brainwagon

In itself, meteorites are not uncommon, but what’s pretty cool is that the Mars rover Opportunity managed to land close to a basketball sized one lying on the surface of Mars. You can read more in NASA’s press release.

CMU developed a project to find meteorites in Antartica using an autonomous robot that could search the frozen plains for these bits of stellar flotsam. Of course, there are other, more labor intensive ways to find Antarctic meteorites too.

Dan Gillmor has a new blog on the future of journalism, where he tries to ask and answer questions about where journalism is going and the role that the citizenry play in journalism in the Internet age. Interesting stuff, and less annoying that most mullings of journalism vs. blogs.

I know, I know, this should come as no real surprise. California legislators craft stupid, unconstitutional legislation every day. But Kevin Murray has introduced a law which would fine or imprison anyone who “sells, offers for sale, advertises, distributes, disseminates, provides or otherwise makes available” software that allows users to connect to networks that can share files, unless that person takes “reasonable care” that the software is not used illegally.

Goodbye, Betamax Decision.

You can read some commentary from Ed Felton at Freedom To Tinker.

Google Blog

If you’re a blogger (or a blog reader), you’re painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites’ search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like “Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site.” This is called comment spam, we don’t like it either, and we’ve been testing a new tag that blocks it. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.

I’ll update my web templates shortly.

It’s great to see a book related to one of my pet interests made available on Project Gutenberg. Today’s Gem is the classic treatise on light, called (curiously enough) Treatise on Light, by Christiaan Huygens, the Dutch mathematician and physicist who first argued that light propagated as a wave. He has an extensive resumé: according to Wikipedia, he also discovered Saturn’s moon Titan, wrote the first book on probability theory, discovered he the laws governing the motion of pendulums, and patented a pocket watch. He also wrote the book Cosmotheoros, one of the first books to speculate on the possibility of life on other planets.

Good stuff.