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Thursday,  08/28/08  11:45 PM

I just returned from watching the Angels beat Texas, they scored five runs in the eighth and came back to win 7-5, pretty exciting.  The rest of the score was four hot dogs, two orders of nachos, and one ice cream sundae.  A good game.

The rest of today was good too, but I'm almost too tired to relate.  Had a long hard ride - lately I've been trying to keep my speed over 18mph on my "local" rides (which is nearly impossible), but constantly riding with my average speed displayed makes for harder workouts.  A tangible example of the metric magic :)

You'll notice I'm not saying anything about Obama's speech tonight.  First, I didn't see it, and second, we all know what he was going to say - a bunch of feel good platitudes, very little detail, and probably some hefty attacks on Bush and the Republicans.  Ho hum. 

BMW/Oracle trimaranSo have you seen BMW/Oracle's new trimaran?  Wow, what a boat!  I can't believe they're actually racing these things in the America's Cup - what the heck is up with that? - but this is sure an amazing watercraft.  I want one :)  Or maybe just: I want to ride on one :) 

If you're not visiting KillerStartups, you're really missing out on some great entertainment.  Honestly half of these companies don't even rate as products, in fact, many of them don't even rate as features of products.  Clearly the lowering of the start-a-new-company barrier has allowed all sorts of stuff to flourish.  A Cambrian explosion of new companies.  The best part is that the description of each company includes "why it will be killer"...  (and in the process, answers the other question, why it won't be :) 

A few times now I've mentioned Smokey, our new Guinea pig... so it turns out they live about 4-7 years, sometimes as long as 10.  So I'm looking at little Smokey, and I'm really struck by this; his whole life is going to be compressed into a time period 1/10th as long as mine.  Why do animals live as long as they do?  Clearly some of it is physics, but also a lot of it is evolutionary.  Don't live long enough, and you can't have as many progeny as possible, nor care for the ones you have.  Live too long and you'll compete with your progeny for resources.  Fascinating...  

Philip Greenspun notes Sikorsky's new prototype helicopter, the first commercially viable chopper with counter-rotating blades.  Apparently conventional helicopters are limited to about 165 knots, a counter-rotating one could go more like 250.  Cool!