Galaxy Zoo is a cool site that gets people to classify thousands of telescope photos of distant galaxies. You get some quick training, pass a test and then start classifying galaxies for them.

From the site:

The project harnesses the power of the internet – and your brain – to classify a million galaxies.
You’ll view parts of the Universe that literally no-one has ever seen before (the photos are taken by a robot and analysed by a computer).

The idea is that if real people are doing the classifications then:

• They will get a pretty accurate classification
• Anything really interesting will be brought to their attention

Also, all this raises awareness which is pretty cool.

I classified a few – this is the most interesting one that I saw. See explanation below if you really want to.

No – that’s not a UFO it’s the path of a satellite.  It is a streak because the telescope has a long exposure to get as much light as possible.  It’s blue because the telescope actually takes 3 pictures – one for red, one for green, and one for blue and then combines them.  The satellite passed while the telescope was taking the blue frame.

It’s strange what some people get good at. People will spend thousands of hours getting unbelievably good at strange things. This is another example of that.

This guy is able to draw a superb rendition of the Mona Lisa in Microsoft Paint – the rubbishy picture editing program that comes with Windows. There are other amazing examples of pictures done in the MS Paint.

I may make fun of the guy, but I will admit that I have on occasion done some ‘MSPainting’ of my own. This is my best work.

MMOG‘s are becoming increasingly popular and although I have never played one, I find them extremely interesting.

An MMOG is a game that is always running and can be joined by hundreds (or often thousand) of players at once. The developers create a persistent online world which players can enter. When you subscribe to one of these games you get an online character (an avatar) which represents you in the online world. A lot of people spend a lot of time (and money) developing these avatars – check this one out.

Then any time you want to play, you can move around in the online world, interact with thousands of other players (all represented by real people) and try to achieve whatever the goals of that game are. For instance in World War II Online there are constantly updated front lines as thousands of players do battle in a virtual Europe.

I think this is extremely cool, because whole worlds populated by (mostly) real people exist on the internet. Whole economies (often linked to the real economy) and societies develop. For instance Second Life

“has its own economy and a currency referred to as Linden Dollars (L$). Though the exchange rate fluctuates, as of February 2007 it is reasonably stable at around L$ 270 to one US dollar.”

These companies make a lot of money too. World of Warcraft has more than 8 million subscribers which at $15 a month turns into monthly revenue of $120 million!

There is just so much to say about all this – but not here (I want to go home!).

Here is a link to a NY Times photo collection of real people and their online avatars. Some interesting combos.

Today (6 June) in 1944 the biggest amphibious invasion in history began when the Allies landed on the coast of Normandy in France. An incredible feat, and a battle which lasted over a month ensued. Although the Nazis fought hard, by the evening of June 6 things weren’t looking too good for them. Especially since Adolf had already started to go completely nutty in his military strategies.

I know it’s geeky but I dig D-Day.

Check out this link to a 720 megapixel photo of Sydney. Your normal camera probably takes pics at about 5 megapixels, so this is some serious resolution. His blog says that he creates these things by stitching together hundreds of individual photos. He must have a mean zoom, a good tripod and some real patience to get it right.

This is a screenshot of part of the zoomed out image.

And this is a zoom in on the bottom left of that screenshot.

He also has links to other photo’s, one at 1500 megapixels which is well worth a look.

I read a lot of news and articles using the brilliant product Google Reader. Reader collects and allows you to view RSS feeds from millions of sites. So each morning I log onto Google Reader and scan through all of the new articles for the day.

One of the cool features of Google Reader is that you can choose to “share” articles that you find interesting. So whenever I see an interesting article that I’m not gonna explicitly blog about -I just click share.

There is a link to my shared articles page on the right (under the heading Blogroll). Check it out from time to time.