Apart from a colossal tsunami, here's another effect of the 66.6 exajoules liberated by this weekend's earthquake in Chile: NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory says that days will now be shorter because the quake shifted Earth's axis by three inches.

The change—which can only be measured thanks to computer models—will result in days that are 1.26 microseconds shorter than before. That's 0.00000126 seconds shorter. There may have been more visible changes, like islands changing its position. One of them, Santa María, may have raised two meters after the shattering land move.

This is not the first time this has happened, as every single earthquake has an effect on the planet's axis. [Business Week]

MS Paint may be beloved but it's also the butt of plenty of jokes about art skill. Project Gustav is Microsoft Research's answer: A GPU-intense multitouch and Wacom-tablet-friendly natural painting program, giving artists a genuine old-school experience, in 3D.

Sure, there are geniuses—including possibly one or two on our staff—who can make masterpieces with Illustrator and Photoshop. But the logic of Gustav, named after Klimt and Courbet, is that the training required to get good at those apps limits artists trained in traditional physical media. What this does is re-create the analogy of real oils and pastels, not just in how they stream but in how the colors blend. In fact, to make a new color, you do what you'd do in the real world, blend your paints together. You can use pens on a Wacom, twisting flat brushes them to achieve swirls and calligraphic flourishes. But you can also reach up to draw on the multitouch screen, the little HP screen shown in the pic.

I am not much of a visual artist, but for a research project, this is a gorgeous execution of a very natural experience. I didn't want to pull away from my own hideous oil, so God knows what a budding Leonardo could do. Bye bye, MS Paint. It's been, uh, swell. [Project Gustav]

It's a common thing to see on TV: the cops get a dark, blurry image of a perp, and using the magic of computers, are able to zoom in and see his face. But now that might be actually possible.

The technique, called compressed sensing, won't work like those fake programs do on TV. And it's mostly meant for scientific purposes, like shortening MRI scan times by only scanning a small amount of data and then filling in the rest.

But how can you do all the number crunching that is required to find the sparsest image quickly? It would take way too long to analyze all the possible versions of the image. Candès and Tao, however, knew that the sparsest image is the one created with the fewest number of building blocks. And they knew they could use l1 minimization to find it and find it quickly.

To do that, the algorithm takes the incomplete image and starts trying to fill in the blank spaces with large blocks of color. If it sees a cluster of green pixels near one another, for instance, it might plunk down a big green rectangle that fills the space between them. If it sees a cluster of yellow pixels, it puts down a large yellow rectangle. In areas where different colors are interspersed, it puts down smaller and smaller rectangles or other shapes that fill the space between each color. It keeps doing that over and over. Eventually it ends up with an image made of the smallest possible combination of building blocks and whose 1 million pixels have all been filled in with colors.

That image isn't absolutely guaranteed to be the sparsest one or the exact image you were trying to reconstruct, but Candès and Tao have shown mathematically that the chance of its being wrong is infinitesimally small. It might still take a few hours of laptop time, but waiting an extra hour for the computer is preferable to shutting down a toddler's lungs for an extra minute.

So yeah, it's meant for scientists right now, but this is clearly the first step to us all being about to enhance, enhance, enhance our pictures automagically. And that is damned cool.

[Wired]

A disheartening chart from Ars Technica, if you're a Firefox booster: That gentle downward slope indicates Firefox might never reach 25 percent marketshare. Why? Because companies with money care about browsers now. Or, in a word: Chrome.

Chrome is the only browser that gained marketshare from January to February, bouncing .41 percent to 5.61 percent. Even the release of Firefox 3.6 in the last two months didn't help, with Firefox sliding .18 percent (second to IE's .6 percentage point drop, which you'd assume would be sending users to alternative browsers, like Firefox).

Here's one difference between Firefox and Chrome, in a nutshell: Banners on two of the biggest, most trusted websites on the internet. Chrome's by Google. It's fast! It's nice! Switch to it!

But you know what? It is faster and nicer than Firefox. The heyday of Firefox, when it was hands down the best was when nobody with money cared about browsers that worked, that made the internet a better place. So guys on a shoestring could out-innovate and slaughter the incumbent tyrant. Now companies with resources—Google—can iterate new versions and features just plain faster. Not to mention, advertise the crap out of its browser.

Part of me really hopes that Firefox does hit 25 percent, just as a symbolic "fuck you" to the old browser regime. But the other part me thinks Chrome might do it first, even if that's a ways away. [Ars]

Microsoft's Surface tables are sweet but they have two problems: They're huge pieces of furniture and they cost a lot. Turns out, they could solve both problems by turning the system upside down, using a portable camera/projector and any surface.

