stray bullets

Lift could take passengers straight into space Japanese scientists are attempting to build a lift (elevator for us Americans) that will take passengers 62,000 miles into space.

MI6 agent's cover slips during BBC interview In his dangerous job the MI6 spy's identity needs to remain a closely guarded secret. So you can imagine his surprise when, during an interview with the national broadcaster, his carefully chosen disguise of a fake moustache failed him spectacularly.

Blogging about blogging What do young people think about blogging? Let’s have a look; here’s what one 18 year old has to say. This one happens to be my son, but I don’t think that prevents him from representing his generation: ‘People no longer are just able to blog, but blogging is increasingly becoming accepted as a legitimate medium of information; albeit quite different to others. At the cost of the credibility associated with major news services and other more traditional ways of getting our information, a whole new world is opened up- of personal opinion, a perspective into the lives and experiences of others and original creativity. When subjective experience and opinion is sought over objective fact, blogging becomes a medium very difficult to beat.’ Blogging is passé? I suspect that many of the old-timers have become a bit tired and unimaginative-- it's just getting started. (Let's encourage young bloggers instead of greeting them with statements like "Blogging is dead")

Ike Really Tore Up Louisville You will find a collection of pictures I took after the storm here. Unfortunately, some streets still look like this a week later. Though we got electricity back about 12 hours after it went out, most houses and businesses around us are still dark. LG&E, our local utility, has been saying it may be another week before all power is restored.

Au revoir to cool hand Luc Besson Luc Besson is in denial. The 49-year-old French film potentate and master of pop cinema (see Nikita, Léon, The Big Blue) has made yet another peerless action classic in the Paris-set kidnap drama Taken. Written and produced by Besson, it stars Liam Neeson as a semi-retired CIA hatchet man who will stop at nothing to bring his missing daughter back home, and send her captors to hell. It is directed by Besson’s former Steadicam operator Pierre Morel, but with its luxurious mix of slick style, emotional melodrama and bone-crunching thrills, it’s got Besson’s fingerprints all over it.

Art and Science, Virtual and Real, Under One Big Roof On a hillside overlooking this college town on the banks of the Hudson, the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has erected a technological pleasure dome for the mind and senses. Eight years and $200 million in the making, the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, or Empac, resembles an enormous 1950s-era television set. But inside are not old-fashioned vacuum tubes but the stuff of 21st-century high-tech dreams dedicated to the marriage of art and science as it has never been done before, its creators say — 220,000 square feet of theaters, studios and work spaces hooked to supercomputers.

TinEye is an image search engine. Search the web for images using an image. Finally! It's still getting its legs-- a lot of images are still not indexed and it's difficult to find an original source, but this is certainly a start. (via)