And so she's off!  Alex is on her way to Uganda... the emotional center of a nice day in which I got a reasonable amount done despite having a lot of distractions.

(The picture of the Mini is for Alex :)

I keep being asked about Abby Sunderland; she's 16 and Alex is 16, she's from Westlake Village like we are; here's a nice overview of the controversy from Sail World.  I've decided if it were my daughter, I probably would have let her go... 

From The Scientist: Brain Paintings.  "An artist and a neuroscientist are plumbing the depths of human perception to create works of art that explore quirks in how we view the world."  Whoa.  I'd like to see them analyze Escher :) 

From The Oatmeal, the rather recursive Three Most Common Uses of Irony.  I love it.  (Irony: a deliberate discrepancy between what is said and what is meant...  perfect for misinterpretation and debate :) 

This is pretty cool: a "flipper" bridge between Hong Kong (where cars drive on the left) and mainland China (where cars drive on the right).  I wonder what happens inside the chunnel?  Something similar, surely.  You'd have to think anything like this would be accompanied by a lot of warning signs, too :) 

Google Earth: the cyclists' edition.  "Today, Google Earth released a new edition of its desktop app which hikers, runners and cyclists are going to love...  One of the new features allows you to recreate the path of a hike or bike ride by ingesting geo-data from one of your GPS devices. The visualizations show you the speed, elevation, and other stats from your ride, which you can see as an animation inside Google Earth."  Awesome.  Now I just need a Pre app to capture the data!