Surface tables are just cameras and projectors pointing upward at a tabletop of glass. Since both of those mechanisms have become totally portable, Microsoft Research conceived of a prototype that is, effectively, portable. The advantage, beyond mobility, is that the camera can read depth in free space, so it can do 3D activities, almost like a baby Natal.

Here, in this functional proof-of-concept, you can see a drums app, where both hand interaction and stick interaction are measured when your hands are between the camera and the projection. (On a regular Surface, you'd have to touch the screen to interact.)

In the explainer shot below, you can see a more real-world scenario, where you'd set your phone on a table at a restaurant and it projects pictures and documents out, so that you and others can interact with them. We're already seeing projectors built into phones and cameras, so it may just be a matter of time before this appears. Windows Phone 8 maybe? Microsoft, of course, isn't promising anything at this point. [Mobile Surface]

Olympic finishes always look close, but when these fractions of a second are charted in audio, you really conceptualize the nearly nonexistent margin between the top of a podium and the bottom of a scotch bottle. Just listen: [NYTimes]

Today kicks off the bi-hourly shutdowns for anybody still running their free copy of Windows 7 Release Candidate, which will continue until June 1, when the seizures turn the OS into straight crippleware. (Or more specifically, your copy of Windows is marked as non-geniune, locking you out of any feature that requires a legit version of Windows.) [Windows Blog via All About Microsoft]

One of the more straightforward acquisitions Google's made in a while, they've just bought the online image editor Picnick. Given Google's past acquisition strategy—turning Grand Central into Google Voice, Writely into Google Docs—the logical expectation is that it'll get merged into its already excellent Picasa photo managing app. [Picnick]

After what feels like years of concept renders and photos of the hairy David de Rothschild accompanying gushing magazine pieces about his plastic bottle boat, the Plastiki will set sail this month across the Pacific Ocean.

If you'll remember, the boat was constructed using 12,000 plastic 2-liter bottles, which have been pressurized using dry ice powder, making it buoyant enough to carry four people on the 11,000 miles from San Francisco to Sydney. It'll take 100 days they think, with the electricity coming from solar panels, wind turbines and exercise bikes that the four crewmembers will be using.

It's the ultimate eco-warrior ship, with even a small garden growing herbs and veggies included on the 60-foot boat. At least if they sink, they've got an awful lot of bottles to put messages in. [Plastiki via TG Daily]

In today's Remainders: wishful thinking. Nikon fans hope they've stumbled on a viral campaign for new cameras; magazine companies hope their slick new ads will keep you buying magazines; Google CEO Eric Schmidt gets pranked in 1986, and more.

Follow the Signs
Camera geeks are getting excited over some mysterious cards that have been showing up in their mailboxes. First I'll explain what's on the cards and then I'll explain what people are surmising, just because it'll be funnier that way. The first card was all black, with the number "8" on one side inside a burst of yellow, with the words "I am" on the back. The next day, a similar card with the number "7" was mailed out, with the words "I am fun" on the back. Now for the theories: yellow and black being Nikon's colors, people are thinking that this might be some sort of cloak and dagger lead up to the unveiling of Nikon's first micro four thirds camera, or perhaps NIkon's rumored EVIL line of gear. The could be reading into the cards a little too much, but when you extend the daily countdown it ends on March 8, the same day a Nikon press event is scheduled in the UK. At least this rumor has a definite expiration date. [Engadget]

Lifting Spirits
There's only one thing that's better than a cat elevator, and that's a cat elevator that is entirely operated by the cat itself. Though you have to wonder if this type of cat-tech retards the development of their natural abilities to leap from crazy heights and not be injured. Because if anything that's a super power we need to be cultivating, not discouraging. [Neatorama]

DoubtsCast
We'd love for a Mitsumi's new TV-enhancing miracle chip to be real, but we find it very hard to believe that any chip is improving LCD black levels as well as is shown in this photograph. The company claims they hope to commercialize the chip this year, but I wouldn't hold your breath—or hold on to your crappy LCD TV—waiting for it. [CrunchGear]

Punk'd
What was Eric Schmidt up to back in 1986, before he became the overlord of the internet-age empire we know today as Google? Getting pranked by his employees, of course. For April Fools Day '86, his Sun Microsystems underlings put a Volkswagen Beetle in his office, to which the bespectacled Schmidt probably responded by slapping his knee and snorting out a "Gee golly!" In any event, the video is a nice trip back to the mid-80s, a time before pranks were invariably cruel and back when the economy was so good that extra cars were always just kicking waiting to be disassembled and reassembled in someone's office. Ah, sweet nostalgia. [TechCrunch]

