In case I never mentioned him before, Terry Bisson is never short of amazing. He wrote the story "They're Made Out of Meat" that went around the net a few years ago. Now he has a new book out, Numbers Don't Lie.
raph: Shouldn't recentlog.html, at least, be mentioned in /robots.txt? (Any of you-all mentioning spammer accounts, by the way, please don't link to them. That's what they want you to do, it bumps their age-pay ank-ray.)
chalst: I'm sorry to have missed you... I'm back in California already.
Here's my cranky but improbably beautiful Mars picture of the week (NASA/JPL/Arizona State University). It's an infrared shot from the night side; blue is dust & sand, red is rock (olivine, they say). In the caption, NASA insists (rather endearingly) that those ditches and pits are collapsed lava tubes. Can you imagine a lava tube with a ceiling two miles across? No wonder they collapsed. :-) Also on the subject of crankiness (my own), I've found some really fascinating Arxiv papers by Martin Lopez-Corredoira:
