So, did you watch our President's final State of the Union speech?  Me neither.  Yawn.  At this point the Candidate in Chief seems to be running for history, and I predict he's going to lose.

From Inhabitat: the 12 most jaw-dropping stories of 2015.  Including the amazing "cliff house", my personal favorite, which has a swimming pool built into the root. 

Celebrating David Bowie by listening to this two-hour radio show from 1979, hosted by ... Bowie himself.  We have the Doors, John Lennon, ... Excellent! 

Robert X Cringley: IBM loses its mind.  "Much of what we think of as the IBM product line has disappeared from its U.S. website. This either indicates an epic screwup from IBM’s web team or an indication that the company no longer cares about most of their existing revenue."  I don't know whether to laugh or yawn. 

Shelly Palmer: CES Trendspotting.  "The pace of technological change is exponential and accelerating, and the results are hiding in plain sight. I call it 'inconspicuous innovation' and it’s the top trend of 2016."  Featuring of course Augmented Reality, one of the most promising near-term applications for visual search. 

Speaking of inconspicuous innovation, here we have the Helium 10TB drive.  Never mind that it's filled with helium (!), this is a real live 10TB disk drive.  Wow.  I can remember washing-machine sized drives that held 240MB.  So this would hold 4,000 times more.  Incredible. 

A great explanation: What Satoshi Did.  Just in case you were wondering what exactly is so innovative or cool about Bitcoin. 

So Windows turned 30 (!), and the Verge published this visual history.  I think I used every single one of these versions...  whew.  Even the not-useful ones, like Win 386, Vista, and Win 8 :)  Onward! 

Dave Winer: Why Facebook and Twitter won.  Cliff notes: they made subscribing easy.  Corollary: why RSS didn't win.  Yeah, subscribing is not easy. 

Don Surber: Firefox is this year's Darwin award winner.  "In March, Mozilla - parent company of Firefox - hired Brendan Eich as its CEO, only to publicly humiliate him and force him to resign over a $1,000 donation to the Proposition 8 effort, a 2008 ballot initiative a majority of Californians supported. Three board members also resigned.  Any company dumb enough to lose a CEO (and three board members) over demands from political hyenas deserves to fail."  Amen. 

Alan Carlin: Environmentalism Gone Mad.  "This [climate change] scare can only be described in superlative terms. It was and is audacious, deceptive, bold, mad, scandalous, and has come closer to achieving its purposes than it should have given its flimsy and invalid scientific basis. The proposed 'solution' advanced by the environmental movement is even worse."  Yep. 

PS to would-be hecklers, I am not a climate change denier.  I am a climate change skeptic.  Just because something is exploited for political purposes doesn't mean it is wrong.  Only most likely exaggerated.

The Incipit wire mesh sculpture is amazing.  Just when you think you've seen it all, you realize "it all" is so much more than you ever thought. 

World's top climate scientists again call for nuclear power to replace fossil fuels.  Yay.  This is super important, way more so than weird carbon caps.  Because it is economically feasible. 

And Peter Thiel agrees. 

And to wrap up on the cutest note possible, a baby otter! 
(Born in Monterey Bay Aquarium's tide pool.)