Here goes:

• The Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques has published its first accepted article: “Importance Sampling of Reflection from Hair Fibers”. Free for download, of course.
• Mauricio Vives pointed out that the thirteenth article in a series going back to 2010 is now up: Fluid Simulation for Video Games. Not my particular interest, but my gosh this collection is impressive, it’s practically book-length at this point, and includes code snippets and a demo with source (you’ll need to install TBB to compile).
• A new book has been announced, coming out in October: The CUDA Handbook. The author, Nicholas Wilt, was a software architect at NVIDIA who worked on CUDA since its inception.
• John Owens pointed out an interesting way to search Google Scholar, by publications with the word graphics. This gives an interesting weighing of influence – no real surprises, and note that some conferences are not included (I highly doubt that EGSR, I3D, and HPG don’t make the cut).
• Sebastien Lagarde gives an in-depth analysis showing how the Phong and Blinn specular highlight models are related by a factor of 4 in the power. This is an old result from Fisher & Woo in Graphics Gems IV, but it’s nice to see an independent verification and analysis.
• Thinking of Graphics Gems, I wanted to mention this old piece of news now: Jim Arvo (editor of Graphics Gems II) passed away back on October 19th of last year. He did seminal work in ray tracing, Monte Carlo sampling, light transport, and many other areas, and was also just a great guy. See his homepage while it still is there.
• There are mutant women who live amongst us with a fourth type of cone cell. There’s more information on Wikipedia.