This illustration, from 13th C France (called "God The Geometer"), appeared briefly during an episode of Nova that we were watching a few days ago. It was about how cathedrals were built - arches, buttresses, vaulted ceilings, etc..

That thing Jesus is measuring, doesn't it look like a free-hand rendering of a second-hand description of a mini-Mandelbrot or Julia set?

main()
{
   float C,l,c,o,O,I=-20;char _;for(;I++<20;puts(""))
   for(O=-46;O<14;putchar(_?42:32),O++)for(C=l=_=0;o
   =l*l,c=C*C,l=2*C*l+I/20,C=c-o+O/20,o+c<4&&++_;);
}

Since reaching a deal to buy NBC Universal in Dec. 2009, Comcast has increased its PAC contributions to election campaigns by 61% over the amount it gave in the same period leading up to the 2008 elections.

From December 2009, when the deal was reached, through August 2010, Comcast's contributions to federal candidates and political parties rose to $1.1 million from $682,450 in the same period two years earlier, Federal Election Commission records show. The money came from the company-run political action committee that funnels donations from employees....

The donations come as the FCC and other regulatory bodies go through the process of reviewing the deal amid concern that the country's largest cable company would be in control of a major broadcast network.

According to the FEC report, Comcast donated funds to 91 of the 99 House members and three of the five senators who wrote the FCC in support of the NBC sale.

Mexican beer dermatitis

I'm sitting here, eatin mah soup, picking around the tomatoes - cause I don't really like chunks of tomato - when it occurred to me that I should be able to filter this soup somehow, to remove the tomato. And the filter that I came up with was:

Select * From Soup Where Ingredient <> Tomato

Yes, my first impulse was to think of soup as a database table of ingredients. Which is another way of saying that I need another week off. Computers are rotting my brain.

Here's the list of the top 15 things which, according to Google, are destroying America:

1. Illegal Immigration
2. Obama
3. Militarism
4. The Fed's Zero Rate Policy
5. the War Against Drugs is Destroying ...
6. Liberalism
7. ZIRP
8. Lowell Kuvin
9. Political Correctness
10. Twilight
11. Hate
12. the Partisan War
13. the Obama Marxist Liberal agenda
14. Christianity
15. This communist, Muslim sympathizing mulatto ******

Of This Soup, I Approve

New research suggests that many congenitally deaf people possess two types of extraordinary sight: Expanded peripheral vision and the ability to detect motion imperceptible to the hearing.

For example, when people with normal hearing stand at a clock's center and stare at the 12, they probably can see the 10 and 2. But those with congenital deafness typically can also detect the 9 and 3, says Stephen Lomber, an associate professor and researcher with the Centre for Brain and Mind at the University of Western Ontario.

Also, deaf people recognize when an object that appears stationary to those with hearing is actually moving very slowly.

2 Years In Prison - A Man's Story

Researchers at Technical University of Ilmenau in Germany have developed “diminished reality” software that can delete an object from live, full-motion video.

The software first reduces the resolution of the object, removes the image, and improves the result (similar to using a smudge tool in Photoshop), then incrementally increases the resolution, improving the result, until the original resolution is restored.

It repeats that for each frame of the video in real time, delivering the final image in 40 ms.

Pretty impressive.

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Don't Burn Quran, Win Car!