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Man, we had quite a day today. Thirty+ eight-year-olds running around and screaming, jumping in the jumpy and splashing in the pool. Whew.
Profiting from Obscurity; Tom Standage examines the long tail in the Economist. "Perhaps the most profound implication of the long tail, however, is its impact on popular culture. As choice expands and people can more easily find niche content that particularly interests them, hits will be less important: so what will people talk about when gathered around the water cooler?" [ via Chris Anderson ] 
Tom Coates discusses his vote in the English election. "And in the end, everything has worked out pretty much perfectly. The country's swing towards the Liberal Democrats was enormously significant, and should give the government a clear sign about where the centre of the debate has headed." Prior to blogs, how could you possibly get this kind of insight about the politics of another country?
San Francisco was chosen as the headquarters location for California's stem cell initiative administration, beating out San Diego. I'm afraid San Diego lost because of the political turmoil there, but truly this choice was a mistake. San Francisco has a huge bureaucracy as well as very consensual, liberal approach; San Diego is much less bureaucratic and must more business-oriented, as well as the biotech center of California. We'll see how it all works out, I guess, but it would have been a better start if San Diego had been chosen...
 Jason Kottke: The Sony Libre. The future of books. Really. Maybe not this device, but a device like it....
Greg London considers Copyrights and Patents in the wild west: Bounty Hunters. Kind of long but the points are solid. It is just so weird that ideas can be owned.
Advanced Imaging discusses Video Data turns into Knowledge. The only thing harder than pattern recognition in 2D images is pattern recognition in video, which is essentially pattern recognition in 3D. Fascinating. [ via Radar O'Reilly ]
Russell Beattie posted a great discussion about The Mobile Web. "The mobile web sucks right now. Why is that?" Seems like an intelligent HTML proxy would make the web on cell phones usable. Right now, most of the time, it is basically in the "dancing bear" catagory; it is cool that it works at all, but it doesn't work well enough to be actually usuable.
Does anybody really know what time it is? Well, here's The Official U.S. Time. [ via Ottmar Liebert ] You have to love Indiana, where some counties are on Central Time, some on Eastern Time, some observe daylight savings, and some don't. People in Indiana talk in terms of "fast time" and "slow time", and in some cities you could hear things like "I'm meeting him at 5:00 fast time". There's even a town called Santa Claus (not making this up) where some businesses are on slow time part of the year, and others are on fast time. Most of the time "fast time" is an hour ahead of "slow time", but there are times when they are equal. Whew.
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