The Visual Literacy project is a tutorial teaching amuteur cartooning, sort-of “you, too, can draw your own silly Powerpoint clip-art!”. The link is from the online book explaining how to make a complete map of every thought you think which I referred to last week.
A nearby star system thought of as a candidate for harbouring life has 10 times the number of asteroids and comets as found in our Solar System. The sheer number of bodies raging around the Sun-like star may mean that any potential life is choked off, say UK researchers.
The star, Tau Ceti, lies just 12 light-years away and has been eyed as a possible oasis for life because of its similarity to the Sun and the inference of a surrounding debris disk that may harbour planets.
Imaging the disk has now identified the 10-billion-year-old Tau Ceti as the oldest of about a dozen stars with confirmed disks. Its span is similar to our Solar System’s Kuiper Belt.
This shadowy belt consists of a ring of comets and asteroids reaching just past Pluto’s orbit. But the amount of dust around Tau Ceti suggests it is circled by more than 10 times as many of the objects.
Jeffrey Veen: MP3 Blogs and wget. Also, a blog dedicated to the workhorses of UNIX downloading, wget and curl (both of these programs work quite fine on Windows, through cygwin or perhaps other distributions).
Here’s a link to some free classical music to experiment with.
MA in Novel Writing programme, at Manchester University. (via del.icio.us)