What does Earth look like when viewed from Mars?  Like this.  Cool pictures from the Mars Global Surveyor.  "A fortuitous alignment of Earth and Jupiter - the first planetary conjunction viewed from another planet - permitted the MOC to acquire an image of both of these bodies and their larger satellites."

Remember my caravans idea?  ZDNet has done a series on high-tech cars, and Patrick Houston discusses the new high-tech cruise controls in his column.  The positioning is safety, not efficiency, but the essential capability of these devices is the same.  Interesting reading...  I have to check out one of these cars.

Check out this fascinating post by Omnibus Bill on the University of Michigan affirmative action case.  Apparently UMich had proof from their own studies that racial preferences in their admissions policies were not helping, but continues to pursue them anyway.  An interesting contrast with the University of Texas' 10% policy, which says nothing about race but has increased diversity significantly.

The affirmative action debates remind me of debates about the economic value of communism in the late 1970s; after the clear failure of the policy was already apparent (in Eastern Europe), people still argued for the theoretical benefit.  Affirmative action in US Universities has been tried, and it didn't work.  Let's move on.

Wired reports a weird probable cause case:  "After police in Washington state placed a tracking device in a suspect's car, he inadvertently led them to a shallow grave where his daughter's body was buried. Now the convicted killer claims his rights were violated."

The world's oldest man?  Habib Miyan says he is 132, but according to records he is a mere 125.  He was born in 1878 - imagine the changes this man has seen in his lifetime.  Wow.

Yippee!  Tivo's loss shrinks as sales jump.

Tim Bray ponders RDF.  "RDF has ignored what I consider to be the central lesson of the World Wide Web, the 'View Source' lesson."  I celebrate these articles by experts which validate my own impression, which is that there is no 'there' there in The Semantic Web.

Further affirmation: Sean McGrath links Tim's Article, and says amen.  "A lot of XML technologies these days are big bags of complexity."  Does that make them wrong?  Yes.

The benefits of high-tech: Ice wine and cool technology.  Yum.