Odds and Ends, Sun 2 November 2008
This collection has a scientific flavour...
1. "Top 10 Amazing Physics Videos"
<http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/09/top-10-amazing.html>
2. "The Solar Furnace"
<http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2008/10/solar-furnace.html>
"A piece of steel being melted by the Sun - and episode from James May's
'Big Ideas'"
3. "25 Truly Stunning HDR Pictures"
<http://www.digitalpicturezone.com/digital-pictures/25-hdr-pictures/>
"Applied carefully, High Dynamic Range-technique (HDR) can create
incredibly stunning pictures which blur our sense of the difference
between reality and illusion."
4. "The Psychiatric Infrastructure of the City"
<http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/psychiatric-infrastructure-of-
city.html>
"A few years ago, the Boston Globe looked at what could be called the
psychiatric impact of that city's Big Dig. The Big Dig was a massively
expensive urban engineering project that put Boston's Central Artery
underground, freeing up space on the earth's surface for parks and
businesses."
5. "Second egg found inside giant chicken egg"
<http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/11/02/2407763.htm>
"A second, normal-sized egg popped out of a giant egg laid by a chicken
raised at a high school in Japan, a school official said after breaking
open the shell."
6. "Police's fridge-magnet calling card"
<http://arbroath.blogspot.com/2008/08/polices-fridge-magnet-calling-
card.html>
"An investigation has been launched into claims that cheeky police are
said to have left a fridge-magnet calling card after smashing into the
wrong house."
7. About those "Yellow Dots" generated by colour laser printers:
"Yellow Dots of Mystery: Is Your Printer Spying on You?"
<http://www.instructables.com/id/Yellow_Dots_of_Mystery_Is_Your_
Printer_Spying_on_/>
A video exposing and explaining the dots.
An earlier article: "Printers output secret barcode"
<http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002569690_
code19.html>
"Last year, an article in PC World magazine pointed out that printouts
from many color laser printers contained yellow dots scattered across
the page, viewable only with a special kind of flashlight. The article
quoted a senior researcher at Xerox saying that the dots contain
information useful to law-enforcement authorities, a secret digital
'license tag' for tracking down criminals."
A possible upside?: "Yellow peril"
<http://www.spiekermann.com/mten/2007/11/yellow_peril.html>
"Good to know that we can always prove our authorship from colour laser
prints, even without printing proper credits."
