OK, a question for the jewelry enthusiasts among you. Does it matter if a diamond was mined in Africa or “manufactured in Florida”:http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/diamond.html ? If diamonds stop being expensive and rare, are they still beautiful? Are they still desirable?

Ben writes:

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What is is about keyboards that attracts babies?

I was wondering how long it would take to get realistic skin textures for digital characters. As it turns out, the breakthrough came from our very own UCSD! Now we know why Gollum was so spookily real.

…and adding function to art can make it more compelling. For example, Swarovski brought a group of designers to Milan to show off artistic uses of their crystal in high-tech chandeliers.

Some of the results are pretty impressive, even if a few of them look like K-Mart X-mas light train wrecks. One design uses an addressible array of lights within the chandelier to display text messages from party-goers’ phones.

Be sure to check out the high-res versions of the chandelier images on the Swarovski site; the real artistry is in the details.

Would the corner Blockbuster send me this email? I think not.

(Letter attached in the extended entry.)

This isn’t the first time Netflix has updated my queue to reflect new (or re-released) versions of movies I looked for in the past. Very cool stuff.
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