Cleaning House

So I decided to clean up a bit around here. New image for blogger -- at the top of Schmittenhohe in Austria, as opposed to the bottom of the Kilauea-Iki crater in Hawaii. It also appears that my lovely wife has simultaneously discovered blogging and Twitter, meaning that I need to start tweeting in order to keep ahead on the technical curve. My twitter is available here and also has a fresh image.

I would also like to draw attention to the "Cool Stuff from the Interweb" on the side (note: actual cool title forthcoming). This is a list of items I've shared from my Google Reader. I like this arrangement -- I can share cool stuff without having to comment on it. Enjoy.

Science News Roundup

Best of science news, straight to your RSS readers:

• A new algorithm for disc packing, which seems like a decent approach but also more than a bit heuristic. Without getting too derailed, I'm always amazed at how much theoretical computer science scoffs at the work necessary to solve real problems. This certainly seems more reasonable than strict, no-regret optimization.
• A new experiment finds that Dark Matter may be more complicated than previously thought. Pretty neat. Any article suggesting the existence of an as-yet-hypothetical "dark force" has to be an interesting read.
• Kepler launches successfully. I know lots of people were biting their nails about this one after the recent failure of the NASA OCO. Unfortunately, such failures are part of life with satellites. I'm glad to see that Kepler was successful and hopefully we'll see some excellent exoplanet data in the next couple years.

Snow in DC

So I woke up this morning to be greeted by this -- at least five inches of snow, probably more. Now I'm from Eastern Washington, so snow is something I'm used to. Since I moved to the east coast, however, I've developed a less-than-positive view of the stuff, largely because most people seem to turn into idiots when it's on the ground. It's going to be fun heading in to work today. Wish me luck.