If you don't already know about the hoax that is diamonds, a good starting piece of education is Edward Jay Epstein's work. Gem diamonds are not rare or valuable for industrial purposes, and the company that keeps the price artificially high (DeBeers) has been prohibited from doing business in the U.S. under anti-trust laws for decades. The fact that the people who actually do the mining make no money and the fact that "blood diamonds" are used to fund wars in poorer parts of the world only makes the whole situation worse.

So, it's nice to see companies providing alternative sources. Through a process called "chemical vapor deposition," diamonds can be produced of a size and quality almost impossible to find in nature. The price per carat is around $5. (original link to blog here from Teeg).

Subjects ranging from the Singularity to ancient Egypt to High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography (such as the picture here).

Zhivago puts a lot of effort into creating composite images of various sites he reviews, and the result is impressive.

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Sorry; I expect vi jokes don't appeal to many. This cracks me up though.

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John Ivers of rural Indiana built his own roller coaster in his backyard. It goes over the tool shed, under an elm tree and around the rose bushes in 30 seconds. He calls it the Blue Flash.

Update: the link's been moved here. (and the original cool picture's disappeared.)

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Peter Klausler used evolutionary software techniques to devise the perfect computer keyboard layout, and came to the conclusion (so far) that he couldn't beat Dvorak.

Once upon a time, I forced myself to switch to Dvorak, but the switch was painful. Initally, it slowed me down substantially for the few weeks while I was switching (I type around 80+ wpm on qwerty, so going back to square one is a dramatic impact). But the bigger problem was that once I learned it, it was difficult to type on other peoples keyboards. So, I switched back.

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PBS Nova show on string theory. Interesting, and very available to us common people, but not very deep.

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Scale walls like Spiderman. (link from ar0cketman)

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CAD Circuit Boards

Eagle3D takes a soft circuit board layout and renders it in 3D using PovRay. (link from ar0cketman)

This image seems to be on every stumble page out there, but the article is absolutely fascinating. This woman is a composite created by a computer, designed to be beautiful.

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Google search for "Tiananmen" (as in Tiananmen Square). On the right is the view in China, and on the Left is outside. (from azkitchen)

To see the two screens for yourself, go to image.google.cn/images?q=tiananmen for the version in China and images.google.com/images?q=tiananmen for the outside version.

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