The Aptly Named, Sam's Blog

“Earth from Above” is a great collection of aerial photos by Yann Bertrand taken all over the world. Some are just spectacular.

I like animation. Sometime ago I came across the XIAOXIAO MOVIE website. It features many stick figure animations involving kung-fu. They are awesome. Today there is a post on BoingBoing involving stick figures. Oh, and also see this stick figure recreation of the Weapon of Choice video by Fatboy Slim. Enjoy!

According to this post:
- Technorati is tracking 3 million blogs, including this one.
- A new blog is created every 5.8 seconds.
- 275,000 individual posts everyday. This is one of them.
- People are moving away from the TV to the computer. I know, I am.

I think this is probably going to continue well into the next year. Even more if Yahoo! and MSN provide blogging services and Google integrates its services.

According to the website, “20Q.net is an experiment in artificial intelligence.” I found it here on Dina’s blog. It really is quite good.

Last weekend I started reading about the imminent arrival of Cassini at Saturn. I’m the casual space enthusiast who doesn’t go to space.com everyday but gets quite excited when something is happening up/out there. Even more when the event is influenced by humans. Last night Cassini made it and is now in orbit around the planet. Woohoo! Congratulations to everyone involved.
Saturn Orbit Insertion | Metafilter

Just noticed this entry on WorldChanging about the Digital Library of India. Quote from the site “The mission is to create a portal for the Digital Library of India which will foster creativity and free access to all human knowledge. As a first step in realizing this mission, it is proposed to create the Digital Library with a free-to-read, searchable collection of one million books, predominantly in Indian languages, available to everyone over the Internet”. Cool!

The most awesome thing happened today and it’s all over the place. SpaceShipOne successfully landed after a brief visit to space. Congratulations to the Scaled Composites people! Commercial space travel is looking closer than ever.
Time to start a savings account for the ticket :-)
CNN.com - Private craft soars into space, history - Jun 21, 2004

I haven’t blogged for a while and now I’m back. I traveled to Seattle and to Chicago over the last two weeks to visit family and friends. Logged back into blogger today and was surprised to find an invitation to join Gmail. So, now I have a 1 GB Gmail account. Cool! Dunno how much I will use it. Let’s see.

Here’s a pronumciation guide to the characters and expressions used in Unix. It’s a few years old (dated 29th April, 1997) but Unix is much older. (Seen on Metafilter).
pronunciation guide for unix

A new episode of The Adventures of Seinfeld & Superman is available now. These are so cool. The new one is called “Hindsight”. Thanks Jerry!

Ever since I switched recently and for a little while before that too I have been following news about Apple. There is an interesting article on Robert X. Cringley’s “I, Cringley” page about the future of Apple following the creation of a separate iPod division. Mr. Cringley evaluates it in relation to a 20 year old quote from Steve Jobs. Interesting items include “What most people don’t know is that Apple, with the assistance of Intel, a few years ago ported all its software to run on Intel’s Pentium processors."
Divide and Conquer: Why Apple Has an iPod Division

Today I registered on Audioscrobbler. It is a community of people sharing information and stats on what everyone is listening to. Generated data is available under a Creative Commons License. The client is great. Once installed it quietly works in the background, gathering data from the media player (in my case, iTunes) and transmitting it to the server. My account is here.

There was recently a post on Metafilter about Jon Stewart’s commencement address to William and Mary college. The speech is quite funny. Here are links to that one and other funny commencement addresses:
Jon Stewart’s (‘84) Commencement Address
Conan O’Brien’s Commencement Speech to the Havard Class of 2000

Everything you ever wanted to know about the awwesooome Homestar Runner in a convenient Wiki format, editable by fans. (Seen on Metafilter)
Homestar Runner Wiki

Just like pursuing any academic goal, pursuing a PhD has its own set of requirements. One of these is the actual writing of the thesis, which I hope to do someday. Maybe then this HOWTO will help.
How-To: Write your doctoral thesis || kuro5hin.org
Also, check out Jorge Cham’s www.phdcomics.com

Today, Sony released the PSP and Nintendo released the DS at E³. I think the PSP looks much cooler than the DS and would love to get my hands on it. Dunno if or when that will happen but it would be cool.
E3: Sony PSP High Resolution Shots and Final Specs
E3: Nintendo DS High Res Shot

This post marks the beginning of a blog that I hope to update regularly. Of course, if I don’t, then I will delete this blog after some time and this post will never have existed. Well, it may be archived on some server somewhere on the web, but then that is inevitable.