December!  Wow.  Should be great... :)

An inconvenient truth: return of the arctic ice cap as it grows 29% in one year.  This is the same year that some pundits are calling the "hottest on record".  I'm not a climate denier, more of a climate skeptic.  Seems like behind every liberal cause is a desire to profit from it, making the innate virtue of the cause harder to judge. 

Continuing our theme of big Christmas trees ... check out this huge floating Christmas tree in Rio de Janeiro's harbor.  Wow. 

Continuing our theme of not coercing people into helping others: Penn Jillette on compassion: "Helping poor and suffering people is compassion. Voting for our government to use guns to give money to help poor and suffering people is immoral self-righteous bullying laziness." 

If you're Microsoft, this is not good news: Win 7 handily bests Win 8.  This is Vista all over again, except that this time the desktop is less important.  Microsoft better get Win 9 out soon... 

This excellent once-in-a-decade phenomenon happened yesterday: gorgeous photos of the Grand Canyon filled with fog.  Wow.  Looks like a lighthouse on a seacoast, doesn't it? 

Magnus Carlsen, the new king of chess.  How interesting that in this era when computers can beat humans, humans still have good new games against one another.  There is so much more complexity to chess than you would imagine from the relatively simple rules... 

Yes that *is* Magnus with Liv Tyler; perhaps Brent Musburger will now advise teenage boys to play chess?

Doc Searles: how to rescue radio.  Um, radio?  Buried in the article is an important tidbit: the latest iTunes does have Internet radio, but you have to explicitly enable it via a Preference. 

Parenthetically, my car came with Slacker, a Pandora competitor, and I love it.  Listen to it all the time, this has pretty much replaced listening to my music from my iPhone, even though it syncs perfectly via bluetooth.  I like the spontaneity of hearing music I've never heard, or haven't heard in forever...

BTW Football Saturday sure came through; has there ever been a day with so many close games?  And yay, all of my teams won, how rare is that? 

Onward ... into December!