I made a few minor performance tweaks, hopefully didn't break anything.  For those of you reading via RSS, you won't notice the difference, but if you've visited the site itself, it may be faster.  Then again, it may be broken.

Got a few links for you, right here...

Sometimes the news just makes you scratch your head.  Like, the U.N. has named Zimbabwe to head the Commission on Sustainable Development.  This is like having Libya head up the Human Rights Commission.  Oh, yeah, they did that too.  The U.N. honestly defies parody.  And yeah, we pay for it all... 

This is amazing: Floyd Landis says the US Anti-Doping Agency offered to reduce his suspension if he provided evidence which implicated Lance Armstrong.  Floyd summarized it perfectly: "It speaks to the character of the prosecution".  Indeed it does.  Nothing could help Floyd's case more...  P.S. I love the picture which accompanied the article - see it at right - but as usual the media get it wrong; the caption says "Floyd Landis is facing a two-year suspension after high levels of testosterone were found in his body during last year's Tour de France".  Well, no, he didn't have high levels of testosterone, he had a high ratio of testosterone to pretestosterone.  Very different and crucial to understanding his case. 

Check this out - billed as "the world's most dangerous road", somewhere in Bolivia.  Man. 

So you think you know what's going on in the Middle East, eh?  Well, you may be surprised to find you don't even know where all the countries are located, and how they are positioned relative to each other.  This great little map game will show you and teach you.  I learned a lot in three minutes.  Perhaps this should be given to each of the Presidential candidates? 

This I love - Ant Colony Algorithms - from Dr. Dobbs.  "Ant colony optimization is an example of a swarm algorithm. If you have read Michael Crichton's thriller Prey, which luridly describes swarms of semi-intelligent nanobots in competition with humans, you are familiar with some of the ideas behind this relevantly recently developed area. In a swarm algorithm, a large number of agents cooperate to achieve a global aim without requiring any central control point."  This is pretty much the way we develop code at Aperio - a swarm of programmers :) 

Here's an incredibly useful site: Favicon from pics.  If you need to make a favicon - and you would know if you did - this is perfect; just upload any picture and poof! you have a corresponding favicon.  If you have no idea what this means, so be it; nothing to see here, move along... 

Have you ever wondered, "Why can't I own a Canadian?"  Yeah, me too.  If you're a Bible believer you might consider this serious food for thought... 

Remember Escher for real?  Well here's a YouTube clip which is reminiscent: A drunk man on Escher's infinite staircase...  very cool.  (Thanks, Dave!  And yeah, I like the rope at the end, too :)  Amazing the stuff that show's up on YouTube, eh? 

This is very cool: The Size of our World.  It is just really hard to put this in perspective, isn't it? 

Here we have thirteen things that do not make sense, from New Scientist.  Some of these are more like unexplained mysteries than logic problems, but they're fun anyway.  My favorite is #1, the placebo effect, which is really real and which really doesn't make sense. 

Finally, if you want to find more cool stuff, visit populrs.  Showing the most popular URLs from digg, del.icio.us, reddit, flickr, newsvine, metafilter, tailrank, YouTube, Google news, Yahoo news, Netscape, iFilm, Wired, slashdot, BoingBoing, etc.  So much stuff, you can't possibly read it all, so you might need me to filter it for you :)