Facial profiling for the detection of mal-intent using thermal imaging – I've been out of the loop on how far image processing has come in detecting emotions. If you think a computer that recognises your face is uncanny, how about one that can tell how you're feeling better than a human?
FakeBelieve – Juicy details on how the amazing photographic paintings of Ransom Mitchell are created. I love how they're hacking reality, with hardly a CPU in sight.
Beauty in the Breakdown – Beautiful writing about a climber's addiction to 'benzo' pills, and the interplay between anxiety, obsession, and all kinds of addiction.
Quandl – It's not a new idea, but this is a good implementation of a search engine for time-series data sets.
Bulk loading data into Redshift – I've been very impressed by what I've seen of Amazon's new database aimed at scalable analytics processing, especially since bulk loading seems to be a first class citizen, rather than something you have to hack on after the fact like the old SimpleDB.
Pete Warden's blog 