Ed Felten from the Freedom to Tinker blog has written a post with Princeton senior Sauhard Sahi called Census of Files Available via BitTorrent. The survey takes a random sample of files available on a trackerless BitTorrent system. The article is full of caveats--discussion happening in the comments--but does dig into the likely copyright status of the works they found.

From Boing Boing

They have evolved

Great and somewhat pertinent cartoon.

A wearable conditioning device that detects if you're smiling and provides pain feedback if you're not. Frowning creates intense pain but a full smile leaves you pain free! The first in a series of Tools for Improved Social Inter-Acting.

Apparently.

jQuery can pretty much do anything you can think of. All you need is a creative imagination and some time to learn the simple and intuitive API.

In this article, we share with you some innovative uses of jQuery in animating web design elements. You’ll read about some interesting techniques, tutorials, and examples that will show you how to create similar effects on your own websites and web apps.

It's pretty sleak.

What if all the Large Hadron Collider's recent woes are more than bad luck and technical problems? Two noted physicists speculate that the future may be pushing back on the LHC to avert the disaster of observing the Higgs boson.

The quest to observe the Higgs boson has certainly been plagued by its share of troubles, from the cancellation of the Superconducting Supercollider in 1993 to the Large Hadron Collider's streak of technical troubles. In fact, the projects have suffered such bad luck that Holger Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto wonder if it isn't bad luck at all, but future influences rippling back to sabotage them. In papers like "Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal" and "Search for Future Influence From LHC," they put forth the notion that observing the Higgs boson would be such an abhorrent event that the future is actually trying to prevent it from happening.

More from this article can be found here. Interesting stuff.

Agile is a style of...you know, I couldn't be bothered reading this article. It's about coding.

To give you a clue how boring this is, here's a excerpt.

tl;dr - give Agile a try and see if you like it. If it doesn't work at your company, they'll drop it soon enough. If they don't or you still hate it, leave.

I've had very successful experiences with Agile and some not-so-successful ones as well. Here's what I've noticed in general:

1. it ONLY works when absolutely everyone is committed, including QA and the product owners and ESPECIALLY the customer (or customer proxy if an actual customer is not feasible)

2. the "best developers" who leave as a result of going Agile typically aren't all that good. I've experienced this first hand and usually their code, although working, is unmaintainable, untestable, and difficult to read

3. Implementing Agile 100% immediatley is often not successful. Unless you're starting something completely new and ETC

If you still want to read it, then I suggest you avail yourself of a inflatable woman as real ones are somewhat out of your league.

Plus you can build it yourself!

More here.

They ARE coming!

So do I and millions of others and you can wade in here, deep into controversy

I have no idea what a gnook is, who is it, what they are, what they represent. All I know is they have an endless habit of placing a 'n' after every word which begins with 'g'.

Gnerds.

Twitter is one of the highlights of the year, with an enormous growth of 1082% per day. But those who are on there seem to forget that the people they are writing about can actually read what they put in the timeline...whoops

The best and the worst 3D graphics on PlayStation, Saturn and N64. Now>>

From Metafilter...
The Inamo restaurant in London's fashionable SoHo district isn't known for its splendid food or accommodating waitresses. Instead, this new Asian fusion eatery is getting raves for its use of a touch pad-projection system that allows diners to send food orders directly to the chefs and makes the dining experience fully interactive. It's all one graphic application, with new iconography for signs and menus, graphic wallpaper and tablecloths, shopfront etched patterns and illuminated screens.

AMD are the main competitors to Intel, since the demise, in my opinion wrongly, of Apples 'G' range. However, in the last day or so, AMD have mentioned they're claims about power usage to the CPU may have been...um...well, optimistic. Or possibly fictional.

iDracula.

One of the most innovative things in the last few months is twitter (you can follow me on there as well) - this is a list of tools which can help you make the mostof your 140 characters

Well, how interesting can the net get?

I'm crap at games, but this seems ok.

The fractal Bear

A guide to swearing with Mozilla.org