My correspondent calls it “Watermarking images in a whole new way”:

After the accident, Eaves spent weeks broiling, baking and blow-drying the camera . . . but it still sloshed. So he decided to see what a soggy Nikon could do, and soon discovered the resurrected camera was creating curious effects in each image.

Got a spam today with the intriguing title “Look, I’m totally into you, I totally want you, but we have dinner plans.”

Isaac Asimov (1920-92) died of AIDS, from a tainted transfusion in 1983. (Locus; Ansible.) Was he the most famous such victim?

Bill Detty asks: was he more famous than Arthur Ashe?

Most Overrated Events of the 20th Century — as chosen by (what else?) a Web poll in 1998-9

Got a spam today for police-seized cars, and gotta admire the symmetry: using ‘legally’ stolen bandwidth to sell ‘legally’ stolen goods.

(They tell you that the cars belonged to “drug kingpins”, which even if it were true would not justify plunder; but four out of five drivers thus robbed at gunpoint are never charged with any offense.)

The Economist (Mar.30) paraphrases a paper on “The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development” (by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson, American Economic Review Dec.2001):

The harder it was for Europeans to settle a region, the greater the culture of exploitation created: finding a foreign land hard to settle, colonists preferred to exploit the natives from afar, rather than to build wealth. By looking at mortality rates of pioneering soldiers, sailors and bishops, the authors found a strong correlation between colonists’ death rates and modern measures of political risk and expropriation. Indeed, the authors estimate that these shortcomings account for nearly all the income gap between Africa and rich countries.

So that’s it! On the way home this evening, I saw a raccoon slip into a sewer-grate.

In other news, frogs (or somethings) have been chirping in chorus at night; I guess they’re in the ditch by the railroad.