Man, morning came early today; after getting back from New York late last night I drove down to Vista this morning...  left late, deliberately (so I could sleep a little more), and traffic was fortunately not horrible...  long day of meetings, sometimes I think problems could be solved more easily without other people :) and so I badly needed a hard ride and so I blew out of the office and headed for my now-usual ride down from Dana Point, and my now-usual nice dinner afterwards... and then drove home and then blogged!  Whew.

The art of living dangerously.  "But here's the cool thing. I found that moderate, rational, risk takers, that is, those with scores between the mean and one standard deviation to the right are the people who are most satisfied with their lives."  I think perhaps there is some confusion between correlation and causality here, but it is an interesting finding.  I will try to take more risks... tomorrow! 

Hey guess what?  It's springtime on Titan!  Honestly I cannot wait to go there, I'm saving up a whole bunch of small risks and I'm going to spend them all at once on one big risk.  The adventure of a lifetime. 

Apropos (sort of); a great article by Seth Shostak: When will we find the extraterrestrials?  Please read it for a nice overview of SETI and the various ways we might find life beyond Earth.  Interestingly, Seth argues "I think that if there's a conscious intelligence out there, it's synthetic."  Basically because machines will outlast the organisms that create them... 

This is pretty cool: The Keating Hotel in downtown San Diego was designed by Pininfarina.  How did I know this?  Well the other night my parking valet gave me his card; he happens to run events and marketing for the Keating :)  Looks awesome, too bad I rarely have occasion to stay downtown... 

In case you didn't know; Pininfarina is the Italian design firm best known for Ferraris and Maseratis :)

Caltech's Engineering & Science quarterly describes a fascinating new technique for fighting breast cancer: Molecular Missiles.  "A search-and-destroy molecular machine that selectively locks on to cancer cells could make radiation treatments a thing of the past, at least for breast cancers.  The method uses a chemical payload called a gallium corrole, mated to a protein carrier that seeks out a cancer-cell marker. Once it binds to the cell, the protein triggers endocytosis, a process in which the cell engulfs the corrole-carrier combo."  An interesting approach, non-invasive and seemingly very effective. 

Parenthetically I'll note that I can remember receiving Chemistry lectures from Harry Gray thirty years ago. Dr. Gray always said the best biology was done by chemists :)

Of possible interest, and so I can find it later; Jeff Atwood tells us how to share files with Bittorrent.  Turns out it is a little more complicated to serve files this way than it is to download them... 

So have you checked out Google Squared yet?  O'Reilly says it is an exponential improvement in search, a headline crafted more for the mathematical allusion than for truth; honestly it seems like a nice tool for certain work, but not broadly applicable. 

Finally, the Pre-views are out!  That is to say a whole slew of reviewers have received a Pre-launch Pre, and are posting their reviews.  So far the results seem quite positive.  I'll have more to say when I'm awake again... good night!