Merry nice little Christmas Eve Eve ... spent most of it designing code, and what could be better than that, and the rest of it eating cookies while watching football, and very little is better than that.  Oh yeah and about all those teenagers over my house, having a party ... if you're my neighbor, sorry about that.  But truly there is nothing better than having your kids over :)

Did you know?  Among 17-year-olds, the hottest latest things are ... records!  (pic at right, c. 1956)

So I'm at the gym today, waiting for football to come on, and there's a "news" show on Fox where they're talking about how conservatives should deal with their liberal family members at Christmas.  The working theory was that conservatives leave their beliefs at the door, but liberals live them all the time.  What?  That has to be the dumbest thing I've heard all year, amid heavy competition. 

Meanwhile, the pope says atheists are okay with Jesus, so long as they do good.  Whew. 

Inside the box.  "People don't actually like creativity."  Well, I do. 

And I like this illustration.  Very creative.

Yum!  Ten delicious modern gingerbread houses.  Oh wait, that headline said "deliciously".  Well, too late. 

Dave Winer: I'm working on the next CMS for Scripting News.  This usually presages something interesting :) 

Excellent: Ford engineers test "predictive logic" to improve cruise control.  We're getting closer to caravans all the time! 

Tribune are buying Gracenote from Sony.  Huh.  I've been watching them since ... 1998 when they started as CDDB, with a technology to "recognize" songs from MP3 files and automatically tag them with the track and artist names.  This was big back in the days of Napster, and it's still big now in the days of iTunes (which uses their technology).  The problem of recognizing music is rather interesting (and has since been somewhat solved by Shazam, and others); it is somewhat similar to the problem of recognizing objects in images.  You have the same general  "what is the essence of the thing" problem... 

Happy Holidays from Saturn and its moons, and the astronomers who study them.  And to you! 

BTW, in case you're wondering, here's what little Cassini looks like; the remarkable spacecraft which together with its sub-craft Huygens has taken all these wonderful pictures.