Riders On The Storm...

...played on a harp [caution: 3.5MB quicktime movie]. I like it. Shame it's only a couple of short excerpts, not the whole thing, but the lady (entirely reasonably) wants us to buy her recordings. I'd be even more tempted if it were on CD...

[Link: BoingBoing again]

Computer Programming skillz...

Joel Spolsky does it again. For the bulk of this essay, he's spot on - I'm presently working on a project which was initially designed by a bunch of people who read the tutorials and thought they knew it all. Ugh.

[link: my chromatic sibling]

mind-boggling numbers of the day.

Gamma Ray Bursts are reckoned to be 10¹⁷ times as bright as the sun. If you're unlucky enough to be in the 5-degree-wide beam that this energy is emitted in, a rough calculation leads me to conclude that the Minimum Safe Distance is of the order of a few tens or hundreds of light years. Given that the energy arrives as Gamma- and X-Rays, I may be a bit off here at least as far as macroscopic life is concerned, since I Am Not A Radiobiologist.

Still, that's still a mind-bogglingly big bang. Good thing we've only observed them in other galaxies, then.

[Source: Scientific American, Dead Tree Edition, Dec 2002]

How useful is that?

Windows Calculator has a "square root" button on the Standard view, but not the Scientific view. "Scientists" are obviously supposed to be cunning enough to know how to do it with the "x^y" button.

web browsers...

OneStat.com is reporting that mozilla now has a giddy 1.1% of the global browser market. Including the mozilla-based Netscape 7 takes it to 1.7%, which ties up well with the 1.8% reported by thecounter.com.

At this rate mozilla will take over the world in about a century.

Microsoft now controls how 95% of the world sees the World Wide Web. I wouldn't find that sentence any less depressing if any other entity was substituted for Microsoft.

[link: MozillaZine]

This one slipped under my radar...

Apparently, John Ashcroft has granted the US Department Of Justice the right to eavesdrop on conversations between people in custody and their lawyers. It appears that this means that defence lawyers will be placed in a situation where they can't talk to their client in confidence, which means that, under their professional code of conduct, they can't talk to them at all. Whoops, there goes the sixth amendment.

[link: Kuro5hin]