I'd recommend LessWrong [1], It's an active community around discussing rationality, AI, self improvement, and many more intellectually stimulating topics.
I think a little bit of bragging is good, it can create a bit of social pressure for others to act. More people should publicly share what they've done
So, your awesome, if I was a US citizen I would be calling right now.
It seems like this effect could be got much more efficiently using block lighting. you could get the gradients by storing the light's strength at each vertex. This way you would be tracing only two rays per line