Archive for April, 2009

This is exactly why I am quite happy to live in France: We have a reasonably priced broadband offering. Most 20Mbps ADSL services are price around 29.99€ per month.

I thought about this when I saw that in the US, CableVision was offering 100Mbps at 99$ per month (and AT&T offers 18Mbps for 80$ per month).

Competition is king for driving broadband (ADSL or cable) prices down.

This is so nice: A Stop-motion video that is very well done, funny.

Link love

Those are the best links found recently:

• 9 free antivirus programs for Windows
• Manipulate Vector Images with Open Source Inkscape (via Lifehacker)

Most-read articles

The news as you make it by your cumulated visits:

• Download free Nero 8
• Sharks and other sea jaws
• Art Nouveau Design

Most visited categories

Your attention does not stop to 1 post only:

• Gorilla in Wildlife (digital photography) – 2009 is the International Year of the Gorilla.
• Optical illusions

You wanted to get the contents of this PDF file in a usable form. say! a Word document.

Here comes PDF-to-Word, touted as “The Most Accurate PDF-to-Word Converter”, which may be quite right.

It’s online, it’s free, it’s only 3 steps away:

PDF-to-Word (free online converter)

The converted document will arrive directly in your email box.

Keen eyes like yours will have noticed the opportunity to produce not only Word documents but also RTF documents which can be read as easily in Word as in any other word processor on any kind of machine.

True Marbleâ„¢ is a true color, photo-realistic, high resolution, 3 terabyte image of the earth. All data is provided at a base 15 meter resolution. Even if this was not shot in a single time (sattelite imagery is a bit more complex than Gigapan panoramas), this is really stupendous. But even more, you can download your own reduced subset for free. Keep cool, this is a lot of downloads of big files (they are even available on BitTorrent – much more practical than FTP downloads, and faster too). But it’s definitely there.

True Marble - Earth at high resolution

True Marble GLCDâ„¢ by Unearthed Outdoors, LLC is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Masque

An advanced civilisation if there was one, Aztecs lived in Central America from IXth Century to XVth Century (when their decline was essentially precipitated by their encounter with the Spanish conquistadores). Many facets of this civilisation stay unknown principally because they were wiped out wy the first European colonizers.

But one aspect stayed deep in the minds because it was an immediate shock to those who were meeting it for the first time: Aztecs practiced extensive human sacrifice when Cortés arrived in America. Rare are the Europeans who observed it first-hand, because it stopped quickly then, but many traces are left for the historian.

Generally, religious reasons (”gods are asking for peace brought to them through human bloodshed in their honor”) are shown as the main driving factor. I found a group of articles quite intersting because they discuss the vertus and weaknesses of another theory: That Aztecs needed to enrich their meals with meat that could only be obtained from cannibalism.

• The Enigma of Aztec Sacrifice, by Michael Harner (April 1977)
• Aztec Cannibalism: An Ecological Necessity? by Bernard R. Ortiz de Montellano (May 1978)

I can’t guarantee the quality of the scientific arguments by myself, but -for the reader with a strong heart- the LatinAmericanStudies.org web site contains historical data about the Aztecs grouped in a quite enthralling scientific package.

Additional references:

1. Wikipedia article on the Aztecs.
2. Photos about the Jaguar and Ocelotl, the jaguar Aztec god.

You know it: JPEG image format allows to compress a photo picture without too much loss. But there is some loss. For real.

You want an evidence? Open an image, save it in JPEG; Start over 600 times. The image deterioration will cumulate:

…up to the point of creating a chocolate-inspired video?

…or up to the point of sacrificing chocolate for the sake of pure art?

No fish for 1st of April!
These are bunnies.