Crater Detection

NASA is hosting a TopCoder marathon match to detect craters in satellite images. The contest lasts about two weeks and there are $10,000 in prizes (for the top five competitors). The task is to return a list of crater positions and sizes for a set of satellite images. There is a little over a day remaining in the contest and I am currently ranked third. If I end up doing well in the final rankings I will make a blog post about the technique I used. Here are a few example images in the training set:

Bitcoin

I recently started bitcoin mining using my GeForce GTX 260. Some of my friends have invested thousands of dollars into bitcoin mining hardware and have already earned back more than they invested. Bitcoin mining seems to be the latest fad among CS students. Unfortunately my mining rate is pitifully slow, so I gave up after a few days. I earned 0.5 bitcoins in slush's pool. I held an auction for my 0.5 BTC on IRC and got payed $5 CAD for it.