A quiet Saturday, my first in a while; slept in and have been quietly coding on something new...  in the meantime, let's see what all is happening "out there", shall we?

I recently had a chance to visit InTouch Health, who make "telepresence robots" for medicine.  Incredibly cool.  Check out this video of one of their robots in action...  looks like the future is here! 

Speaking of robots, DARPA recently sponsored a robot challenge competition, you can see excerpts from it here...  so cool.  (These DARPA challenges seem to drive a lot of innovation, don't they?) 

Dana Stalder thinks the first battle in the mobile payments war is over (and PayPal have lost to "the networks").  Hmmm.  I wonder if that's the right way to view it.  I think of the participants as consumers, merchants, and banks... 

Interesting idea: data furnaces, cloud servers installed in homes which supply free heat to them.  Reminds me of reading recently that one of the reasons Iceland has become popular as a server hosting site is the ease of cooling. 

CNN celebrates 35 years of CNN.  Wow, 35 years!  Can't quite believe it has been that long...  I sure remember when they burst on the scene, with the first gulf war. 

Hmmm ... this man is trying to get rid of "one man, one vote" in the Supreme Court.  There's actually more to it than that, the argument is really about proportional districting; should each district be based on actual people, or registered voters.  The latter, it would seem to me... so as not to include illegal aliens. 

Wow, who knew?  The EPA have ruled that fracking is safe.  At least with respect to its potential impact on drinking water; the possibility that fracking causes earthquakes, very much in the news, was not considered in their ruling. 

Yawn: Foursquare now lets you order an Uber from within their app.  Not clear why this matters; but then again, I never did get Foursquare at all. 

Classic satire: Here comes the Airplane, a startup that offers to spoon-feed customers.  At least I think it's satire; I must say, these days the Onion seems saner than a lot of "real" news. 

Disappointing, but not surprising: Tests show TSA misses 95% of weapons and explosives.  The whole TSA is nothing more than a PR stunt for the government to convince us we're safe.  And of course, it's a make-work project too. 

Nerd talk: Gallus and Simo debate whether the Bitcoin block size limit should be increased.  From Bram Cohen, creator of BitTorrent, which despite the similar name is unrelated.  My takeaway is that nothing is going to change.