Wow... Forget quantum interference, it looks as if optical interference works as well, according to this University of Rochester Press Release...

Not been doing much with this, lately. First blogger seemed to be broken (turned out later that it was) and then the server all this is hosted on was either down or misbehaving. As far as I can tell, though, what I'm writing now is being stored, it's just not getting transferred across to weblog.akicif.net. Which seems, somehow, to have impacted my desire to get stuff down in writing. I guess I could go back and add in the various things I'd been going to mention over the last few weeks but didn't.

Wandering around the web, as you do, I came across a link to the first weblog I'd ever heard of, Vicki Rosenzweig's Yet Another Weblog. So why didn't I start one then? Access, I guess, and the belief that I was still going to get a zine out Real Soon Now.

Continuing the slightly skiffy theme of today's links, there's the International Dark Sky Association. No, they're not a fanclub for the old secret history/X-files wannabe TV series, but people trying to reclaim the night skies...

And while I'm about it, the BBC's Science Playground has a Virtual Theremin...

Wow... Space is big, you know, really big, but it doesn't take that many steps down in powers of 10 until you end up nose to nose with a neutron... Serious sensawunda for a Thursday morning... Of course, it's a rip-off of the old film, but...

Just read:

Terry Pratchett's Thief of Time -- again, serious thought-provoking literary-type stuff disguised as fluffy fantasy. The only problem now is waiting a year for the next one (see also all the other series-based authors I'm reading).

Ah... This looks rather like something I've been looking for: Does Netscape 6 Break Your Table Layouts? : evolt.org, Code. With a bit of luck, I can fix the NN6-based problems at work without having to break NN4.x...

The photographer, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, turns out to have been a chemist, leading Jenny to comment on the underemployment of Russian chemists... (Borodin was a chemist who composed in his spare time, or when too ill to work in the lab - leading to his friends expressing their best wishes for a slow recovery).

Who would have thought it? Colour photographs of Czarist Russia. Beautiful stuff, done by combining three images taken through appropriate filters.

Oh dear, oh dear... Someone's finally implemented RFC1149...

Yes, I know... it's been ages, but what with Rob being in hospital, and sorting out stuff related to that with school, I've not done the Grand Catch-up I intended to.

Still, having seen him off to school (and chased Tara off to work), I'm indulging myself with a little newsreading. And what do I find, but a paper that gives plausible explanations for firewalking, gargling with N₂(l) and the trick my old science teacher did with molten lead: Boiling and the Leidenfrost Effect. Oops:I should have mentioned that it's a PDF document.

Guess I'll do that catch-up later...