Once in a while, a good paper appears in the endless river of PhD thesises, one that stands out because it's likely to impact the near future. This time it is Solid Texture Synthesis from 2D Examplars . Check out the video and, if you are into computer graphics, read the 22mb paper.
In case you are wondering, I no longer actively keep track of research papers. I ran into this one while researching the current state of art in realtime in-game editing. Answer: recent progress is rather disappointing.
Update: Pete Shirley's blog seems to be a good source for pointer to graphics-related papers. A single cascading topic focused search will reap more results than one has time to read but it would be nice to have a federation of insightful blogs specializing in computer graphics.

Yup. Technorati is down. I had to comment out Technorati scriptfile loading code from the front page so the page can finish loading. I don't know if the scriptfile is really needed after a blog has been successfuly claimed but less dependency on other site the better so I won't be restoring it when Technorati comes back.

This incident is unfortunate because they appeared to be on their way back recently.

I doubt blogs like Engadget will run out of new products to post about any time soon but the rate at which we are depleting rare earth is a concern. Rare earth is used in a wide variety of high tech products like LCD and cellphone yet 90% of it comes from China.
Will China tighten its grip  on rare earth export like OPEC does with oil? I think it is in their best interest to do so. Even worse, I think China may stop exporting rare earth all together to initially monopolize manufacturing then eventually to dominate development.
Will nano-technology advance fast enough to erase our dependency on rare earth before we run out of it? Whatever the answer is, it's going to an exciting race.

Meanwhile, my MBP is no longer the top of the line. Dang. 4G of RAM is nice.