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 Hi everyone! Thought I'd poke my head out of my self-imposed isolarium to check in with the world. How's it going out there? In here it has been quite busy - lots of coding going on, and lots of other stuff also - and I see the blogosphere has been busy as well...
Wine is sunlight held together by water... Galileo
 I for one like U2, and am happy that Apple have arranged for me to get their latest album Songs of Innocence free. Why this act of marketing should have made so many people angry I cannot imagine. If it were a band I didn't care for, so be it, I would simply delete the album. Sheesh. 
File under no good deed goes unpunished.
One more comment: it's actually a good album. Says me. I'm listening to it right now ... :)
Interesting: PayPal open fire on Apple Pay. "Apple Pay is as safe as your selfies". A most dishonest claim, by the way.
Related: Apple proves that moats are for dummies. A good thought piece from Robert X Cringley, who has been rather scattered of late. Welcome back Robert :)
And yet: Apple's $100M gift to U2 was not cool. "For a company that makes products that are supposedly about personal creativity, they seem to focus on elite creativity a bit too much." Yep, good point.
Four factors every founder must keep in mind when determining valuation. Good to know.
 Good advice on strategy, from Dilbert...
Excellent: A startup hopes to teach computers to spot tumors in medical scans. The applications for visual search technology are limitless - and important.
 Pretty cool: the Sweden Solar System. "The Sun is represented by the Ericsson Globe in Stockholm, the largest hemispherical building in the world. The inner planets can also be found in Stockholm but the outer planets are situated northward in other cities along the Baltic Sea." I love that they've embraced the "outer planets" like Eris, Sedna and Quaor.
Interesting think piece from Josh Newman: To have or to hold. GenX-ers want to own stuff, while GenY-ers just want to be able to access it. Seems like a key tipping point which pivots around the availability of nearly everything as a service.
 Cool: Eight incredible vessels that changed how ships are made. I am kind of surprised they didn't include any aircraft carriers in this list...
I wonder if this one could have made the list, too: Russian billionaire's $300M yacht. I actually saw this vessel anchored outside Marina Del Rey last Wednesday, must be too big to enter the harbor. Looked wildly cool.
 And then there's this one: The SS United States, the fight to save America's last great ocean liner. Truly the end of an era. I would have dearly liked to make a transatlantic crossing back in the heyday of liners. Maybe someday we'll have the equivalent for visiting other planets :)
 Maximum congratulations to Alberto Contador, who won the Vuelta a España in convincing fashion, just two months after breaking his leg while riding in the Tour de France. A pivotal stage was last Sunday's stage 15, which finished at the top of the massive climb up Lagos de Covadonga. (I rode that climb myself back in 2007, while watching a stage of the Vuelta.)
 Wow, cool: Google's latest object recognition tech can spot everything in your living room. Of course the killer app for visual search applications isn't identifying stuff you already own, it is helping you buy new stuff you don't own yet :)
 Awww... ZooBorn of the day, a teeny African elephant. Where by teeny, I mean in comparison to her Mom; she weighed 245 lbs at birth :)
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