To thrive, Brick and mortar retailers must offer only the biggest sellers. So movie theatres only show the latest runs and Walmart only carries the biggest selling CDs.

But micromarketing and recommendation engines allow the "tail end" of the market (i.e. the non-big-sellers) an opportunity to enjoy access to large markets. Chris Anderson proposes the future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream.

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Scientists at Sandia Labs have produced plasmas that exceed 2 billion degrees Kelvin -- hotter than the interiors of stars. This technology could eventually lead towards smaller, safer, less costly nuclear fusion plants.

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Olgui has a great collection of science, art, animals and nature posts.

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Each player moves one of his pieces, then fires his (real) laser. Laser bounces among mirrored surfaces, and if a piece with a non-mirrored surface is struck, it's removed from the game. Win by eliminating the other players Pharoah. Interesting concept.

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Jeff Han and others built a touch-screen capable of reporting multiple points of contact and associated software to work with it. The screen is capable of responding to one person using both hands to manipulate objects on the screen, and also multiple people working on the screen at once. See the video for a good example of usage possibilities.

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Electric Sheep is a free screen saver run by thousands of people all over the world. When these computers "sleep", the screen saver comes on and the computers communicate with each other via the internet to share the work of creating morphing abstract animations.

Anyone watching one of these computers may vote for their favorite animations using the keyboard. The more popular sheep live longer and reproduce according to a genetic algorithm with mutation and cross-over.

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LandSerf is a free Geographical Information System (GIS). It's software for visualizing and analyzing various surfaces. Written in Java.

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8ight has a fantastic collection of science-related links, along with great reviews. Very nice presentation.

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The Long Now Foundation has been building a clock that will keep accurate time for 10,000 years.

This page has many pictures of the components that comprise the first prototype. As part of it's development, a mechanical binary computer was developed, part of which is pictured here.

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Manuel Lima built a collection of nearly 300 complex networks and the way that each has been mapped to best visually represent the information in the clearest ways. These networks are in many fields, from art to food to computer systems.

The map shown here represents routing through the Internet.

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