Astronomers find largest exoplanet to date

And it’s fluffy!

Less dense than Saturn. Isn’t Saturn the planet that would float in water if you found a big enough bathtub to put it in?

Microsoft’s Silverlight has hit their 1.0 RC milestone. In case this one has slipped under your radar, here’s how MS describes the technology:

Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of Microsoft .NET–based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web.

From what I gather, it’s essentially an alternative to Flash. Surprisingly for a product from MS, it’s available for Mac OS X and eventually for Linux as well as Windows.

I’m not going to claim the slightest expertise here. This is a case of a technology floating around and me hearing about it without paying much attention until suddenly it gets in my face. I hope to dig into it a bit more and if/when I do I’ll report my findings.

When I was back in high school, I remember looking forward to geometry. Why? Because we used graph paper in geometry, and that meant I could spend the entire period doodling out generate after generation of Life (as in John Conway, not as in Parker Brothers, or something deep and philosophical). I was fascinated by it then, and I guess I still am, because when I Stumbled Upon Mushroom Life I was immediately drawn back into the whole wonder of it all.

In this version Conway’s simple cells are replaced by Mushrooms that grow, or die, depending on the rules that have been around since the 70’s. But as the mushrooms age, they mature, which is just a visual thing but it adds another layer of satisfaction to the game.

It was interesting to run into this at the same time I’m slowly churning through Darwin Among the Machines since in some ways the topics are related. But that’s for another day. Right now I need to go grow some more mushrooms.