Be you a writer, artist or musician, or simply someone who enjoys the fruits of these fields of endeavour, you should spare the fifteen or so minutes it will take you to read Jonathan Letham’s astonishing essay on plagiarism, intellectual property and the creative process at Harper’s. Even if you’ve never really managed to develop an opinion on such matters, I defy you not to have one by the time you are finished.

What has three spectacular examples of the most impressive light shows a human being can ever hope to see, all in one place? Only this picture of an Australia Day celebration, featuring a lightning storm, comet McNaught *and* fireworks in one (admittedly composite) frame. Absolutely awesome. [Scalzi’s “By The Way”]

We humans have a bad habit of leaving rubbish everywhere we go, as any nature lover or walking fanatic will tell you. That habit extends to our short tenure of adventuring in orbit around the planet, with some experts suggesting that we’re reaching a point where there is so much junk as to make space flight an unrealistically dangerous proposition. It strikes me that this can’t be a problem that is beyond our technology to address – much like the aftermath of a good house party, the issue is more likely to be that no one wants to take responsibility or volunteer to start first, let alone pay for the effort. [FutureWire]

There’s plenty of licences floating around to facilitate the development of open source software, which is a relatively proven concept. The same doesn’t yet apply to hardware – but that could all change with the release of the TARS Open Hardware Licence, launched this week. Will this start to level the playing field of computer hardware, or is the open source idea not portable beyond the realms of code? [reBang]

Nanomachines – cutting edge ideas, right? Well, not really; Drexler was kicking the ideas around in the 70s, long before they were even vaguely practical. But the ancestry of nanotech concepts goes back further – 140 years, in fact, to a theoretical design for a molecular machine called Maxwell’s Demon, which has finally been built by a team at the University of Edinburgh. [gizmodo]