Harnessing Light

Significant discovery w/ photonic crystals "shocks physicists":

Claims of "unexpected and stunning new physical phenomena" are rare in the abstract of a reputable scientific paper. But the latest report by photonics crystal pioneer John Joannopoulos and his group at MIT, soon to be published in Physical Review Letters, does not disappoint.

The researchers document the ultimate control over light: a way to shift the frequency of light beams to any desired colour, with near 100 per cent efficiency. "The degree of control over light really is quite shocking," comments photonics expert Eli Yablonovitch at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Read the article at NewScientist.com. [Thanks to jleft for mentioning this].

Google Infrastructure

Here's an interesting IEEE article (in PDF format) on the system architecture and infrastructure at Google, Inc. It's from the March-April 2003 issue of IEEE Micro.

Denounce

Saturday saw a revival of sorts for Denounce Newswire. Two new stories posted there in the past 24 hrs. The first, Internet Pundit Fantasy Camp, got written up by a number of internet pundits, including Doc and Dan. Traffic spiked wonderfully as a result. The second article, "National Do-Not-Vote List Registers 1.2 Million People on its First Day," is a bit more political (and a bit darker in a Handmaid's Tale kind of way), but what the heck.