Researchers at the Imperial College London and the UK Hydrographic Service have announced that they think they know why Britain isn’t attached to France and the rest of the European continent. Apparently, between 200000 and 450000 years ago there was massive flood that was so large (one million cubic metres/second) and continued for so long (months!) that it scoured the land and created what is today the English Channel. High-resolution sonar scans in the English Channel has revealed scour marks and landforms that are consistent with what you would expect to see in such a catastrophic flood event. Apparently, there’s an article in the July issue of Nature, though I haven’t seen it, yet.

The research was conducted using data collected for another purpose, which makes this particularly interesting. One has to wonder what other discoveries are lurking in data people have collected for one purpose and then stuck on a shelf because they’ve finished with it.

Very cool research!

Apparently, a new creature that’s half-squid, half-octopus has been found in a filter on the end of a pipe 3000′ down in the waters around the Big Island of Hawaii.

I recently blogged about Microsoft Surface. Well, it didn’t take long for someone to spoof their ad on YouTube.

Those Japanese are very clever people as can be seen by a behind-the-scenes look at how the pointer on the screen is moved when you move/click the mouse.� Thanks to Akira for pointing this out.

Update (10 April 2008): The link no longer points to the demonstration of how a mouse works.

If anyone is looking for gift ideas for me, please consider getting me a Microsoft Surface setup when they appear on the market.  Basically, it’s an interactive tabletop device that you interact with using intuitive gestures on the touch-sensitive surface rather than the more traditional keyboard and mouse.  If you’re working with photographs, you can manipulate them as though you were using a huge light table.  Eric asks if this is the next hot trend in computing, and I would have to say it is.  Very cool.

Darin blogged about AnswerTips recently. Basically, you can add a scrap of code to any website and make all of the words clickable, even ones that aren’t links. I’ve added this feature to my blog, so if you double click a word, you’ll get a pop-up with (hopefully) relevant information about the word or phrase.

A few people I know have posted these things to their blogs, so I thought I’d give it a try: