This blog is written and maintained by students in the Master of Science in Professional Computer Science Program at Simon Fraser University as part of their course credit. To learn more about this unique program, please visit {sfu.ca/computing/mpcs}. Where are your eyes drawn to in this photo? Most of us will admit that our eyes are drawn to the blue duckling. To humans, the blue duckling sticks out like a sore thumb.

On the day that I was born--winter solstice, 1959--a headline in Life magazine proclaimed "Target Venus: There May be Life There!" It told of how scientists rode a balloon to an altitude of 80,000 feet to make telescope observations of Venus's atmosphere, and how their discovery of water raised hopes that there could be living things there. As a kid I thrilled to tales of undersea adventure with telepathic Venusian frogs in Isaac Asimov's juvenile science-fiction novel Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus. In 1975, when I was 15, a family friend--a planetary scientist--gave me a picture of the first-ever photograph taken from the surface of another planet: Venus. The Soviet Venera 9 probe had sent back a black-and-white image of a landscape with angular rocks and fine-grained dirt.

They had invented--or, rather, discovered; no, really they'd just inexplicably gone to the trouble of creating--a die with a hundred and twenty sides. "What do you use it for?" "We have no idea," he answered. Futility notwithstanding, the d120 is billed as the "ultimate fair die allowed by Mother Nature (i.e., mathematics!)," At two inches in diameter and a little more than three ounces in weight, the d120 casts an impressive but not a runaway roll--even with so many sides, all of them skinny right triangles, the die is far from spherical.