For anyone who didn’t click on the last link in my post about the Space Station, it went to the wikipedia entry on April Fool’s day.

Now, I know that April Fool’s is not everyone’s favorite holiday, but I have always enjoyed a good prank. My favorite ones are the slow, dawning awareness ones. But, with the number of people posting today about how they don’t like April Fool’s day, I thought I would post my rules for what makes a good prank.

1. It doesn’t scare anyone.
2. It doesn’t raise false hopes.
3. It doesn’t hurt.
4. You have to fess up.

An example of #1 that someone I know actually pulled. He faked his own death so that his girlfriend would come in to find him. That is seriously, seriously twisted. Not funny. Not even a little funny.

#2. Calling someone to tell them their novel was going to be published. That would be evil.

#3. Hand buzzers and Kick Me signs. Physical and emotional pain are right out.

#4. Oh come on… if I let you believe that I was really going into space and you told other people, that would just be mean.

Do I get serious enjoyment from pulling the wool over your eyes until you get it? Yes, yes I do. I am twelve years old. However, I also enjoy it when you get me, too. A beautifully crafted prank can be as lovely as a beautifully crafted story, or at least for me it is. I told you a story and just for a moment, my fantasy existed in the real world.

The prank that I wish were real today? Virgle. I wish, oh how I wish, that we were really going to Mars.

Google introduced gDay™ with MATE™ in Australia, but the technology isn’t available in the US. Darn. Because this would be handy.

Search tomorrow’s web, today!

Google Australia has introduced a new feature, enabling you to search content on the internet before it is created.
Steps

1. Enter your search term
[e.g. footy scores]
2. Select “one day in advance” and click “Google Search”.
3. Google searches the web as it will look tomorrow

About gDay™ technology

The core technology that powers gDay™ is MATE™ (Machine Automated Temporal Extrapolation).

Using MATE’s™ machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques developed in Google’s Sydney offices, we can construct elements of the future.

Google spiders crawl publicly available web information and our index of historic, cached web content. Using a mashup of numerous factors such as recurrence plots, fuzzy measure analysis, online betting odds and the weather forecast from the iGoogle weather gadget, we can create a sophisticated model of what the internet will look like 24 hours from now.

We can use this technique to predict almost anything on the web – tomorrow’s share price movements, sports results or news events. Plus, using language regression analysis, Google can even predict the actual wording of blogs and newspaper columns, 24 hours before they’re written!

Spotted at deedop’s.

The spate of good news seems unending. I’ve been keeping part of this under my hat because I was afraid of jinxing it, but just got word that it’s official.

Many of you are familiar with Launch Pad, the workshop funded by NASA to introduce writers to the wonders of actual astronomy. While reading about Launch Pad, I wandered over to NASA and discovered their art program. Considering that the artist-in-residence program includes such luminaries as Laurie Anderson, I figured my chances were slim, but what the heck. It was just paperwork.

Remember back in July when I mentioned good news that I couldn’t talk about? That was when I got word that I had moved to the finalist round.

Now I can let you know, officially, NASA has selected me! It seems that my combination careers of puppetry and writing tipped the balance in my favor. When you combine that with my college days on the sky-diving team, I guess I came up with the right set of skills to be the next artist-in-residence on the International Space Station!

I’ll be heading to Florida this summer to begin training. It will mean a three month separation from Rob, but good heavens — literally, heavens — I’ll be in SPACE! With astronauts! I can hardly believe it. The details are all here, if you are interested in the training regime.

Edited to add: Since it is no longer April Fool’s Day, it only seems fair to tell you that this was a prank.