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It’s difficult to distill into simple concrete terms what dark matter is, and why it’s important, other than to say that dark matter is six times the size of the known universe, exists everywhere, and keeps the universe from flying apart. Nobody knows what it’s composition is, and until now, nobody has been able to see it. It’s presence can be directly inferred by its gravitational effect on nearby light and matter, much like black holes.

It’s the latter phenomenon that has allowed astronomers to exploit a loophole in the universe, as it were, and for the first time bring light to a dark subject. Taking advantage of the effect of gravitational lensing, A team of 70 astronomers from Europe, America and Japan used the Hubble space telescope to create a map of dark matter within a region of space that dates back to nearly 7 billion years.

The picture that emerges is much like seeing the skeleton of a human body, or the fishing line that keeps aloft a mobile. In essence, every floating, etherial object in space is connected to something else via dark matter. The same may be said of every particle in our existence. Dark matter is an invisible scaffold which holds the entire universe in place.

Great article about it in the UK Independent here.

This is nothing short of incredible and deeply moving. It’s a shame this installation was in Berlin
and now over.

It’s just to me a very gorgeous metaphor. About resistance. About frenzy. About collective will. About sacrifice. About failure. And the use of wolves, which are symbolic outlaws. Others. It’s a political piece, I guess. And it’s just so interesting to look at.

I have never heard of Cai Guo Qiang before, but…. just amazing. Well done.

The “$100 laptop“ the product of the One-Laptop-Per-Child initiative (OLPC) and MIT Media Lab founder Nick Negroponte’s near-realized dream to provide laptops to schoolkids in the third world, seems to be hopping along. The final hardware form factor and supply chain questions seem to now be mostly resolved, with the effort shifting to the operating system and final usability.

Since it’s inception, $100 Laptop has been using various versions of Fedora Linux. Apparently the people at Red Hat have taken Fedora and customized it into a child-friendly UI known as “Sugar”. Videos of it have started appearing online, with instructions on how to run the OS within Mac and Windows.

Video link: http://www.ivr-usability.com/olpc/olpc.html

My impressions: It’s a curious little thing and it looks like a straightforward repackaging of common gnome applications such as Abiword.

It will be interesting to see how this thing tests. The interface — for all of it’s reliance upon primitives and oversized icons — seems pretty complex for the kindergarten crowd. Even though I was a precocious tot when it came to the blinky terminals of the Commodores and Tandys of my youth I still find it hard to imagine that the laptop will be intuitive to very young children. Perhaps older kids will truly appreciate it. Perhaps the device will be self-selecting, and the same apple-cheeked youths will be using it to ping-attack your enterprise network during their later pimply adolescent years. By then we can only hope they will have moved on to Dells.

BTW: In memoriam:

I wuv you Timex Sinclair 1000. Still miss you.

Back in the pre-911 days, I ran a cartoon website called Cartoonlandia which allowed cartoonists to submit their works in a collegial-style atmosphere. It did really well and needed some additional nurturing but a full-time job took away my energies and I had to eventually abandon maintaining the project.

One of the contributors was a fellow called William Bredbeck. His cartoon series, Meow, was perhaps one of the most offbeat, hilarious things I ever read. I am pleased to see he’s put his entire collection back online.

And by fusion I don’t mean tilapia with miso rub sauce. You’ve been officially nerd warned.

One day in the year 1936, an inventor named Philo T. Farnsworth had a conundrum. He could continue working on his novel idea for a electrostatic fusion reactor, or he could work an another novel idea he had for an electronic gun that would spray a beam of electrons onto a phosphor-coated surface inside a vacuum chamber.

He decided to pursue the latter project and this is why he’s known in the history books as the Genius Who Invented Television(tm).

So what happened to his other invention? Farnsworth shelved it, and for a while the US dept. of defense took interest, but ultimately dropped the research. Over 70 years later, Farnsworth’s forgotten fusion reactor design is suddenly developing a storm of interest among fusion researchers, and for it’s promise of the previously unfathomable goal of practical fusion power.

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