If you happen to share my obsession interest for science in the 1800′s you should definitely check out The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, a witty blog-comic created by animator Sydney Padua.

The comic’s main characters are Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage, the historical figures considered to be the first programmer and the inventor of the programmable computer respectively. A real treat is to be able to read the author’s notes regarding different aspects of the story in each episode. The comic contains a wonderful mix of history, science, and a lot of steam (Steampunks rejoice).

You may start at the Origin!:

So many hours, so little laptop battery power.

Most blogs will let people display a small image icon or avatar whenever they leave a comment in the discussion section of a post or forum. But in many sites, unless you have created an account previously (if such option exists in the first place) the avatar displayed for you will be a boring generic silhouette or a random colorful pattern (like the ones appearing on this blog). Enter Gravatar. The name stands for Globally Recognized Avatar, and what this service does is let you associate an image of your choice to the e-mail address you normally use for posting comments on blogs. The avatar image will then follow you around from blog to blog, provided the blog or forum has enable Gravatars (most blog applications now do). It is a centralized avatar repository.

Creating a Gravatar is very simple: just signup, upload the image of your choice, and define which e-mail address(es) you want that image to be associated with. That’s it. Your e-mail address will not be used for anything else. No spam.

I, for example, can go and harass Alex Wild at Myrmecos Blog with my less-than-insightful comments and he will always have to deal with my green ant Gravatar made from a SEM image of Oecophylla smaragdina (Fabricius).

A side note. If you don’t have a blog, you should know that bloggers will appreciate comments by readers no matter how small or simply they are (the comments that is).

If you are into rock music and wine, your dreams are about to come true this year. From the cellar of bass virtuoso and showman extraordinaire Les Claypool comes Purple Pachyderm, 2007 Russian River Valley Pinot Noir.

“Big, bold, well balanced… with a magnificent nose” as aptly portrayed in the bottle’s label. 240 cases only, so you better start reserving.