Busy year so far.  Whew.

If you've been on the web at all the past 24 hours, you've seen these new color pictures of Mars, courtesy of Spirit.  When I saw that first picture, it literally gave me chills.  It just doesn't seem real - but it is.  Awesome!

India and Pakistan announce the start of "peace talks".  Excellent. 

North Korea offers to halt its nuclear activities if six-way talks are restarted.  A key contingency: they want the U.S. to begin supplying heavy oil, power and other energy resources.  Also excellent.

Meanwhile Libya is trying to reestablish diplomatic ties with Israel.  Again, excellent.

What's going on here?  Peace seems to be breaking out all over.  Glenn Reynolds comments: "A funny thing happened on the way to world war.  Despite claims that President Bush's war on terror would set the Middle East -- and the rest of the world -- aflame, things haven't worked out that way.  In fact, they're looking pretty good."

Arnold Schwarzenegger gave his first State of the State address tonight.  Citizen Smash is all over it, with excerpts from newspapers prior to the speech, and a review of the highlights afterward.  "Over the last five years, the state's income has increased 25 percent, but spending increased by 43 percent.  This was irresponsible...  If we continue spending and don't make cuts, California will be bankrupt.  Every governor proposes moving boxes around to reorganize government.  I don't want to move the boxes around; I want to blow them up."  Smash sums up: My governor can kick your governor’s ass.

So did you catch Steve Jobs' keynote at Macworld?  Excellent as always.  Here's a summary of the announcements if you don't have an hour to watch Steve...  For me the coolest new thing is Xgrid, Apple's computational clustering facility.  Perfect for pattern recognition in large Pathology images :)

Brett Simmons and John Gruber like GarageBand.  "GarageBand turns your Mac into an anytime, anywhere recording studio packed with hundreds of instruments and a recording engineer or two for good measure."  Very cool.

Chris Anderson in Wired: Memo to the Next Head of the MPAA.  "Congratulations on your new job - and on having the courage to take it.  You arrive at a historic moment, with big shoes to fill and a tough challenge ahead...  So what should you do?  Start by accepting that new technology means a new way of doing business."  I think it's right on - read the whole thing.

SCO really pisses me off.  Now they're asking 6,000 Linux licensees to certify that they in compliance with their Unix agreements.  Piss on 'em from a great height.

Another thing that pisses me off - fake political correctness.  Like this post on GNXP, where razib reports a school banned "the three little pigs" for fear of offending Muslims.  Are you kidding me?  Just because you don't eat pigs doesn't mean you can't read about them.  Wow.

Dave Winer thinks Pete Rose should be in the hall.  "Ask the fans, we want to honor the best hitter of all time. For all his moral weakness, there was a reason he was called Charlie Hustle."  I don't think Dave intended this to be a double entendre, but if you ask me there were two reasons he was called that :)

Rob Smith notes the 2003 Darwin Award candidates.  Like this one: "In February, according to police in Windsor, Ontario, Daniel Kolta, 27, and Randy Taylor, 33, died in a head-on collision, thus earning a tie in the game of chicken they were playing with their snowmobiles."  And they get a tie for my favorite, too.