The Invisible Visual Web

Hm, where does the time go? Last week it went to a trip to Toronto and a trip to California, where I gave a colloquium at UC Riverside (posted soon!). This week it's catching up time, and I have a lot to do.

But through my PHENIX channels (aka Bill Zajc, whom some readers may have met through his guest blog on Backreaction), I was alerted to this article from the Institute for Nuclear Theory on "The strongly interacting quark gluon plasma in a new light: photons at RHIC", written by my BNL colleague Raju Venugopalan. Now, it seems that no-one knew about this article through the usual means. But the usual means, of course, means Google. And how could Google miss anything, when at the rate it's going it'll have all of our baby pictures indexed visually in a couple of years. Or not -- it's still pretty mediocre at indexing images, and that's why this article didn't show up on my usual RHIC searches, despite it being full of RHIC-related keywords. All of the text and captions are images, rendered from LaTeX (our standard typesetting package) into PNG (a standard image format):

It's funny how the obviously visual becomes completely invisible to current technologies. Maybe someone should print it out, scan it, OCR it, and re-post it as text. Then I'm sure Google will get cracking on it pronto.

Or someone, e.g. I, could just post it as postscript (which Google will read...thanks, Raju!)