Who knew? My username means something interesting

blazar is my username on many systems (the standard first initial plus last name) but other than a misspelling, I never gave it much thought. I never thought to ask What is a blazar? Turns out that a blazar is an astronomical object, a newly uncovered class of active galaxy. Oooh, a whole kind of galaxy named after me!

I found this info after checking out a new clustering engine named Vivisimo, which does not search/crawl the web itself but organizes the outputs of other search engines. The marketing dweebs at Vivismo use the term clustering engine instead of metasearch engine because its core technology is the automatic organization of documents into meaningful groups. The company is a spinout from the Computer Science labs of Carnegie Mellon University, where I spent my somewhat happy freshman year of college.