Happy Anniversary - to me!  And to my wonderful wife Shirley.  We celebrated our 11^th anniversary yesterday.  Wow, eleven years.  A lot has happened in that time, to us, and to the world!  Eleven years ago nobody had heard of the Internet, it was not a thing.  And now it is an indispensable part of many lives.  Amazing to contemplate, and to think what the next eleven years might bring...

Lots of catching up to do, it's all happening...

Well, Lance has done it again.  Five straight Tour de France victories.  Absolutely unbelieveable!  This was his toughest one, and in many ways his best.  The time trial yesterday was great; too bad Jan Ullrich fell in the wet conditions, it made for a bit of anticlimax.  But that's bike racing... sometimes you have to survive first, then win.  I think the key point of this Tour was stage 15 in the Pyrenees, when Lance fell hard, and then incredibly got up and powered to a stage win.  He just seems to have an extra gear when he needs it :)

Remember we were talking about Mitochondrial Eve, and how humans were first found about 160,000 years ago in Africa?  Well, turns out humans came to North America much later, only about 18,000 years ago...  There is evidence from Y chromosome studies that the first Americans came over a land bridge from Asia.

Here's an interesting post on what makes faces attractive.  [ via GNXP ]  This is an especially interesting discussion considering the natural selection considerations; somehow there must have been selective pressure for "attractive" faces, or we wouldn't find them important in choosing a mate.

Also in GNXP: Genes, Medicine, and the New Race Debate.  [ Originally from Technology Review, but behind a paywall ]  Researchers are using the data from the human genome project to construct a "haploid map", which defines the boundaries of each haplotype block, a kind of grouping of genes along a chromosome.  "The most immediate impact of the HapMap is likely to be the prediction of how a patient will respond to a drug."  One of the holiest grails in biotech right now.

More on RFID; Salon says everything is watching you.  Not yet, but soon...

Recent reports from AOL and SBC seems to suggest DSL is gaining on Cable, in the neck-and-neck race to bring broadband to the U.S.  Interesting.  I've had both, and I can honestly say cable is better.  Faster, anyway, and at least as reliable.  With cable you get 300K+ downloads all the time, whereas with DSL you only get about 100K.  Uploads are slower - and you can't host a server on cable - so that's the downside, but for the average couch surfer that doesn't matter.

CNet report Microsoft considering Music Store.  Excellent, welcome to the party.  Yet another case where MS would follow Apple into a new market / technology, and perhaps yet another case where they'd be more successful over the long haul.

Anil Dash writes about Microsoft: many years of sucking.  He picks on the font installation dialog, which has sucked for ten years.  There are these little backwaters of Windows which never seem to get any attention.  That funky dialog box you get when you first use a help file (which Joel likes so much) comes to mind.  It is probably unfair to judge the entire company, or Windows, by one anachronism, but it is fun...

	Check out these amazing optical illusions.  The one at left is my favorite; no matter how hard my brain tries to tell my eyes the lines are straight, they want to say they're curved.  Cool.