Light On Ideas
I love LEDs and I love cool furniture design, but this LED table sort of makes my blood boil. It costs $24,000. It shows just about zero imagination when it comes to implementing the lights. It has to be plugged in at all times. A waste of money, a waste of energy, a waste of LEDs! Did I mention it costs $24,000? Forget that noise, just make your own. [UberGizmo]

Pew Pew
A recent study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project revealed that more Americans get their news from the internet than from print media. No surprise there—if anything it's surprising it didn't happen sooner—and the internet is still behind national and local TV when it comes to how Americans stay up to date, so don't get too worried about the internet subsuming everything in it's path. Not yet anyway. Still, this is one step closer to the future we envision in which Gizmodo is the nation's primary source for all news, gadget and otherwise. (One surprising bit from the study: 21% of internet news-gatherers get their information from a single site. So, seriously, get ready for the Gizmodo News Network.) [Ars Technica]

Print Rules
Five huge print publishers—Time and Conde Nast among them—have banded together on a $90 million crusade to remind us why magazines rock so much and why we should shell out $3, $4, $5, $6 a month to buy them. "We surf the Internet. We swim in magazines," reads one of the campaign's ads that's going to run in ESPN The Magazine. Sure, whatever, we might be swimming in magazines, but the magazines themselves are drowning. Drowning so bad that they don't know which way is up and it seems like a good idea to throw tens of millions of dollars into a lame ad campaign. Drowning so bad that they think it's a good idea to try to put their customers' internet consumption and magazine consumption at odds when they could be working on models that combined the two and made everyone happy. Drowning so bad that they're trying to convince people that growing 11% over the last 12 years since Google came on the scene is some kind of great accomplishment. Just make sure the New Yorker looks really good on the iPad and we'll forget this campaign ever happened, OK? [WSJ]

Screen Shots Fired
Some fat-fingered Dell employee accidentally made a typo when entering a new Ubuntu netbook into the system, resulting in this price of $100,278. That's not what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is this particular type of fuck-up—the accidental astronomical price—and if we will find anything quite so amusing. I've heard some people say that the Aristocrats is the funniest joke ever told, but surely the accidental astronomical price is better. Knock knock. Who's there? A hundred thousand dollar. A hundred thousand dollar what? A hundred thousand dollar netbook from Dell. Oh that's good! OK, maybe that's going too far—I like a good goofy pricing error now and again—but the internet is treasure trove of typos. Maybe it's time for us to branch out. [CrunchGear]

You're probably relatively confident in your various machines' integrity against hackers. Repeat Pwn2Own hacking competition victor Charlie Miller would like you to know that you're wrong—especially if you have Flash.

In an interview with OneITSecurity, Miller picks off questions about hacking and security with just enough ease and nonchalance to make me queasy. Like, you know how Mac OS exploits are supposed to be tougher to root out than Windows exploits? Not quite! And they're both vulnerable:

Windows 7 is slightly more difficult because it has full ASLR (address space layout randomization) and a smaller attack surface (for example, no Java or Flash by default). Windows used to be much harder because it had full ASLR and DEP (data execution prevention). But recently, a talk at Black Hat DC showed how to get around these protections in a browser in Windows.

And obviously, Linux is fortress, right? Again:

No, Linux is no harder, in fact probably easier, although some of this is dependent on the particular flavor of Linux you're talking about. The organizers don't choose to use Linux because not that many people use it on the desktop. The other thing is, the vulnerabilities are in the browsers, and mostly, the same browsers that run on Linux, run on Windows.

And within a given operating system, surely you can ensure immunity from exploits by choosing a secure browser like Firefox. Surely. No? GUUUGHHH.

[The safest browser is] Chrome or IE8 on Windows 7 with no Flash installed. There probably isn't enough difference between the browsers to get worked up about. The main thing is not to install Flash!

So the guy who consistently prevails Pwn2Own, a competition where hackers demonstrate exploits for sport, says that Flash, which is installed on about 98% of computers on the internet, unifies all browsers in insecurity, and that IE8, an Internet Explorer browser, in case you're having trouble unfolding that acronym, now ranks among the safest in its category. The slightly better news is, despite inherent insecurities that he doesn't bother to elaborate on, mobile smartphone platforms are relatively secure as compared to their desktop counterparts. So there's that.

The full interview is definitely worth a read, even for the tech disinclined—it's a good reminder that you (and you!) can never completely avoid online security threats. So, stay on your toes, and look out for... something? [OneITSecurity via Crunchgear]