A pretty nice weekend day, although Stanford's dismantling of USC put a damper on it (guess I'm going to have to root for them now).  Worked steadily while watching football all day, and took time out for another cycle tour of Rockstore; really getting into that ride (and getting back into top climbing shape).

Congrats to Ohio State for a nice overtime victory over Iowa; who would have thought when USC blew them out at the start of the year that they would be going to the Rose Bowl, and not 'SC?

I must say I love Tivo - given - and the 30 second skip - given - but wouldn't it be great if the device did an autoskip?  And/or, if the Slingbox software could do it?  The number of commercials during a football game is staggering, and it is distracting to have to switch your attention to skip them :)

Two sunken Japanese subs found off Hawaii.  Remarkably, one of these WWII-era subs was equipped for launching airplanes.  Wow, who knew? 

You really have to admire such "old technology"; imagine the effort that went into designing, testing, and building these submarines way back in those pre-computer days.  Wow.  Interestingly, the sub was sank by the U.S. after it was captured and studied, possibly to avoid sharing the technology with the Russian military.

I have begun a major operation; I am moving to a new laptop.  I've had the new machine for three months, but with one thing and another have not made time.  It is time.  And oh by the way the new machine is running Win 7.  fXf, stay tuned! 

How excellent is this?  Matrox Unveils World’s First Single PCIe x16 to Power 8 Monitors.  I think the technology of graphics adapters has become more impressive than general purpose CPUs.  Perfect for digital slide viewing.  Coming soon to a desk near me (I hope :) 

So I was working on a Linux machine today, and I wanted to change the priority of a background process, and I couldn't remember how exactly, and so I typed "man renice".  Which of course brings up the manual page for the "renice" command, which is how you change a process priority.  So Meg walks in and sees what I've typed, and starts laughing hysterically.  How could I possibly explain? 

Visualizing sound waves with fire.  Basic science concepts are definitely more fun to learn when you add open flames.  BTW this video violates the reverse pyramid dictum, but I did watch it.  Still if it began with flames, it would have been better. 

Why does the universe look the way it does?  "Every time you put milk into your coffee and watch it mix and realize that you can't unmix that milk from your coffee, you are learning something profound about the Big Bang, about conditions in the very, very early universe.  This is just a giant clue that the real universe has given to us to how the fundamental laws of physics work.  We don't yet know how to put that clue to work."  Sean Carroll looks to be a worthy successor to Richard Feynman and Kip Thorne; a physicist who can share his insights in a way that enlightens rather than intimidates. 

Really when you think about it, this is THE question.  There was so much order at time zero, order which creates energy, and the universe has been running on that order ever since.

Beautiful: The Lemur. 

Have you ever seen a Slow Loris tickled?  I didn't think so.  Cheers :)