Crowdsourcing Awesomeness

In addition to showing traffic on the highways, Google Maps now shows it for city roads as well. The awesome part is how they do it - they compute the speed of geolocation enabled phones to figure out what the average speed on a given stretch of road is. All this without needing to dig up roads and installing sensors - pure genius!

Lectures on Godel, Escher, Bach

MIT Open Courseware has lectures from a course in GEB, one of my favorite books. Havent watched any yet, but intend to do so over the weekend.

Nominating Michael Pollan

... to be the secretary of food. A compelling investigation into how Americans devolved from cooks to spectators.

The usual Pollan arch-villian, corporations, are of course to blame. On a meta level, the concept is not limited just to cooking. There are a lot fewer doers compared to watchers. Thats why Nike switched from "Just Do It" to "Witness" (I despise those commercials and tshirts). Why bother to get your bottom off of the couch, just watch someone gifted perform - and make sure you wear whatever they are wearing. Now where is my copy of No Logo ?