Wednesday link dump

Because I have nothing better to do right now, it’s a good time to dump the interesting links that I’ve been accumulating.

  • While radioactive hunks of matter are often portrayed as glowing with a green tinge, we all know that’s not actually true.. unless there’s Cherenkov Radiation involved, as in many nuclear reactors- that’s not green, though.
    Glowy. Also radioactive.
  • Google have (for now) won the suit against them by Viacom regarding copyrighted content being uploaded to YouTube, which is good news for everyone except maybe Viacom.  It’s still fun to read choice excerpts of correspondence involving all sorts of mudslinging in the case (warning: lots of curses).
  • OpenStreetMap is a neat project to create free maps, similar to Google Maps, Bing Maps, etc.  Cool stuff, and all the map data is Creative Commons, meaning it could be used for any number of shiny projects.
  • There might be life on Saturn’s moon, Titan, observations courtesy of the NASA/ESA/ASI Cassini mission, which has been bouncing around the Saturnian system since mid-2004 after launch way back in 1997.  It’s far from a sure thing, but it’s really exciting that predictions of how life might work on Titan have been supported by observation.
  • This study (PDF) of internet routing to previously unused blocks is quite interesting, especially the numerous SIP streams pointed at 1.1.1.1 (section 5.1).
  • The EFF (kind of like the ACLU of internet, if you’re not familiar with them) recently put out the HTTPS Everywhere extension for Firefox.  When it’s this easy to lock down your web traffic, there’s no reason not to.  What’s your excuse?
  • Huge things are cool.  Want to feel tiny?  Go ask Wikipedia about the local supercluster, then consider how tiny everything humanity knows is, relative to that.  When you’re done scrabbling about in your own Total Perspective Vortex, consider epic timescales for extra kicks.  Yeah.. cosmology is awesome.
* Exasecond timescales are impressive, but then there's the depressing concept of the [universe's heat death](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe).  [What if](http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html) there were a way to [reverse entropy](http://www.multivax.com/)? * How did I not know [this album](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_Empires) exists?  There are some really good mixes on it..

..and that’s several weeks of accumulated cool-things.  Enjoy.