Categories
Oddities

Second law of thermodynamics “broken”

New Scientist: Second law of thermodynamics “broken”.

One of the most fundamental rules of physics, the second law of thermodynamics, has for the first time been shown not to hold for microscopic systems.

The demonstration, by chemical physicists in Australia, could place a fundamental limit on miniaturisation, because it suggests that the micro-scale devices envisaged by nanotechnologists will not behave like simple scaled-down versions of their larger counterparts – they could sometimes run backwards.

[via daypop top 40]

Categories
Resources

Amazon Light

Amazon Light is an interface to Amazon.com’s search engine with a Googlish-UI (in fact, the original UI was so Google-like, the designer got a letter from Google’s lawyers…)

It’s all done with Amazon’s web services API, and shows why that’s a cool thing – in fact, I guess it’s a better demonstration than the Google API of why web service APIs are useful – Google was so spartan that people argued you could just as well use CGI and screen-scraping (parsing what you want out of the HTML Google returned).

Categories
Oddities

Leonard Nimoy’s Nude Photography

Leonard Nimoy Photography is a site featuring Mr. Spock’s artistic nude photos. Of interest to the Jewish audience might be his Shekhina project, featuring a nude woman wearing Tefilin (phylacteries).

[ from newsqueak.com, in particular here ]

Categories
Oddities

Internet Forums and the Law

An article on Ynet describes a recent court case in Israel, a trial about defamation on an online forum. The judge showed considerable insight into the issues, ruling that the right for privacy does not extend to concealing someone’s online identity, and that internet sites should not be held to the same standards of accountability as newspapers with regards to libel. However, he did rule against a forum owner who posted bogus defamatory messages under another user’s nickname, and prevented that user from posting his protests that he did not post those messages.

Categories
Blather

MT 2.21

Updated to MovableType 2.21. Just posting this to test if pinging weblogs.com works (there’s a much more sophisticated feature called TrackBack, which allows peer-to-peer notification instead of just client-server, but it’s clearly non-trivial.

Just shows you that development of this is driven by techies. Instead of giving MT a real built-in search engine, they spend time doing bleeding-edge stuff.

Although since the other big new feature of this release is the option for a MySQL backend, perhaps they wanted to do that before they started on search.