. And if you tried to generate a zombie antidote, you'd still lose a lot of people in the process of creating the antidote, and it wouldn't revert the zombies back to a dead state, which means they could possibly infect people in other areas.

The best solution? The only hope of wiping out a possible zombie invasion is to attack the undead in focused, strategic attacks that progressively increase in intensity. This will help address the growing number of undead in the process. But even then it would prove difficult to emerge victorious, as it would take 10 days worth of heavy fighting to quell the outbreak.

But luckily, you don't have to worry about any of this because some sap mathematically proved it would be impossible for zombies to exist (along with vampires). Something about how they would feast themselves into oblivion. [University of Ottawa (PDF) via io9]

Reader Robin says this little guy was hiding out in the drawer of a recent vintage purchase:

My wife, Deborah, recently bought a secretary style vintage desk from an estate seller. In one of the drawers along with some staples & glue was this little abacus. It's about 2 x 4 inches. Thought you might enjoy seeing this - no clue of it's history or age & I don't see anything about it searching google.

Personally, I love the simple juxtaposition of the label. An abacus, one of the oldest counting tools on the planet, with a General Electric "Computer Department" label on the side? Classic Retromodo. [Thanks, Robin]

According to their calculations, there's a 1-in-20 chance that a meteor would hit one flight over the past 20 years. Which isn't too crazy. But still, the odds of something so small falling from the sky and striking something else that's so small and moving so fast are close to nil, so while this is an interesting theory, the chances are good that it was just a malfunction of the airspeed indicators. [NY Times and Discover]

From inside to out, the Klein Bottle experimental house plays with the theme of a mathematical puzzle that manifests in an interesting hodgepodge of geometry. But cleverly hidden within these angles and crevices is a rain water collection system and solar paneling (because aliens hate to pollute).

So be honest, readers. Would you live in a house that looked like this? And if so, would you be willing to transplant it into any normal housing development? Or would you need to be part of some off the grid martian colony? [dornob via io9]

His mirrors can reflect wider angles, capture 360-degree panoramas without distortion and even reflect vast amounts of infrared data (to measure body temperature).

New Scientist has a complete blow-by-blow of Hicks' creations, but this lead shot is of a wide angle mirror free of distortion—lines that are straight in the real world remain perfectly straight on the mirror. Who would need such a thing? It's implemented in a stair-climbing robot that requires precision angle information for each step. [New Scientist]

The puzzle, in the way of these things, sounds deceptively simple: sort a stack of different-sized, one-burnt side pancakes so the largest is on the bottom and all unburnt sides are upwards in the fewest number of flips. The science team replicated the problem with DNA fragments as the pancakes, with genes spliced in from a different bacterium to act as the flipping mechanism. By adding yet one more gene, they made their little bacteria brain resistant to antibiotic when it got to the right answer, effectively stopping the "program" from running.

The team notes that the technique, when expanded into much more sophisticated bacterial systems, has enormous potential power as a massively-parallel processor, and billions of the computing cells take up very little space. Sounds like Starfleets living computers may one day be possible... though the idea of creating a pile of goo that can think and is antibiotic-resistant sounds like the stuff of more than one science-fiction nightmare, doesn't it? [Telegraph]

The asteroid in question is the Apophosis. If it runs into one or more of the earth's 40,000 satellites as its path brings it closest to our planet on April 13, 2029, the collision could be enough to alter its trajectory and send a 200-billion-ton ball of iron and iridium our way in 2036. The impact would be followed by tsunamis that would destroy coastal and inland areas around the Atlantic Ocean. To top this disaster-movie situation off, a thick layer of dust would blanket the Earth.

So how did NASA get it wrong? Perhaps they did not take into account the possibility of that trajectory-changing first collision—either that or they forgot to carry a digit somewhere, because 450 and 45,000 do look vaguely similar. I am guessing that young Nico's project, "Apophis — The Killer Astroid" won the regional science competition that it was entered into. [Yahoo! News]

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A solid working knowledge of productivity software and other IT tools has become a basic foundation for success in virtually any career. Beyond that, however, I don't think you can overemphasise the importance of having a good background in maths and science. If you look at the most interesting things that have emerged in the last decade - whether it is cool things like portable music devices and video games or more practical things like smart phones and medical technology - they all come from the realm of science and engineering.

I also place a high value on having a passion for ongoing learning. When I was pretty young, I picked up the habit of reading lots of books. It's great to read widely about a broad range of subjects. Of course today, it's far easier to go online and find information about any topic that interests you. Having that kind of curiosity about the world helps anyone succeed, no matter what kind of work they decide to pursue.