On a lighter note...

(Este post en español.)

Some other things I learned while perusing three months worth of blogs...

* Second Life is becoming more and more like a real country, and one that appears in the newspapers more than some of the traditional ones. Not surprisingly, Reuters opened a news agency there. Sweden has become the first country to open a virtual embassy in SL. There is even a terrorist movement in-world! Last but not the least, there is also science on display in SL; in my brief visit (yes, I joined, I'm curious!) I didn't manage to find any, but now I see that Paul Decelles provides some useful pointers. Rob Knop of Galactic Interactions gave a talk there, and promised to write about SL in the future.

* The truth came out.

* The nice Powers of 10 video was featured in a lot of blogs, but only in The Daily Transcript did I find Simpsons' version too.

* 17 was found to be the most random number. Though, of course, with randomness you can never be sure.

* There is some hope, after so many promises, that stem cells will finally start to deliver.

* I was really impressed by the story about chimps making spears (and I don't understand why the whole planet is not speaking about it). But how could this even more shocking discovery go almost unnoticed?

* Another bit of natural history which wasn't highlighted as it deserved: The march of the librarians (via Improbable Research). Forget penguins. Al Gore was lucky; this documentary should have been nominated and awarded instead of his talk.

* Via Digg: how would the creatures imagined by children look if they could draw just a little bit better? Perhaps like this?

* Of course, there where plenty of quizzes waiting for me in the feeds. Thus I learned that I'll die from an Unlikely Illness ("only to find out after death that eating more broccoli would have cured you"), that I'm Einstein ("a detached intellectual whose ideas saved/will destroy the world"), that my dominant intelligence is linguistic, that I'm Dr. Doom ("blessed with smarts and power but burdened by vanity"), that I know the Bible 95%, that I'm a mad King of France, that my brain falls exactly in the middle of the male-female continuum, that I'm William Gibson, and that I'm a loser (sorry about that, William).