Fall sailing schedule starts sunday. We were at the dock today and picked up the quota list – here you go

• MAKE: Blog: Creepy Halloween snakes.
• MAKE: vortex cannons
• MAKE: taxidermy supplies

* “The Black Tower”:amazon by Louis Bayard. Very engaging tale of conspiracy set during the French Restoration. Excellent characters, nicely ambiguous ending. * “The Blue Star”:amazon by Tony Earley. Coming of age tale during the early days of WWII. Love, pride, prejudice, fear, death, hope. A great little human story. * “The Book Of Lies”:amazon by Brad Meltzer. Da Vinci Code-ish, a nice beginning of biblical conspiracy, the origin of the Superman character, and your standard life threatening events. The middle slows a little but a sweet ending.

Eleven Warriors » Thad in at End, Heyward Slides Over. – “For a group loaded with so many seniors, especially 5th-year guys, the starting 22 only features 8 of them” Some of the changes have been obvious (Pryor) but it is good to see the coaching staff responding to the underwhelming start of the season.

“Buffett once told me there are three ‘I’s in every cycle. The ‘innovator,’ that’s the first ‘I.’ After the innovator comes the ‘imitator.’ And after the imitator in the cycle comes the idiot.”

Toolmonger » Blog Archive » Preview: Stanley 3-in-1 Tripod Flashlight. For the person who already has 37 flashlights and wants more.

Sound & Vision Magazine - Ask The Expert: Cable Length Limits. Here is one article that suggests 6M is the max usable without getting funky.  Trying to do a media room config and need to know this stuff.  No obvious answer I can find for displayport but I bet it is similar.

From Marginal Revolution: Economists Speak:

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As economists, we want to express to Congress our great concern for the plan proposed by Treasury Secretary Paulson to deal with the financial crisis. We are well aware of the difficulty of the current financial situation and we agree with the need for bold action to ensure that the financial system continues to function. We see three fatal pitfalls in the currently proposed plan:

1) Its fairness. The plan is a subsidy to investors at taxpayers’ expense. Investors who took risks to earn profits must also bear the losses. Not every business failure carries systemic risk. The government can ensure a well-functioning financial industry, able to make new loans to creditworthy borrowers, without bailing out particular investors and institutions whose choices proved unwise.

2) Its ambiguity. Neither the mission of the new agency nor its oversight are clear. If taxpayers are to buy illiquid and opaque assets from troubled sellers, the terms, occasions, and methods of such purchases must be crystal clear ahead of time and carefully monitored afterwards.

3) Its long-term effects. If the plan is enacted, its effects will be with us for a generation. For all their recent troubles, Americas dynamic and innovative private capital markets have brought the nation unparalleled prosperity. Fundamentally weakening those markets in order to calm short-run disruptions is desperately short-sighted.

For these reasons we ask Congress not to rush, to hold appropriate hearings, and to carefully consider the right course of action, and to wisely determine the future of the financial industry and the U.S. economy for years to come.

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Hear hear.

Caltech researchers awarded $10M for molecular programming project. UW involved as well.  More info at the Molecular Programming Project:

…we will develop new computer science principles for programming information-bearing molecules like DNA and RNA to create artificial biomolecular programs of similar complexity.

…computing and decision-making will carried out by chemical processes themselves. Through the creation of molecular programming languages, theory for analyzing them, and experiments for validating them, our long-term vision is to establish “molecular programming” as a subdiscipline of computer science

Overview presentation here.

Fascinating stuff.

Tough observations from a MSFT insider:

Now we have this godawful concoction about experiences, be they compelling, seamless, or plain vanilla. It suffers all the flaws of the second vision, in that it is too vague and subjective, and it also throws in some buzzwords for good measure. If you dip your WTF-sized strainer in this bubbling cauldron of muck, what emerges is “create seamless experiences”. What is THAT supposed to mean? Here’s a seamless experience I just had–I put an SD card in my Vista machine to try to upload them to a website, and it completely failed to do anything at all. It did so very seamlessly, I might add. Furthermore, I was completely unable to figure out how to make it recognize the thing (a scenario which had worked the day before), so it really was a case of a sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic (and also being indistinguishable from a kick in the crotch, which may have been the forgotten coda to Arthur C. Clarke’s famous quote). It was also a compelling experience, in that I briefly felt compelled to toss my computer out the window. So I was batting 1.000 on the vision, but I didn’t feel so hot about it. With this to guide us, our vision might get replaced with a future that looks like “a computer in every dumpster and a pissed-off user in every house, cursing Microsoft software”.

Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters: Vision Statements on the Decline.

Magazines: Maghound Offers NetFlix-Style Magazine Subscriptions. If I could get these all delivered electronically to the Kindle I might consider.

Thank god the Pryor era started. And punting game was good. I can’t say the defense was awesome, a couple guys stood out, but a lot of open field and poor tackles. But a win is a win

Pryor is not a project, he is the present.

Live from the Shoe: Pass, punt, defense (Blogging the Buckeyes).