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Wednesday,  12/25/13  11:19 PM

Did you have a great Christmas?  I hope so.  Mine was very nice, but I did eat too much, do very little, and acquire a cold.  So be it ... onward!

PS my favorite present, among many; a jersey emblazoned with little gnomes.  Yippee.

'Tis the season for "'best of' lists".  And "lists of 'best of' lists".  I am not going to make a list of "lists of 'best of' lists".  Consider yourself spared :) 

I will say, I am far more interested in science and tech than politics.  So I might hazard a list of 'best of' list topics, including:

What are your favorite 'best of' list topics?  You might want to list them :)

The year of the robot?  Japanese robot is winner of 2013 DARPA robotics challenge.  Oh yeah, this robot's parent company is Schaft, recently acquired by Google


Excellent:  World's first self-replicating 3D-printer assembles in just 30 minutes.  It's cool, but when you read the fine print you realize not all of the parts are self-replicating. 

How to fix heath care.  We need more of this, and less of the Obamacare bashing, which is clearly the story of the year.  Yes, what the federal government have done sucks, but now what?  "Only deregulation can unleash competition. And only disruptive competition, where new businesses drive out old ones, will bring efficiency, lower costs and innovation."  Yep.  And this: "We can have a single government-run airline too. We can ban FedEx and UPS, and have a single-payer post office. We can have government-run telephones and TV. Thirty years ago every other country had all of these, and worthies said that markets couldn't work for travel, package delivery, the “natural monopoly” of telephones and TV. Until we tried it. That the rest of the world spends less [on health care] just shows how dysfunctional our current system is, not how a free market would work."  Onward! 

Another theme: Overstock plans to accept bitcoin.  I still can't figure out if bitcoin is a blip on the radar or the next big thing.  Judging from the up-and-down value of the virtual currency, there are a lot of people bobbing in the same boat. 

Remember Apple's antenna-gate?  Jonathon Mann does: The day Steve Jobs danced to my song.  It's amazing that Apple chose to make this last-minute change to their press conference, but so cool that they did. 

Happy Boxing Day