This would be great for blind people. But its touted applications? Marketing and advertising.

Scientists have to follow the money these days. There's no such thing as research for the good of Earthlingkind; it has to make dollaz. That's the sort of thing that keeps me awake at night. Well, metaphorically.

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Stan Lee to create new heroes for Disney

Smilin' Stan innovated the "I'm a superhero but I have everyday-Joe problems" formula. (The buck for waaangsty superheroes stops with him, though the whole trend for 'realism' through tackling 'issues' has helped send the industry down the pan.) But he was always a bad writer. *chuckle*

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Crackdown on lunar-fuelled crime

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Banana sammiches get dog off hook

Nicest thing ever: peanut butter and banana sandwiches. *covetcovetcovet* </Basaltine>

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Hip hip riverhorse!

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It's a race to the chequered flag! A sastruga sprint! Will it be a photo finish?

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Fantastic penguin photos.

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I've heard this before, but it amuses me.

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The 'no kidding, Sherlock' news of the day:
Exercising disruptive pupils calms them down.

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If you're a city-dweller, this is practically porn.

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Cuuuutie!

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Ask re-writes web search rules

The research trainer yesterday tipped me off to Myriad as a particularly good aggregate search engine. (I like the way it weights results, although the colours are a bit headachey for me - I'll definitely play with it some more.)

She also recommended Clusty for broad 'topic' searches because it's good at refining your enquiry: you searched for dogs, but did you want dog breeds, puppies for sale, pictures of dogs, boarding kennels, trainers, medicine...? (I search very specifically - "golden retriever joint care" - so don't imagine I'll have much use for that feature.)

There's also Alltheweb, which she recommended as far better than Google for non-text searches (image, video), and Textmap which is an interesting look at what the hot topics are in the blogosphere, with a visual representation of topic relationships. (Visual representations make my head hurt. I wish my sensory and cognitive weirdnesses didn't make me such a fogey!)

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Apparently one of the nonentities has just been kicked out of Big Brother tv series for using a "racially offensive word" - the N word, to be more specifically allusive. There was a big race row in the last series of Celebrity BB, so Endemol are running scared of public outcry. This has worrying implications. Yeah, we all know that in the real world a white person just can't use that term where someone black (or Hispanic, unless you're J-Lo) can. So yeah it was a dumb thing to do. But ye gods.

Longer article about the word.

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And a non-BBC report on why the game industry is going south.

Let me just make myself very unpopular to my own industry (broadcasting and intarwebs) for a moment...

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