Whew, what a long eventful week, and it isn't over yet; heading back down to Vista tomorrow for a meeting there, and have a meeting back in the Valley in the afternoon.  But I also have a backlog of things to blog about...

Oh, and I have a most happy daughter; Meg is taking a video editing class, and we got her a new video camera.  (Yay, that such classes exist!)  Actually we got her a new camera, period; a Canon T3, which is an awesome 35mm digital camera and a cool video camera, all in one.  (Yay, that such devices exist!)

Have you ever wondered at your brain's ability to remember music?  It is truly incredible how many songs you know, how many songs you can recognize within just a few notes, and how much of the song you can remember.  Just today I was driving listening to Classic Rewind on XM and the Moody Blues' Music to the Story in Your Eyes came on.  I haven't heard that song for 100 years but I recognized it instantly, and was able sing along without any problem.  (Well, I can't sing, but I can try :)  Amazing. 

Who would have thought?  Record-low SAT scores a wake up call.  "SAT reading scores for the high school class of 2011 were the lowest on record, and combined reading and math scores fell to their lowest point since 1995."  While everyone struggles to rationalize these data points, we should accept them for what they are; evidence of Unnatural Selection. 

Interesting: Do users change their settings?  No.  The power of defaults is strong and must be respected. 

A fascinating article in the New Yorker: Laboratory Conditions, in which architects re-imagine the science laboratory environment.  It turns out extraordinary work environments can yield extraordinary results. 

This is way cool: Augmented Reality's Disruptive Potential.  "One of the most interesting apps that someone produced was a virtual tee-shirt shop. It was placed in the 20 most expensive shopping streets in the world, selling tee-shirts. Stop and think about that for a minute. He built a virtual shop where a real one already existed."  Excellent! 

In thinking about Ray Kurzweil's talk about how things develop exponentially when you expect them to develop linearly, augmented reality is a good candidate for a technology which is set to explode.

Another candidate: Rapid Ramp in full-genome sequencing: 30,000 in 2011.  Ray actually mentioned this one; the day is nearly at hand when everyone's DNA will be sequenced.  

This is excellent: Wooden desk hides a pipe organ and fluidic computer.  Don't you just love non-electric mechanical devices?  Me, too.  I don't know why, but this is ever so much cooler than a desk which accomplishes the same things with electronics. 

Duplicating blogger Jason Kottke with software: Robottke.  You can imagine that while it isn't quite as good now, it could get better, and eventually maybe even better than Kottke himself.  This is sort of a weird Turing Test, huh? 

I'm not buying this: Neutrinos clocked faster than light.  Anything faster than light would violate causality, and that is logically impossible.  The interpretation of the experimental results must be wrong. 

Tap tap, crash: "'We don't allow faster than light neutrinos in here' said the bartender.  A neutrino walks into a bar."  :)

Man, I shouldn't have done this but I did; I ignored the world cycling championships!  Congratulations to Tony Martin for upsetting Fabian Cancellara and winning the world time trial championship, and congratulations to Mark Cavendish for outsprinting the field and winning the world road racing championship.  (I must say, I think the organizers of the worlds should always have a course which breaks up the field and doesn't result in a field sprint, but what do I know...) 

Dirk Schmidt: Visualizing the Steve Jobs era.  "From a value creation point of view, it’s hard to think of a better performance from anyone, ever."  And related, hard to think of anyone who will have left a bigger impact on the world of technology and business. 

This is pretty amazing: Volkswagon's New Beetle page, "just scroll".  HTML5 gone amuck!  Definitely not your father's web page, celebrating a car which is not your father's beetle.  BTW works in IE 9 (yay), but not under IOS (boo). 

Stuck for a Halloween costume?  You could always be an Angry Bird.  I love it :) 

Finally, celebrating Rosh Hashana, Google brings the Dead Sea Scrolls online.  L'Shana Tova!