Max Contrast Jupiter Gash

This post has been updated a few times...
Several naively employed techniques I used in Photoshop increased the contrast of this collision remnant. NASA released the original taken July 23rd by the Hubble telescope today or thereabouts. At this point the estimated size of the object which caused it is unclear. The JPL infra-red telescope in Mauna Kea displays this photo of Jupiter.

It's frustrating in that I can only find two good photos on the entire internet.
Updates
7-29 New photo
7-30 Optical photo from 7-27
7-28 Several images
8-1 Volunteers

8-6 Here's part of a later photo of the Jupiter impact from Donald C. Parker of Coral Gables, Florida, posted to Japan's Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers. I have flipped it (and clipped it and sharpened it) to show similar orientation to above and the public Hubble shot:

Also, compare with a near-simultaneous white cloud seen on Venus. Still some possibility of comet impact although no cometary cloud - coma - was seen in space. Best bet is still a volcano. See best pix of the Venus White Spot.

Now there is another astounding planetary impact: an unknown object smashing through one of Saturn's rings
The inset is the same image, size unchanged, with added high contrast. At the time of this writing, clicking on it opens it larger in a new window.

Strange Visitor From Another Planet

Sqirlz morph
He looks disgruntled but I think he's enjoying the desert air all the same.

Goldilocks Sudoku

Uses numerals 1 through 8

The ironclad mathematical laws of the universe are what I was bemoaning to myself , something I don't normally do except in the case of sudoku. In which one is pretty much locked in to the fact that 3 x 3 equals 9, and 9 x 9 makes 81 squares to fill, minus the clues.

This is just a tad too much for my poor head. I am one who likes to not fill in candidate numerals, and so keep in my head the various possibilities. There are a few of us who like to solve sudoku without pencil marks. By this I mean we allow ourselves to only use a pen or pencil to fill in the correct numeral only when we know for certain that it is correct.

And recently I began using a little program that generates "jigsaw" sudoku. This is essentially the same as regular sudoku except the boxes, instead of being 3 x 3 are irregular. But they have 9 regions and 81 cells to fill, minus the clues.

I had an odd thought. Irregular subregions don't need to be symmetrical. A puzzle with 64 squares is certainly possible with jigsaw sudoku. You don't need boxes 2.828 x 2.828 cells, an impossibility. (The square root of 8)

So I cranked up my lovely little jigsaw sudoku generator and plugged in some odd initial inputs, and lo and behold: I got the above puzzle. I had it set on "extreme" difficulty but it's not so hard. Heh heh.

There are several popular sudoku variants. For me this is not too easy, not too hard. "Just right."

I got the original program from Simon Tatham's webpage for games. I was in such a rush to download the newer jigsaw version a while back, and because the earlier version was so intuitive and easy I didn't need a help file, that I didn't see or download the newer help file for the jigsaw variant explaining how to do unorthodox sizes of puzzles. I had to figure it out myself.

UPDATE: August 2010 My favorite Sudoku forum disappeared. I have changed the link that was at "solving without pencil marks." Apparently the original forum vanished. There is a new forum full of smart people. Many are the same old crowd.

Nice Temple

"I especially like the vines."

This fellow has probably 100,000 hairs. There is very little Photoshop magic that makes it easy. Sqirlz morph

Grail+

OMG he's showing Metalvision again.

Fourth Fashion Faux Pas

Here Roy Rogers violates protocol with a flag shirt. Or maybe it's Abbie Hoffman with Roy's head photoshopped on top. Happy Fourth and Happy Trails.