And so another busy week flew by... sorry for my intermittency.  I am settling into my blogatorium, quietly catching up.  It is what it is, for the time being, although I have not drowned and am slowly making my way past the breakers*.

*Something I call the "beach effect"; you are taking on something new, the learning curve is steep, and you keep getting thrown.  Like when you're at the beach swimming; you wade in, the waves break over you, throwing you back, and progress is slow and sometimes negative.  Then suddenly after fighting your way through wave after [unexpected] wave, you find yourself in calm water, beyond the breakers, able to swim.

I sometimes joke about "Morse code from Mars", as a way of characterizing low bandwidth in a business relationship (you call, you leave voicemail, you get a call back in a week, they leave voicemail, etc.).  My blogging is like that right now, I know it; and the latency is bad, too (who wants to read about my comments to something that happened WAY in the past, like, last Monday :)  Still it is what it is, please hang in there with me, because yeah, it's all happening...

Ian Frazier Travels in Siberia, and writes about it.  Wonderful stuff, a slice of the world you never think about, vast, weird, and largely empty.  To a large extent Russia today is still recovering from the massive distortions of Soviet Russia fifty years ago, and it seems much more time will be required... 

Awesome!  A new Maserati...  having come out with the amazing Quattroporte sedan, and then the lust-inducing Gran Tourissmo, now we have the four-seater convertible GranCabrio.  Wow. 

Megan McArdle is Thinking Thin.  In which a reader comment ignites a blogstorm.  "I suspect the only way people will change their behavior is a sudden desire to move up the social ladder.  Being thin and attractive gives you a competitive edge, especially if you live in a city with lots of talented people."  This is so clearly true, and yet a large number of people are arguing it isn't, presumably because they wish it weren't.  Perhaps a side effect of Obamaness is that if only you wish hard enough for something to be true, it might happen.  If wish that were true :) 

The line diet.  A perfect implementation of the Metric Magic.  You set your goal weight and timeframe, and graph your progress against the resulting line.  And use the difference between actual and plan as a motivator.  I think this really works.  The biggest problem is that there's no gimmick - you have to actually eat less to lose weight :) 

The other day I noted the trailer for Avatar, James Cameron's new 3D film; apparently it is already the most watched trailer of all time.  Wow.  Word of mouth in action.  I bet this translates into big time box office sales.  I know I want to see it! 

I love this: Twelve words you can never say in the office.  Not because they're bad, but because they label you as being out of touch.  One of them is "Weblog"; you would never say that, right?  Nah... 

PS a related thing I've found: people who confuse "blog" with "post".  As in, he wrote an interesting blog about that.  You would never say that, right?

Rick Poyner: Appreciation for a forgotten typewriter.  "I'm struck by how powerfully its form and image embody and express the idea of writing, as does almost any typewriter.  Like the telephone at an earlier phase in its development when it still had a distinct earpiece and mouthpiece at either end of a handle, the fully evolved typewriter is a 20th-century industrial archetype."  True, isn't it?  So many of our icons have evolved from things which aren't in actual use anymore.  Like a desk calendar :)  [ via Boing Boing ] 

Wave of the week, from The Horse's Mouth's wave of the day.  Awesome.  Why do we humans like looking at waves?  Who knows, but it is given that we do...  I bet this one is even more awesome live! 

Want to really bend your mind?  Then try this: Quiddity has a Qualia all its own.  In which Eric Raymond does logical battle with Daniel Dennett about whether everyone sees the same thing when they see Red.  The argument insofar as I can grok it is that the specific color Red triggers a specific biological reflex in your brain, based on its inherent properties (wavelength).  I find the argument more interesting for its form than its substance. 

Wow, this is cool:  Venezuela's continuous lightning storms.  "It's still unknown exactly why this area--and this area alone--should produce such regular lighting. One theory holds that ionized methane gas rising from the Catatumbo bogs is meeting with storm clouds coming down from the Andes, helping to create the perfect conditions for a lighting storm."  Must be hard to sleep, at least until you get used to it.  Who knew? 

Yay,  Alexander Vinokourov is back in the professional peloton, competing in the Vuelta de Espana, which he won in 2006, riding for Astana, the team he founded and led until his doping suspension during the 2007 Tour de france.  We can't look for him to be competitive after all this time off, but we can root for him to attack! 

Another blogger tries blogging tweets, and finds it exposes the inanity: Tim Bray: OK, you win.  I am really starting to wonder when the Twitter emperor's lack of clothes will be detected.  It has already lasted longer than I would have thought... 

Great question: Where have all the geeky lunch boxes gone?  "I’m sure I’m showing my age, but when I walked to school (uphill, both ways), my books were carried loosely in one hand and my peanut butter and jelly sandwich, carrot sticks and potato chips were packed safely away in a tightly clasped, rectangular metal lunch box."  Yep, me too!  I miss 'em... 

News you can use: Hack your Palm Pre.  I keep thinking I want to do this, so I can access all the hundreds of unofficial Palm Pre apps, but then I have to admit it would just be for fun, I don't really need anything.  Well maybe a nice RSS reader :) 

Popular Mechanics: Behind the scenes with SpaceX.  For once, a nice article about the company which isn't about its charismatic founder Elon Musk.  SpaceX is amazing, the first private spaceflight company which really has a chance to make a business out of launching people into space.  How cool is that? 

Something of interest (perhaps) to SpaceX engineers: A guide to N dimensions.  "The most intuitive description of a dimension is the oldest one: the number of dimensions a system possesses is the number of independent directions you or anything else can move in.  Up and down count as only one dimension because up-ness and down-ness are two sides of the same coin: the further up you go, the less down you are.  The same connection exists between left and right, and forwards and backwards, but not between up and right, down and backwards, and so on."  Riight. 

The funniest joke of 2009: Hedgehogs; why can't they just share the hedge?  Tap tap, crash. 

ZooBorn of the week: a baby Pudu.  Yes of course as you know, a Pudu is the world's smallest species of deer; even adults look cute, but the babies are adorable. 

Whew, all caught up.  Now onward (to more blogging :)