I'd like to think I'm a realist, not a cynic. But I'm too cynical to think that's the case.
Pencil sculptures by Dalton Ghetti.
Thanksgiving
I should probably write a long post for all the family, friends, and other blessings that I'm very thankful for, but I'm very full. So you get a clipart turkey instead:
Bose-Einstein Condensate Created from Photons →
"Super photons" for the win!
Microsoft Gives Cloud To Scientists →
Microsoft is now selling Azure as a cloud-based HPC solution for scientists, too. Sounds pretty good:
Microsoft today unveiled its behind-the-scenes work on porting a popular suite of supercomputing software tools to its Azure cloud platform. It's work that culminated in an a test job that the company says would have cost an estimated $3 million if it had used traditional on-premises hardware, but it got the job done for a little more than $18,000 using a hybrid approach. The teams ran a large chain protein sequence through BLAST, a software tool set designed to churn through databases, which in this case were all known DNA base pairs in the human genome.
BLAST is a computationally expensive search algorithm, especially when running against such a huge set of data. In fact, these searches "have proven too taxing for the search and analysis system maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), which makes protein databases available."
Having used the NCBI's BLAST tools before, I can tell you that they are certainly backed up. The ability for scientists on any scale to tap into a huge network of computational power to alleviate that problem is awesome. Microsoft gets props for making science cheaper, faster, and easier.
[Sources]
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-20022738-75.html?tag=mncol
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/microsoft-gives-the-cloud-to-scientists/
I have to admit I'm getting to be impressed with the marketing we're doing for Windows 7 + Windows Live. This is pretty good.
That's right, Windows Phone 7.Sort of actually enjoying this thing. (Taken with instagram at TechCrunch HQ)
Isarithmic History of the Two-Party Vote →
Big words, but a really awesome visualization of the shifts in political preference from the 1920s through 2008 all over the United States.
There are two types of people who want to make games. People who don't know what they're getting into, and people who are jumping on the hot thing the other people are jumping onto. The people who actually do make great games are rounding error.
— Mike Lee
Hotmail Wins German Free Email Review →
Getested.de (owned by aha.de Internet) ranked Windows Live Hotmail 1st, Yahoo! 2nd, GMail 3rd, T-Online 4th, Freenet 5th, and Web.de 6th. Woot. Use the translator of your choice on the link to read more.