"Whitepaper: Pingback vs Trackback" [Daypop Top 40]

Autonomous vehicle race from LA to LV, \$1M to first across the line.

Pre-order Thinking in C#

"potholes" [Daypop Top 40] Photoshop makes me doubt such things, but if it's real, it's funny.

Friday Five:

1. What are your favorite ways to relax and unwind?

Coding and pondering challenges in information theory is my favorite way to escape from the real world. But since mostly what I do is code, I have to relax and unwind from that. To be honest, I put …

New Scientist is reporting some science-based speculation that the acidic clouds of Venus may harbor microbial life. "Microbial" my sweet aunt Agnes -- I'm thinking shark-blimps that endlessly pursue schools of blimplets as they swirl through the jetstream...

"Clones" to be re-rendered, displayed on Imax. Supposedly, there's a digital printer for the IMAX that prints 8000 x 6000 resolution. And then also, one supposes, they can render the scenes using the appropriate "lenses" (I once saw 2001 on an IMAX screen and the obelisk looked like a melted …

Oh, those charismatic megafauna get all the props. UNEP has put Great White Sharks in Appendix I of the Convention of Migratory Species, which means that every nation has to prevent taking them. More interestingly, apparently there's a camel species recently discovered "in a lost land of salty sand dunes …

Neuroscience unlocks secret of zen garden. Geez, I dunno'. What they're describing is called Voronoi or Delaunay triangulation; it's used in computer graphics quite a bit. I would think that many arrangements would generate tree shapes. Maybe I'll... holy crud!...\$15 for a single article!?! I'll wait for the movie …

After reading this post and being exposed to FOAF yesterday, I wonder if FOAF does not suggest a trust mechanism for *back pings. The moment you think about it, you realize it's just a matter of luck that the spammers haven't yet figured out that blog comments are vulnerable.