I stubled upon this in MS Excel’s built-in help. Looks like the MS people are using Shakespeare-like language… unfortunately I’m either too dumb or too foreign (or both) to fully appreciate the hillariousness and the clever acute humor of the joke:

Use names to clarify formulas

What’s in a name? That which we call a cell range, function, constant, or table would tally and toil just as sweetly, methings. But nay, don’t take me at my word. Read what follows that is writ to master all manner of names that befit.

Pray tell, what dost thou desire to do?

Good choice.

What laptop does Steve Ballmer use for his presentations? Right…

Originally uploaded by Paint.It.Black.

Microsoft Keynote in Louvain

Originally uploaded by Choubistar.

See the image above? Is it what you think it is? Why yes, indeed, it is. Just like you suspected, an image of the majestic globular omega Centauri, the largest and brightest globular cluster in the sky… what else on Earth – or outside of it – could it have been?.

Now, remember those peculiarities observed in it? Of course you do. Turns out that Eva Noyola, who also holds the record of most miles traveled for a Soda Stereo concert (6127) and is one of The MKX® favorite readers, deduced that Omega Centauri harbors an elusive intermediate-mass black hole smack at its center after analyzing some fancy photos taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys onboard the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and data obtained by the GMOS spectrograph on the Gemini South telescope in Chile. Well, that explains that. So we’ll update the image for something prettier (artist rendition though):

Congratulations Eva, you are now officially our smartest reader and we hope to hear about (but maybe not fully understand) more high profile astronomy discoveries from you. The other scientist, Karl Gebhardt, I can’t remember, but I’m sure I’ve had beers with him either at Eva’s parties back when she lived in Austin or perhaps at the Crown and Anchor. Congratulations to you as well!

More :

• 15 minutos
• Del agujero
• Gemini observatory article (good images)
• Hubblecast (video interview! Very awesome.)
• Slashdot

I’m asked for advice on what digital camera to buy quite often. I’m no photographer, but here’s my philosophy:

I’d rather have lots of decent photos taken with a small camera I take everywhere than few or no great photos taken with a camera so big that’s always left at home.

Marcos and his trusty Optio S, beer

With this in mind, my advice is to get the smallest digital camera you can find that provides adequate quality. If you must get a big, high quality, professional SLR camera, go ahead; but complement it with a really small camera (this is exactly what Jaramillo did).

Adequate is a very subjective word, and comparing digital cameras is not easy. To me, adequate would mean a real flash (not the toy flashes that come in cellphones) and at least 3x optical zoom. The number of Megapixels I’d rather not nail down, as that changes very quickly. Ignore the digital zoom spec. But be careful, numbers by themselves often don’t mean much: some older 3 MP cameras can take better photos than some newer 10 MP cameras because they have better quality lenses and sensors. For a detailed comparison of the quality of photos taken by different digital cameras, Google is your friend. Do keep in mind that the small lenses on small cameras impact quality quite a bit.

Personally, I’ve only owned two digital cameras. They were the smallest decent cameras available when I bought them and I took thousands of photos with them, because I did not mind bringing them everywhere.

The first one: the now discontinued Pentax Optio S. This camera was famous because you could fit it inside an Altoids tin, which is exactly what I used to carry it around. I didn’t come up with the idea, but people though I was clever. Many of my friends later bought the same or a newer model. Great little camera.

Pentax Optio S

The second one, the Casio Exilim S600. This one is slightly longer and taller than the Optio S but considerably thinner, so it’s more comfortable in your pocket. It can also record VGA video, which is cool.

Casio Exilim S600

Even years after these came out, there aren’t many cameras of similar size. Their quality was pretty decent and so was the battery life. Even so, I’m always on the lookout for smaller things. Most of the photos on The MKX® Photo Central were taken using one of these two cameras, so feel free to see for yourself.

Pentax Optio S VS Casio Exilim S600 (side by side)

If you want to find a good comparison of different digital cameras by size, you won’t have much luck (as I learned when I was looking for a new digital camera) – until now. I fired up Google Docs and started making a table. Check it out, and if you think I should add a model or correct something, let me know through the comments!

Smallest digital cameras by size comparison

Starting yesterday, Google started adding IMAP access to their free Gmail webmail service (my account is not upgraded yet).

What does this mean?

It means you can read your email from your Gmail account directly in most email clients (Apple’s Mail.app at home and Mozilla Thunderbird at work, in my case) as well as from iPhone without the need for any plugins or third party software – and your mailbox stays synchronized all the time no matter where you access it from. This is something I’ve wanted to do for years.

This way, if you’re in front of your new and shiny MacBook you can use Mail, but if you are traveling or don’t have your computer with you, you can keep using the web interface. Not bad

Google answers some questions you may have here.

[Update 10/29/2007] Today I was finally able to enable IMAP in my Gmail account, but neither Mail.app nor Thunderbird work with it. I’ll let it rest for a couple of days to see if it’s something Google needs to sort out on their end or if I screwed up on my side.