Weather report

"Six more weeks of Winter"
 -  Punxsutawney Phil, Seer of Seers, 126th Groundhog Day

Free data

If you are at all interested in fair and easy access to government data, this guy will probably become one of your heroes. Be it patents, laws, books in the Library of Congress or just some simple tax information, he wants to have it available for free online so the people who paid for it, the tax-payers, can use it. The above linked speech is a little long; the takeaway is that good things will happen, and money will be saved, if only there was a policy of scanning everything. Just make the data available in bulk; internet volunteers will make sense of it.
He cites several historical bureaucratic leap-forwards which were not expensive, just backed by the will to do it right. He also mentions these IT horror stories, which nicely illustrate how bad things are:

• The Electronic Records Archives (a general government archive) are handled by a meager 100Tb system that cost $250 million, a figure which does not include any backup or working internet connection. The servers are actually physically transported in a van to the various places that supply data and processing.
• The IRS make nonprofit tax returns available only on DVDs. The files are not in searchable form, they are just millions of images. Many of these images contain social security numbers of school children because "A CIO at Treasury told me he thinks they're prohibited by law from redacting those numbers as that would be altering a government document."
• There is a disturbing trend towards agencies being tricked by corporate lawyers when they do try to scan their archived data. Take the case of the Government Accountability Office; a corporation now owns the exclusive rights to the Federal Legislative History.

ac.uk

I notice that there are mutterings about teaching programming in UK schools, which I think is a good thing. At the very least it will help people understand a little more about that thing you have to sit in front of in the office everyday. Fostering early programming interest is also important; I had to be obsessed enough to teach myself until I got formal instruction at college. At least home computers are ubiquitous now; I didn't own a PC till I was 19, and I had to build it myself (amazingly, I did use it for other things than playing Doom). The $25 PC could make a big difference to schools.

LotR Film

Ok, there is a lot of list journalism at this time of year, but this effort is actually interesting: Things You Didn't Know About... The Fellowship of the Ring.  Perhaps half of these things you actually do know, particularly if you are a Peter Jackson fan, but there are some good quotes like this one from Sir Ian:

If you are suddenly dropped by a helicopter on top of a mountain on which no man has ever walked before, which I was, and you're trudging in Gandalf's gear through two feet of snow, feeling like that Kiwi, Edmund Hillary, going up Everest, no acting is required...

Also, ponder this without your brain hurting - The Beatles apparently wanted to star in a version of Fellowship. Directed by Kubrick. o_O

Lightning

Artificial lightning can be created in the lab with tesla coils, but apparently a much higher voltage than natural lightning is required. These guys think this is because existing tesla coils are not big enough, so they are going to build two 10-story high coils and send arcs across a football field. If you think this is great, then you can contribute to the project. They have also built a wirelessly-powered vehicle (a chair on wheels), which thankfully runs during "arc free" mode. True steampunk-style Mad Science!

Influential

A games site just wrote an article about Why Quake Changed Games Forever. Quake is an old game that I used to play a lot; it looks terribly brown and pixelated now but that is not the point - the point was shooting at monsters/friends in a true 3d world, which was technology years ahead of its time. Also, because John Carmack wrote it, it was super-easy to mod, which we did instead of writing college assignments. I see Romero gets a bit defensive in the article; he has his reasons *cough Daikatana*. The most amusing part is the the fact that Quake code still survives in games today. How many games can claim that?

Asteroids

A while ago there was a website I enjoyed using where you helped astronomers categorize galaxies, Galaxy Zoo. This site has now expanded to other projects, which are collectively called the Zooniverse (disappointingly, no, I don't think it is a Mighty Boosh reference). Now they not only have have projects that involve astronomical data from the moon, sun and Milky Way but there is also a weather one, and one based on transcribing old papyri. But my favorite at the moment is Ice Hunters, where you check highly-processed photos for possible asteroids (more technically "Kuiper Belt Objects"). Not for everyone, I'm sure, but it's kind of relaxing for me.