Three quick, random posts: A neat image, Search for Aliens From Your Desktop, and something terribly, wonderfully geeky

First, a pretty nifty electron microscope picture of flower pollen from several different plants, including lily, primrose, hollyhock, and castor bean.

Secondly, I don't know about you, but I search for aliens from desktop. No, really. SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is scanning the skies with large radio telescopes, with the goal of
discovering the existence of other civilizations in the cosmos. This brings in a good amount of data, but they don't have a supercomputer. Instead, they organized a network of volunteers, whose computers all interpret data and send it back to the main facility. The computers only do work when they aren't being used, or when they are in screen saver mode. When banded together these volunteer computers have the combined computing power of a pretty damn big supercomputer. In fact, when combined, it beats out the world's current supercomputer champ, IBM's Roadrunner. (In this sense, it's like a computer virus, but for good.)

If you're interested, here's a link: http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/

And now for something truly funny, but embarrassing:

So let's say you're like me, and you love poetry and books, but you also have a soft spot for space exploration and Star Trek. Let's say you're rather excited for the upcoming Star Trek movie. Now let's say you REALLY wanted to get into the movie, not just by dressing up in Vulcan ears or by aping Scotty's famous brogue. Well now, there are Star Trek fragrances.

One, called "Tiberius," seems markedly uninteresting, as I'm no great Captain Kirk fan. Those Travelocity commercials just ended it for me. And that duet with Ben Folds? WTF?

But another is called "Red Shirt," in homage to the redshirt crew members who'd die in the first few minutes of your average Original Series episode. It carries the tagline, "Because tomorrow may never come." Now that's fantastic, Mr. Bombastic, yes?















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