Now I lay me down to sleep... exit light, enter night.  But first blogging!

Ann Althouse takes a cold look at the text of Obama's speech.  "What if companies go out of business when you deprive them of the ways they've come up with to be profitable?  I'm afraid making the insurance business unprofitable is completely acceptable to you, because you don't mind if in the end government takes over everything."  A pretty good fisking, from an Obama supporter. 

The Universe, in high definition!  As the Hubble's new Wide Field Camera is put through its paces.  Wow. 

Wave of the day: psycho-slab.  Whoa. 

It's a smartphone world: Like you, I get an email from Amazon periodically with their "top 10 deals in electronics".  Interestingly many of the products on offer are already obsolete because of smartphones!  The Garmin GPS?  Replaced by smartphones!  Flip video camera?  Ditto!  Samsung DVD burner?  Um, what was a DVD, again?  Nikon coolpix camera?  Smartphone again!  Digital photo frame?  Cute, but really you can keep all your pictures on your phone...  I will say that HDTVs have not been replaced by smartphones, yet... (but wait until we have embedded projectors!) 

Speaking of smartphones, the Palm Pre has a little sister, the Pixi.  It is teeny, has a real keyboard, and runs the WebOS.  I like it! 

The coolest supercar you've never heard of...  Spyker Spyder of course, and yes of course I have heard of it.  Dutch of course! 

Twitter and the revenue dilemma.  The argument being, once you have revenue, you are valued based on revenue, before that you are valued based on potential.  (Next we'll have Twitter and the profit dilemma, they should be so lucky :)  This is so fascinating to me.  I cannot remember any company which was getting so much business model help :) 

Congratulations to Tyler Farrar on winning Vuelta stage 11, his first win in a grand tour.  Of many more in the future, we can be sure; he is a very promising young rider.  As well as [seemingly] a really nice guy.  This was a much needed win for Garmin, too, they have been so close so many times this year. 

Berci Mesko embeds this great slideshow on Social Media, the umbrella term for all the new consumer Web 2.0 services.  While I like this presentation, I must say that grouping Facebook with MySpace with Twitter and trying to make common observations about them is pretty tough. 

Jeff Atwood with Nine ways marketing weasels try to manipulate you.  A pretty amazing list, really.  Consider #1: Encourage False Comparisons: "When Williams-Sonoma introduced bread machines, sales were slow. When they added a 'deluxe' version that was 50% more expensive, they started flying off the shelves; the first bread machine now appeared to be a bargain."  Huh. 

Here we have Glass sculptures of viruses and bacteria.  Wow, beautiful!  The one at right is swine flu...