Cool. They're trying it again.

Cosmos I - take 2: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=96&ncid=96&e=1&u=/space/20030806/sc_space/ridingthesunmaidenflightloomsforsolarsailsatellite

The Planetary Society is launching a satellite which is propelled by a solar sail. A slow, but exceedingly cheap way of moving around in space.

The coolest thing about this is that it's a purely civilian group doing this, developing the technology with no government money, and launching it using an old submarine-launched ICBM that Russia is launching for them...

More detail and better hype can be found here.

Random pictures

Snarfed from stonemirror's journal.
You know of digital cameras, right? You know how different models have different names, that always follow a convention of +<5 numbers, incremented sequentially>. Apparently, so many people have them, and so many people upload their images without changing the filenames, that Google has quite a lot of images with those names.

So, of course, diddly.com created a little program that will randomly generate a digital-camera-style filename, then feed that name into Google image search.

Zoinks!

Arnold Schwarzenegger: Finally, a public official who can explain the administration's social policies in the original German.
--Bill Maher by way of rhonan by way of Wil Wheaton