Here’s a great read from Nick Tosches, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.

The wallpaper on Nick’s WinXP desktop was the classic ‘Autumn’ seen above, and it was a welcome scene when we returned home each time from his travels around the world including the hurried pace and fast lifestyle while away covering world events.

This story is about Nick’s absolute obsession for a year trying to track down the photographer and location of this photograph. The level of difficulty in finding information on the mysterious origins of the photo and the number of people involved in the effort makes for an interesting story. Here’s a snippet -

Every member of Team Autumn begins as I did, confident that finding the location pictured will be a quick and simple matter. As the months pass, many of my volunteers, rather than admit defeat, resort to the exculpatory “maybe it’s a computer-generated picture” premise and retreat to their real lives.

Some have tried to console me: “Hell, it’s probably next to a toxic-waste dump.” My buddy Bruce suggests there’s a sinister element: “It could be like Blow-Up. Something bad could be happening at the end of the path. Maybe that’s why they won’t tell you anything.”

But—toxic waste, dead bodies—I don’t care. Autumn awaits me. Somewhere. Yeah. Over the rainbow. Yeah. And I’ll find it yet.

Read on…

Slashdot is reporting:

The guys over at winhistory.de managed to get their Windows XP Professional running on a very minimal box: an Intel Pentium clocked down to 8 MHz with 20 MB of RAM. (The installer won’t work with less than 64 MB, but after installing you can remove memory.) The link has plenty of pictures of their progress in achieving this dubious milestone. They deserve a Golden Hourglass award for ‘extreme waste of time.’ What obscure hardware configurations have you managed to get Windows running on?”

One of the funnier comments to this /. post was:

I for one welcome our new masochists overloards

Click over to the link above in the /. post, they’ve got tons of pics of the machine and screenshots of the XP image.

Here’s one example of cheesy art used to make you smirk or giggle at some pretty punny math jokes. Check out mathsforlaughs.co.uk for more, i’m subscribing to the feed.

The latest issue of Nature announces the details of a membrane developed by the University of Rochester that opens new design possibilities for better dialysis, fuel cells and neuro-stem cell cultivation.

At more than 4,000 times thinner than a human hair, this 15 nanometer membrane is very similar to the slices of silicone seen in every-day microprocessor manufacturing plants.

Read the details here.

[Found on physlink.com]

The panes on the left denote the Fibonacci series in the Foxtrot comic below. Care to take a guess in the Comments at what the series of numbers in the right pane refer to?