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.

Microsoft has created PIAs for OfficeXP. Microsoft has created some PIAs for .NET COM Interop for Office XP. If you attended [Sam Gentile's] talk, you heard [him] talk about the importance of Microsoft creating "offical" "blessed" PIAs for a lot of their stuff which they haven't done a lot of …

A three-hour tour... A guy sailing from Long Beach to Catalina was rescued off the coast of Costa Rica after three months at sea.

Microsoft pushes on in server OS market. Linux only serious threat to Microsoft's increasing dominance, IDC says [InfoWorld: Top News]

I was watching Ken Burns' Civil War documentary last night and it reminded me of something I've never understood. Why did the Emancipation Proclamation by the United States have any meaning in the Confederate States? On January 1, 1863, was anyone actually freed?