Philipp Lenssen (of Google Blogoscoped) says that the following banner ad (which I presume he designed) is one that he would click on, and I’m happy to oblige:

This short-and-sweet PDF e-Book, God’s Debris by Scott Adams of Dilbert fame, is absolutely free for personal use, and without Digital Restrictions Management or other strings attached. From his synopsis:

Imagine that you meet a very old man who—you eventually realize—knows literally everything. Imagine that he explains for you the great mysteries of life—quantum physics, evolution, God, gravity, light, psychic phenomenon, and probability—in a way so simple, so novel, and so compelling that it all fits together and makes perfect sense. What does it feel like to suddenly understand everything? God’s Debris isn’t the final answer to the Big Questions. But it might be the most compelling vision of reality you will ever read. The thought experiment is this: Try to figure out what’s wrong with the old man’s explanation of reality. Share the book with your smart friends then discuss it later while enjoying a beverage.

The Google Mars map browser lets you “fly” across the surface of Mars and zoom in on any feature that interests you.

In 1976, Viking photographed a mountain in the Cydonia region of Mars that looks somewhat like a face:

However, more recent photos of that spot show more detail and don’t look like a face at all.

There’s a better face on Mars though, the “happy face crater“, also known as Galle crater:

(NASA photos)

Google Blogoscoped posted a challenge to find a query that returns the same top result when the query is reversed. Philipp Lenssen, the blog’s author, calls that a Googledrome.

Dave Pettit found that searches for Oprah and Harpo both led to oprah.com, and I managed to find a couple more Googledromes.

I had a hunch that it might be possible to construct (rather than “find”) a Googledrome for the home page of Google Blogoscoped. Naturally, a search for “google blogoscoped” returns Philipp’s blog as the top result. I searched for “depocsogolb elgoog” and found that Philipp’s blog was the last of four results.

That’s not surprising, because the blog’s home page doesn’t include the reversed words - they are found only in the text of a link leading to the home page, and the page with the link is going to rank higher than the linked-to-page. I had to find a way to exclude the linking page from the search results.

I inspected the Google cache for the home page (because that will match Google’s indexing). For each word on the page, I searched for its reverse. About half way through the page I struck gold: the words “live” and “evil” both appeared on the page. Searching for depocsogolb elgoog live brought the Google Blogoscoped home page to the top of the list.

But now I had a problem with the other version - searching for evil google blogoscoped returned individual blog posts which used the word “evil” more times and more prominently than the home page. I had to find a way to eliminate those pages from the results.

I could have continued to seek words whose reverse also appeared on the home page, but an easy option was available. Single-letter words are their own reverse, and by adding ‘e’, ‘g’ and ‘3′ to the search I was able to eliminate the individual posts from the results and bring the home page back to the top of the listing.

I ended up with a Googledrome consisting of the following two searches:

• g e evil google blogoscoped 3
• 3 depocsogolb elgoog live e g

This Googledrome won’t last long, of course. The home page of Google Blogoscoped is in a state of constant change, and when it is re-indexed the query results may change too.

Also, Philipp has hinted that he might change the rules to disallow single-letter search terms.

I’ve chosen to use WordPress to power this weblog on account of its power, elegance and standards compliance.

One of the nice things about WordPress is that the author’s “dashboard” shows excerpts from the WordPress Development Blog. As soon as I installed WordPress 2.0.1 for this blog, I saw that a 2.0.2 security release had just been issued.

As the security release addressed “unannounced cross-site-scripting issues” an immediate upgrade seemed essential.

Luckily, the upgrade was painless. I just had to delete some of the WordPress files and replace them with others from the 2.0.2 distribution.