While exploring the NOAA’s website, I noticed that they have a list of photos of weather and ocean related images that (being funded by your tax dollars) are mostly in the public domain.
I suspect I’ll be spidering and looting this collection shortly.
The Spirit of the New Year…
Well, Marvin didn’t get this one. Yesterday the Spirit rover successfully bounced to a stop on Mars, linked up with JPL and transmitted pictures back to Earth. You can see the first of the Mars Exploration Rover Mission: Press Release Images. I was hoping for some higher resolution images, which undoubtably will be showing up in the next few days. To all those who were involved in the mission: congratulations! We will be looking forward to the pictures and data you get back.
Addendum: Here’s a link to a
high resolution panorama.
Another reason to move to Canada..
Lawrence Lessig’s weblog
contains a short message from Wallace McLean. He notes that in Canada every author who died before December 31, 1948 has passed into the public domain. His description of what that means is particularly poignant:
As of today, millions of pages of archival heritage, in hundreds of
archival institutions, have become the common property of all Canadians.You are free to make use of this heritage in any way you want, by
publishing, digitizing, compiling, translating, adapting, dramatizing, or
treating the material in any other way. It’s yours to enjoy and share with
whomever, whenever, in whatever way you want.
A pretty nice holiday present for Canadians. We’ll have to wait another 15 years to celebrate the entrance of a single page into the public domain.
Stardust Succeeds…
Today NASA is reporting that their Stardust probe, designed for capturing a sample of matter from the tail of comet Wild 2 successfully photographed and obtained the desired sample. Unfortunately, it won’t return this sample until 2006, when it will drop it’s load somewhere in Utah. Nifty picture of the comet, which looks like pretty much every other chunk of rock hurtling through the universe: a big cratered potato.
Brain related merchandise…
While perusing the web, I sometimes encounter odd brain-related products. Today some random link took me to the
Soda King, a purveyor of unusual soda pops.
Brainwash Soda combines an unnatural blue color and a skull logo with a brain portruding. How cool is that?
Or perhaps you need a
brain shaped Jello mold? Or perhaps a budget brain and skull model, perhaps from brain-mart.com.
Do it yourself card games..
I’ve long known about Nomic, a game where the players make up the rules as the game is played. Dvorak – A Nomic Card Game is a similar interesting idea, modified to be a card game. All cards start out blank, and the players make up and add cards as the game is played. Cool!
Graphics CPUs
Modern GPUs are interesting bits of silicon. They pack a huge number of relatively slow floating point processors in parallel to achieve large throughput. Because of this, GPU performance has vastly exceeded the Moore’s law style improvements for the last decade. Recently other application programmers have begun to try to use the huge amount of compute power to other applications. In perusing some Slashdot links this morning, I ran across gpgpu.org which has links to all sorts of helpful resources.
Astronomy Pic of the Day
If you haven’t seen NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day
website, you should check it out. The most startling picture I’ve seen in quite some time is APOD: 2003 December 8 – An Antarctic Total Solar Eclipse.
Simply awesome.
Crypto Smorgasborg
In a bit of synchronicity, today’s llinks have a decidedly crypto
theme. Julian sent me a
link to the Enigma-E, a modern electronic equivalent to the original Enigma machine. Unfortunately, these are apparently only available in the UK and the Netherlands (so far), otherwise my credit card would be debitted already. It just seems too cool.
Bruce Schneier’s Cryptogram
coincidently arrived, and had a couple of interesting links. The first was a list of unsolved codes and ciphers. I knew of a number of the more famous ones, such as the Beale and Voynich ciphers, but didn’t realize that some of the cryptographic messages from the Zodiac killer remained unbroken.
Another good link was to a collection of papers on fooling biometric fingerprint readers. I’ve seen a lot in the news about increasing use of these sensors, and it’s interesting to see how easily they may be fooled.
Blog Spammers
Well, it finally happened. My blog was spammed by a whole bunch of comments which linked to Lolita-style porn websites. Thanks for the interest, but I’d prefer if people didn’t hyperlink this sight to all kinds of websites featuring women pretending to be underage. Call me silly, but that’s just
the kind of guy I am.
Attention Deficit Theater
There is a recent trend I’ve noticed in TV programs. It’s the practice of recapping the show that’s currently in progress after virtually every commercial break. I first noticed this in shows on the Discovery Channel when they doing "Top Ten Countdown" where they would take the time to recap what the previous entries were. It then spread to shows like Forensic Files. Last night, this odious
practice shifted to a drama show, namely Tru Calling.
Do television writers think our attention span is so limited that we
need to be reminded what were watching after every commercial break? C’mon, we’re already watching you show. Don’t insult us by beating us with
repeating the details of your show in progress every fifteen minutes.
This concludes my daily peeve.
Which is scarier?
It’s quiz time: which of these do you find funnier:
this cartoon or this one?
Scary fact: one author actually believes his cartoon.
Patent a Fish?
Slashdot had a link today to the glofish.com website: a company which will begin distributing a genetically engineered zebrafish in 2004. These fish have an anenome gene cut into them so that they glow with a flourescent red color.
I suspect that I’d be interested in buying some. In scanning their webpage
though, I ran accross this:
Because fluorescent fish are unique, their sale is covered by a substantial number of patents and pending patent applications. The providers of GloFish™ fluorescent fish, 5-D Tropical and Segrest Farms , are the only distributors that have the necessary licenses to produce and market fluorescent fish within the United States . The production of fluorescent fish by any other party, or the sale of any fluorescent fish not originally distributed by 5-D Tropical or Segrest Farms, is strictly prohibited.
So in fact, you aren’t allowed to breed these otherwise normal zebrafish (their color is in fact heritable) to produce more or to hybridize them with ordinary zebrafish.
This brings up an interesting set of intellectual questions beyond just a glow-in-the-dark zebrafish. It seems that large transnational corporations have been patenting not just their own genetically engineered crops, but actual indigenous plants as well. Companies like Monsanto who normally supply farmers with seed for planting now use license agreements to keep farmers from using any of their crops for seed. It’s a wide, wooly area of patent and IP law, and we can
only be comforted slightly that patent terms are limited compared to copyright terms.
Try reading this website for a bunch of thought provoking analysis of the role that IP law holds for a world that still has lots of hungry people.
Unavailability
I apologize to any of my two or three readers that brainwagon.org (and telescopemaking.org) may have been unavailable for the last few days. I’ve had some problems with DNS and only recently
got it straightened out. Hopefully there will be few problems in the future.
Very old puzzle solved
Bill Cutler, a rather famous puzzle guy has finally found all unique solutions to The Loculus of Archimedes. I rather like puzzles of all sorts, but through some freak of nature had not heard of this particular one. Kudos to Bill!