Meh

Did you ever think you made up a word and at one point heard it back through someone else? Then you know that making up a word is the easy part, and making sure you really were the first to use it is the hard bit. By the time the word gets printed on T-shirts you're by all means too late to claim it, and even using it loses its cool. When even The Guardian gets hold of it the word is definitely useless as an indicator you belong to the incrowd, the knowing, the initiated, the, eh, sheep? Meh!

Mandelmania Revisited

Re-reading the book by Arthur C. Clarke, The Ghost from the Grand Banks, made me timetravel back to my university days and my first i386 computer. Why? Because a background story in the novel is about the late 1980s Mandelbrot Fractalmania (see the book cover in the Wikipedia story!). I too have spent countless hours at the computer monitor hypnotized by the colors and endless depths of the Mandelbrot set - a shortlived but severe addiction. An addiction shared by many at the time, fed by the new notion of chaos in math but enabled by the simultaneous availablility of home computing power. Out of curiosity I Googled the name of the most popular piece of Fractal software at the time, Fractint, and to my amazement it is still being developed. Although at version 20 it still runs on DOS...

Saturn Rings Crossing by Cassini

The truly amazing technology behind this photo and accompanying video on the NASA site is of course the Cassini spacecraft far in the outskirts of our solar system. However, without the Internet such motion imagery would only reach its audience if a science minded TV program would be so kind as to air a feature on it. Now, space and science buffs just have to surf to the NASA site - an organization, by the way, who knows how to broadcast its achievements with NASA-TV.