List of Common Misconceptions

Wikipedia has a list of common misconceptions. How many of them surprise you? For instance:

George Washington Carver did not invent peanut butter.
Gyroscopic forces are not required for a rider to balance a bicycle.
John F. Kennedy's words "Ich bin ein Berliner" are standard German for "I am a Berliner".

Help Me Perform A Security Test

A project has asked me to test the security of their website. All I can attempt is a SQL injection. If any of you with more expertise would be willing to take a crack at it, please let me know.

Puppet Warp Is Spectacular In Photoshop CS5

Thanks very much to the Ann Arbor Science Fiction Association for their "Cool Stuff Grant" to buy me a student copy of Adobe Creative Suite 5. Today I'm working on an ad for ConFusion, and doing some more work on the ConFusion program book.

One of the new features in Photoshop CS5 is incredible! It's called Puppet Warp. I can put my drawings into a new pose with surprising ease. Select Puppet Warp and Photoshop will create an interface over your drawing that conforms to its curves. It looks like a spider web. Then you can stick virtual pins into the web and pull on the pins to warp your image around.

In this video about Puppet Warp, there is a particularly neat demonstration at 3 minutes and 40 seconds.