A video from Emory University (below) suggests that, "in the age of texts, Facebook, and email, the art of the love letter is fading fast." Perhaps that's true in Georgia, but at Minnesota State University at Mankato, creative-writing and MFA students have spent the past few days composing Valentine's Day notes, letters, and poems for romantically challenged people willing to pay a small fee. The money will help cover lodging costs for students attending the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in Chicago.

A Massachusetts man, Michael A. Vivenzio, was sentenced last month to 2&frac; years in prison for his role in a sophisticated marijuana-growing operation in Portland, Ore. According to an article in The Oregonian, Mr. Vivenzio told Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas H. Edmonds that he moved to Oregon and got into the pot business because he had racked up some $100,000 in student loans. Portland vice officers seized a total of 831 plants from Mr. Vivenzio's home and two others where he and an associate, Jason J. Kalenkowitz, were growing marijuana. Investigators arrested Mr. Vivenzio last year at his home, seizing a loaded 9mm pistol that was hidden in his sofa. They also seized $72,000 in cash from Mr. Kalenkowitz, who was sentenced to more than four years in prison, and $27,000 from Mr. Vivenzio. According to The Oregonian, the IRS reported that Mr. Vivenzio had managed to pay down $80,000 in ...

Never mind the respect of one's peers and the shared $1.5-million cash award. Saul Perlmutter, the University of California scientist who was named today as one of three winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics, revealed the other great thing about the honor: one of the free parking spaces that Berkeley gives its Nobel laureates. "Which of course is the only reason to win a Nobel Prize, to be able to park on campus," Mr. Perlmutter joked in an interview with the Associated Press. Mr. Perlmutter shared the Nobel with Brian P. Schmidt, of the Australian National University, and Adam G. Riess, of the Johns Hopkins University's Space Telescope Science Institute, for their "discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe through observations" of supernovas, according to a citation from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. No word yet on whether Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Riess will also...

Danford W. Middlemiss is done looking for parking at Canada's Dalhousie University. After waiting in line for more than an hour on Monday to purchase a parking pass — only to learn that all the passes had been sold and that he would have to return the next day — the political-science professor pulled the plug on his career of 31 years, according to an article on the CBC News Web site. "I went straight upstairs, I said, 'I'm not kidding this time, I don't have to put up with this. I'm resigning,'" said Mr. Middlemiss. Dalhousie, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, reportedly has 2,000 parking spaces for 17,000 students and 3,000 employees. It has traditionally oversold parking passes by 65 percent, meaning that they function more as hunting licenses than as parking permits. This year, however, the university was going to cap its overselling at 20 to 30 percent and add 200 guaranteed spots for...

Is God: A) punitive, angry, and vengeful? B) warm, loving, and forgiving? OK, folks, pencils down. Now, if you chose B, you probably cheated your way through college. Two psychology researchers — Azim F. Shariff, at the University of Oregon,  and Ara Norenzayan, at the University of British Columbia — found in a pair of studies that students who believe that God is kind and gentle are more likely to cheat on tests. In the first study, 61 undergraduates were asked to take a mathematics test on a computer that contained a software glitch. If they failed to press the space bar immediately after reading each problem, the glitch would cause the correct answer to appear on the screen and that just wouldn't be fair. After taking the test, the students were asked about their perceptions of God. Of course the sneaky researchers — believers in a benevolent God, no doubt — had peeked to see...

The NCAA has released the tournament brackets for the 2011 Division I men's basketball championship, so Tweed Madness is on: Tell us in the comments which team is going to win which matchup — the more obscure your reasoning, the better. We'll give you our own Final Four picks in a moment, but first, an obligatory academic digression. Minutes after our announcement went out on Friday, friends started reminding us about other geeky approaches to bracketology: * Richard Lapchick, director of the University of Central Florida's Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, compiles one that highlights which tournament teams do the best job of graduating their players. * The Center for Responsive Politics offers the K Street College Classic (which our colleague Sara Hebel noted a couple years ago), awarding victory to whichever college spends the most money lobbying the federal government...

Academy Award-nominated actor James Franco has partnered with Columbia College Hollywood to offer an innovative course through which 12 of the private film school’s best editing students will create a 30 minute documentary film from videographic footage from Mr. Franco’s own unorthodox career.

Four biochemistry Ph.D. students at the University of California at San Francisco shot this clever parody of the Flight of the Conchords' "Most Beautiful Girl (in the Room)" for a skit show at their program's annual science retreat. Who else could find a rhyme for "centrifuge"?

The folks at Improbable Research, the organization that handed out last week's Ig Nobels, invites people to submit a limerick that imagines what Dmitri Mendeleev might have thought of this video about the periodic table.

A local television news affiliate in Pennsylvania reports on the assault of a student at Grove City College by a man dressed as a panda. As of Monday, the panda was still at large.

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