It’s November 1, which makes today the first day of “National Novel Writing Month”! If you haven’t heard of it before, this is the month when the brave, the daring and the possibly insane bust out their word processors and write that novel they’ve been meaning to all their life. It’s open to anyone who feels like doing it. The only requirement is that you must write a fiction story of some sort consisting of at least 50,000 words, all of which must be entirely written during the month of November. Short of that, pretty much anything goes.

Scary as it seems, 50,000 words isn’t that much when you break it down: It’s about 1500-2000 words per day–two or three long blog posts, to put it in perspective. It’s a tough but achievable goal even for the gainfully employed. The novels aren’t judged in any way except for meeting the minimum word count, so it doesn’t matter how bad your writing is. The point is just to get it done. Surprisingly, though, quite a few of the novels written in past years have gone on to be published, including the New York Times best seller “Water for Elephants”… presumably with some serious editing after the nanowrimo event, of course. 🙂

I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to participate–yeah, I know, I’d better decide soon, soon being now–but if I do, I know exactly what I’m going to write: a cheesy sci-fi novel. Didn’t see that coming, didja? 🙂

A friend at work just showed me this, and boy is it cool. “Seam Carving” is a new algorithm for image retargeting. Image retargeting is an alternative to scaling and cropping, but it is content-aware. Scaled images suffer from the problem that the re-sized content may be too small to see. Cropped images may eliminate important content. Image retargeting solves both problems by keeping the image elements the same size and simply eliminating the “unimportant” parts of the image.

Graphic artists occasionally modify images this way by hand when doing page layouts for magazines–think of it like a visual form of copy-fitting–but an automated approach opens a world of possibilities. The number of of potential practical applications are immense, and include everything from dynamic web page re-flowing to widescreen-to-standard aspect texture fitting for games.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIFCV2spKtg 350 292]
A better version of the video as well as the research paper can be found on Dr. Shamir’s home page. What’s really neat is how straight-forward the method seems to be. The paper is well worth the read if you are interested in graphics algorithms.

If you’d like to play around with this technique on your own images, someone’s already implemented the algorithm in Flash.

Sometimes you run across something so disgusting you just have to share. I already traumatized my co-workers with this one, but then I realized I hadn’t shared it with you yet, my fine readers.

Cymothoa exigua is, simply put, the nastiest parasite ever. I ran into this bugger studying crustaceans for a project at work. Cymothoa exigua is the only known parasite that functionally replaces a complete organ, in this case the tongue. It is born as a nymph and swims in the ocean until it finds a spotted rose snapper. It then enters through the fish’s gill and attaches itself to the base of fish’s tongue. The parasite diverts blood from the tongue to feed itself. As it grows and clamps around the tongue cutting off blood flow, the fish’s tongue eventually withers away and dies.

Now here’s where it gets weird: Cymothoa becomes a functional replacement for the animal’s missing tongue. Attached to the tongue stub, the fish is able to use Cymothoa as it would it’s own natural tongue, except that Cymothoa shares what the fish eats. As the fish feeds, Cymothoa consumes some of the food right out of the fish’s mouth.

After reading what the parasite does, I searched for a picture expecting to see a formless mass of flesh much like other parasites. To my shock and horror, I saw THIS:

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeewwwwwwwwwww!! Now that’s an image I won’t be getting out of my mind for a while.

Outlook 2007 has a very cool feature that lets you embed your current calendar in an e-mail and send it someone else. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could e-mail your To-Do list as well? Now you can! This macro shows you how to generate a formatted e-mail that contains all of your current tasks, as well as a list of any messages that you’ve flagged for follow-up.

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I subscribe to a lot of groups in Second Life so I can get notification of upcoming events. One thing I’ve noticed is that some people write more effective group announcements than others. Here are some tips for writing your event announcement in a way that will encourage more people to attend.

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