Far from being the PR success the Chinese government had hoped for, the Olympics are becoming a sort of bad political joke.  The headline news seems to be speculation about who will show up at the opening ceremonies.  And this is rather typical: how the Bejiing Olympics got its logo. 

Remember I reported I changed my site to direct hotlink requests to a special logo image?  Well today pretty much randomly I checked my referer logs for images, and I can't believe it but there are still a metric ton of hotlinks to images on my site!  All these sites all over the place are serving billboards advertising this blog.  I think what must happen is that the images get cached by would-be hotlinkers' browsers, so they never see the logo image instead of the one they think they're linking.  Amazing.  Moral of the story: don't hotlink :) 

Good news from the front: Cancer rates decrease for some groups.  "The Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer, released in October, found that cancer incidence rates have stabilized and, for many of the most common forms of cancer, are actually dropping.  Among men, incidence rates for lung cancer (the leading cause of cancer death in men) decreased by 1.8% a year from 2001 to 2004, and rates for colorectal cancer fell by more than 2% annually. Perhaps most impressive were the changes in the incidence of breast cancer, the second-leading cause of cancer death in women, behind lung cancer. Those rates for women dropped by 3.5% a year during this period."  Excellent.  As people live longer, more will get cancer - it tends to be the thing that kills you in the end - but we are now increasing the quality of life for the average person. 

And speaking of the odds of dying somehow, this great chart shows that your chance of dying from a bicycle accident are 1 in 5,000, less than in a car (1 in 84) and from cancer (1 in 7).  Heart disease is still the worst at 1 in 5.  (Yeah, I know you can't read it; click it to enlarge.)  Good stuff to know.  [ via Ottmar Liebert ]  

I find it very weird that suicide is 1 in 119.  Wow.  Can that be right?  Also weird: earthquakes (1 in 117,000) are worse than floods (1 in 144,000).  Not shown, but found in the table of the linked National Safety Council report: cataclysmic storms (e.g. hurricanes) are much worse, at 1 in 4,300.

Tom Boonen is the king; he triumphed in a bunch sprint to win Paris-Rubaix, the toughest one-day bike race in the world (sorry, Milan-San Remo) and arguably the toughest one day sporting event, period.  Poor George Hincapie was riding in the front and feeling good when his rear wheel broke.  Such are the breaks... 

Brad Feld: Sillyness-as-a-service.  I love it.  He forgot AaaS - Acronyms as a Service :)