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Watching football this weekend. Great games! I love my Tivo. How could you possibly watch this many games, this fast, on your own schedule, any other way?
You've read about the FCC's "broadcast flag", right? Wondering Will the Broadcast Flag Break Your Tivo? Paul Boutin answers No.
Here's today's order-of-magnitude question. (You knew this was coming, right :) What if everyone on Earth was smarter? Some reasonable increment, like, say, 10 IQ points (roughly 10%)... Would that make our lives qualitatively different? Or - wait for it - what if everyone was less intelligent? By 10 IQ points... Would that make our lives qualitatively different? Just wondering.
You don't need to know this, but I'm going to tell you anyway... Today I cleaned out my closet. As a result I'm giving away about 50 shirts, jackets, sweaters, pants, etc. that no longer fit (either physically or culturally). And I rediscovered another 50 shirts, jackets, sweaters, pants, etc. that I like, but I forgot I had. Somehow I seem to wear the same three things, over and over. Anyway I feel like I just went shopping and bought all these great clothes!
 This is amazing: Discovery Labs' DNA Explorer. "This kit--the first to feature a bona fide centrifuge and electrophoresis chamber--will turn your kid on to the intricacies of genetics at an even younger age. Realistic lab equipment transforms the kitchen into a forensics lab, where your breakfast-bar biologist can extract clumps of real DNA from fruits and vegetables or solve 'crimes' by revealing DNA 'fingerprints'." Italics are mine... I wonder what Watson and Crick think of this? [ via Cory Doctorow ]
 It's shopping season, which means it is online shopping season. Which means Google is busier than ever. And if you like Google, you might wonder What is Google Worth? They have $800M in revenue, and $200M in profit (estimated, they're private, so we don't know for sure). Most rumors seem to iterate around the $10B figure for valuation. That is 12X revenue, and 48X profit. Yeah, they're a great company, but that seems inflated to me.
 Another cool toy - the [rumored] Sony PS3. Alice notes "a somewhat Orwellian future where consoles would 'be able to extrapolate eye movement and gestural [sic] recognition, more complicated finger movement, and the logical next step of that is to deduce from a person's facial expression and demeanor what their emotion state is'." It will become harder and harder to distinguish reality from virtual reality! [ via Ottmar Liebert ]
Adam Curry posted a wonderfully recursive QOTD: "Philip G. Hamerton: Have you ever observed that we pay much more attention to a wise passage when it is quoted than when we read it in the original author?" The more deeply the quote is nested, the better. If you link to my post, it will become even more significant :)
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