Busier than a cat in a sandbox over here, and curiously not much happening out there...  (I refuse to comment on the sexual travails of a certain [soon to be ex-] governor.)

Bram Cohen (creator of Bittorrent) usually blogs about esoteric technology, but occasionally considers other things also: Now is the time when the US media starts to lie.  "It happens every time - just when it's becoming clear who's going to get the nomination, the media completely manufactures the story of a competitive race, because it sells newspapers.  The truth is, it's basically over. The chances of Clinton winning the Democratic nomination have become remote. Now that that's the case, I feel it's time to talk about how completely surreal her campaign has been."  Great points, actually.

Mitt Romney is now running for Vice President.  Seems like a decent choice, actually.  He is a successful businessman and Governor, and complements McCain.  Whether they get along and could work together is another matter.

Amazing: IBM builds Virtual Healthcare Island.  "The IBM Virtual Healthcare Island is designed with a futuristic atmosphere and provides visitors with an interactive demonstration of IBM's open-standards-based Health Information Exchange (HIE) architecture. Working with project leads in the U.S., the island was designed and built by an all-IBM-India team."  It does not appear to incorporate digital pathology, strangely, which I am trying to change :)

This is so excellent: The writing's in the walls.  When I was at Caltech, one of the joys of the undergraduate dorms was the incredible murals painted on the walls by those procrastinating from studying...  these dorms have been refurbished and the walls have been painted over, but the memory of the murals is now preserved online.

I've begun re-reading Andrew Parker's excellent In the Blink of an Eye.  This is a book of ideas, and the ideas are really amazing.  The central theory is that the Cambrian explosion of variation among species was triggered by the evolutionary "discovery" of eyes; predators had a new weapon, and prey a new defense, and an incredible evolutionary arms race was the result.  It rings true - there is plenty of evidence, carefully presented - and I recommend this book to anyone who is thoughtful about such things...