Zogby blogs about the dumbing down of the California High School Exit Exam.  "They actually have the gonads to look a reporter straight in the eye and tell them that they're not dumbing down the test when they're replacing high school level math questions with 6th and 7th grade math questions."  How long can this stuff keeping going on?  Outrageous.

Check out this Palestinian brainwashing.  How sad.  How completely, thoroughly, discouragingly sad.

And speaking of sad, do you know what 300,000 really looks like?  (That's the number of people Saddam Hussien's government buried in the 263 mass graves found so far.)  Remember, every dot represents someone's son, or daughter.

Turning to more positive things, Eric Gagne easily won the NL Cy Young award.  The Dodger closer converted all 55 of his save opportunities with a 1.20 ERA, and had 137 strikeouts and 20 walks in 82 1/3 innings.  One of the best seasons anyone's every had.  Unbelievable.

Want to see what perfection looks like?  Check out this 103 carat D/IF diamond.  D is the "whitest" color, and IF means "internally flawless".  The cut isn't mentioned, but my guess is 000 (why not, with such a perfect rough), so what you have here is - indeed - a perfect diamond.  This pic is about actual size, too!

Note: this grade of diamond is rarely made into jewelry.  Most flawless diamonds are purchased as investments, and spend their lives in bank vaults, like some kind of bearer bond.

Martin Spernau notes Eigenpolls.  "The problem with normal polls is that it find the most popular option.  But if you are looking for a solution to a problem you don't want the most popular, what you want is the best solution to the problem.  Eigenpolls try to solve this by letting the voters compare and rank the options, and then use a algorithm similar to Google's PageRank on the result."  Excellent!

Mark Morford lauds the famous Apple out-of-the-box experience: Lick Me, I'm a Macintosh.  "This is what Apple does.  This is what they are known for and why their design team is so famous and why they win so many awards and why they engender such passionate devotion from their adherents and why Macs are still far, far superior to PCs and always will be."  This is the goal; I want my company to have people feeling this way about our products!