Seven things:

• Stephen Hill’s great collection of SIGGRAPH 2015 links.
• As he and others have noted, the entire SIGGRAPH 2015 proceedings is available to all for free download until the end of this week. Grab it now if you’re not a SIGGRAPH member. SIGGRAPH members always have Digital Library access to SIGGRAPH-sponsored conferences, even if not Digital Library subscribers, e.g. here’s the SIGGRAPH 2014 proceedings.
• New term: froxel – frustum voxel. Alex Evans mentioned it in his fascinating talk in the Advances in RTR course; on page 83 he notes, “The term originated at the Sony WWS ATG group, I believe.” Diagram. He’s semi-right that Shadertoy programs do ray marching through froxels at their simplest; a speedup for Shadertoy is using the minimum distance-field distance found to any object as a minimum step size (e.g., line 126 of this demo, most of which they live-coded during the wonderful Shadertoy studio workshop).
• Evidence that patents appear to not spur research and innovation, even for big pharma. I like The Economist, as it tries to weigh the evidence for & against some idea, vs. knee-jerking it one way or the other.
• Folklore 1: Jim Blinn confirmed that the teapot model was scaled down vertically because it looked nicer that way, not that the pixels were non-square (incorrectly propagated here and here). Jim & 3D printed teapot.
• Which reminds me: here’s my random set of pics from SIGGRAPH 2015, with captions. I like, “Hundreds of beautiful designs, and only one or two that suck.” Update: more photos from Mauricio Vives, along with WebGL specific shots. Need more? Everyone’s.
• Folklore 2: (Updated and corrected) Rendering equation: Kajiya’s used S as a subscript, in PoDIS Glassner used an omega symbol because it looks like a hemisphere, since that’s what was being integrated over. Wikipedia uses it.

Seven more tomorrow.