I'm feeling sick.  Not good.  Arg.

Did you see this 3D picture of Mars?  Wow!  Amazing detail.  You must get 3D glasses for this...  Apparently Spirit will wait a few days before venturing out; controllers are having trouble clearing away one of the air bags.  I hate when that happens :)

Lost in all the great news from Spirit is another successful NASA mission; Stardust flew through a comet tail, gathered a bunch of dust particles, and is on its way back to Earth.  Excellent!

The Beagle news is less good: Mothership fails to find Beagle on Mars.

Timbu muses about two-party politics, and introduces Condercet voting as a possible compromise.  It seems like it might work, but it is way too complicated.  And another possibility: choose people at random to govern.  Seems weird, but that is how we choose people to judge criminal cases.

Ottmar Liebert has mixed emotions about GarageBand, Apple's new music app.  "Why would a child attempt to spend years learning a musical instrument when s/he could be making music with GarageBand instantly?  I envision a boy, two hundred years from now, who learns trumpet from old movies, because nobody plays the instrument anymore and there is no teacher who can show him....  On the other hand it would be a great tool for a student to practice along cool loops rather than having to play to a metronome all of the time."

Netgear seems to be getting into this wireless media stuff in a big way; they've introduced a wireless media router and a wireless digital music player.  The music player tunes Internet radio stations as well as playing your MP3 collection.  Where is all this going?  Are people really buying this stuff?  They must be =)

BW interviews Niklas Zennstrom, creator of Kazaa and more recently Skype.  Among the more interesting discussion points, he contrasts Skype with Vonage.  "They're using your broadband connection to replace the last mile, and they're offering a calling plan that may be a little bit more attractive than the local phone company's.  We think it's much more efficient to use the Internet to make calls between two Internet end points.  That's why we can offer this free of charge."  True, but Skype can only be used between two people with Skype, whereas Vonage can be used with plain old analog phones, too.  [ via John Robb ]

For the geeks among you: kernelthread.com has posted a detailed technical overview of Mac OS X.  "This document attempts to give a hacker over-friendly answer to the question 'What is Mac OS X?'."  I really learned a lot from this...

And more geekness: Dave Winer wants the ability to subscribe to OPML files.  "It's the next level after RSS.  Not only do I subscribe to your feed, but I want to subscribe to a set of feeds that you choose for me."  Interesting, it would reinforce the idea of bloggers as filters...

Doc Searles is Macwhirled: "A sub-par Steve Jobs keynote for product announcements, I thought.  Not that it mattered...  What will happen when all of us can be the first sources of music and movies as well as journals and books?  A bigger, freer and far more interesting marketplace, is what."

Seems like everyone likes iPods!
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