US News & World Report asks an interesting question: if warrantless electronic search of United States citizens is legal as the Bush administration claims, is warrantless physical search also legal? The article doesn’t really answer the question, except to say the White House seems intent on staking a legal position broad enough to cover all kinds of search, and the FBI under Mueller has been keen to disassociate itself from such shenanigans.

A great essay has been posted over at Worldchanging.com, discussing the ways our advances in technology are improving our ability to produce augmented realities, virtual worlds and simulations, and how building these capabilities into our ‘real’ world may help us make it a better place for everyone and everything. It’s impossible to sum it up in a paragraph, so just trust me and go take a look.

THE Mars Global Surveyor, back in 2000, detected gullies that some scientists believed were created by liquid water flowing on the surface in the recent history of the planet (for ‘recent’, read ‘last million years’). Gwendolyn Bart, a graduate student in planetary sciences at the University of Arizona, thinks that they may in fact be due to landslides caused by wind and asteroid strikes, having found evidence that the thoroughly water-free Lunar landscape has similar features.

What would big cities be without all the screaming neon? (OK, some would argue ‘vastly more tasteful’, but bear with me.) But all that neon burns a pretty packet of power in the name of advertising. Mule Lighting’s ‘LED-Flex’ could replace traditional neons, providing a 70% decrease in power consumption and increased versatility of use…after all, you can’t tie a neon tube in a knot.

In a fitting tribute to the memory of the recently departed SF luminary Octavia Butler, a charitable organisation has been set up in her name to fund scholarships for SF writers of colour to attend the famous Clarion writing workshops that helped her own career.