The Lost Realm

Finally, someone has found an application for image recognition that doesn't suck. By combining an electromagnetic latched catdoor with a PC, their cat is refused entry to the house when it is carrying anything in its mouth. In particular, the cat is refused entry when it is carrying dead (or partially dead) things in its mouth.

While I'm not sure that most of us need to keep skunks from entering our homes, this is definitely a winner. If my cats were allowed outdoors, I know I'd want to buy one. I certainly hope they've got a patent.

Once again, congratulations to those paying attention. Yes, I have been missing for a few days. My wife has been quite ill and had to spend some time in hospital. For those who are really paying attention, yes, the baby is okay. Luckily we caught it in time.

Now that Debs and The Bean are feeling a little better (hooray!), I'll hopefully get to post some of the things I've been finding over the last few days. Prepare to be underwhelmed.

For some time now, there has been a secret war for the top ranking hit when searching Google for scientology. The Scientologists have been using a multitude of microsites to influence their site's ranking, while others have been linking to a popular anti-scientology site using the keyword “scientology“.

The Religious Technology Center and Bridge Publications (parts of the Church of Scientology) have just forced Google to remove almost all the links to xenu.net from their database. According to Google's email, the links were removed because of violation of copyright.

Even though xenu.net have a right to oppose this in court, it seems astounding that Google could be forced to remove information from their databases. After all, the URLs and page titles are already publically available on xenu.net's website, and the rankings are simply Google's opinions on relevance to the search keywords. How is this a violation of copyright against the Church of Scientology on Google's behalf?

If you're one of the lucky generation, like myself, that grew up playing Space Invanders and Pac-Man on an Atari 2600, you'll love this Atari site that includes rarity information, screenshots, scanned manuals and ROMs. They've even gone to the effort of scanning in the cartridges themselves so you can remember what they look like (if you don't still own them).

Excuse me while I lapse into a nostalgic trance.

Must… have… super-cool virtual keyboard.

This has to be the most geeky, and yet most cool gadget I've seen all year. Not only is it a virtual keyboard that can be used on any surface (except, possibly, for a cat), but it doubles as a virtual mouse.

I'm not sure why I've never heard of this before, but there is quite a case for Hamlet being an allegory for the two competing cosmological models of Thomas Digges and Tycho Brahe. Is it really possible that Shakespeare (or was it Marlowe?) was trying to make a point about astrophysics?

The author has a list of further publications on the topic on his homepage, including several fully referenced papers in quite respectable journals.