One big difference between IBM and Microsoft today is that, while both are filled with "high bandwidth" people, those at IBM seem to have a greater creative freedom.

Here's an example. It's a great little piece by IBM engineer Paul Reiners about turning Stephen Wolfram's cellular automata into music, using Java.

This presses all kinds of buttons for me. I'm a Wolfram fan. I like open source (and IBM is still rumored to be working on an open source JDK). I like music. I love the link between science and art. And the idea of an engineer learning to play music (or tap dance) is also attractive. Something else to think about is how Reiners pushed most of his links into a resources sub-head at the bottom of the story.

Now where does this take us?

Maybe nowhere.

Science is filled with dead ends.

But it may take us somewhere. It could take us to another way to think of music. It could take us to another way to represent cellular automata. It may link music to Wolfram's new science.

You follow the work where it takes you. That's your Clue.