The real hero!

If you watched the 4x100 freestyle relay yesterday, featuring Michael Phelps on a historical medal bid, you just saw one of the most unbelievable athletic performances of all time, and it wasn't from Phelps. In fact, Michael should just hand off all credit for this gold to Jason Lezak, who, ironically, has just about been discovered.

With less than 50 meters to go, being 0.59 seconds behind the world record swimmer Alain Bernard, who was himself on a record-setting pace, I actually mentioned to my family that the race was over! Rising from the surface of the water like an acquatic Phoenix, Lezak did the impossible, smashing real and conceptual limits, winning by 8 hundredths of a second, handing more fame to Phelps :-) (you don't see Jason's photo in an article about him). Who is the real hero?

In this race, the worst team shaved more than a second off the pre-Beijing world record!!!

Browsing for fun!

Just when you thought that the browser wars had concluded, and that Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari (for Mac and iPhone) had settled into their market share buckets, you hear about some really cool stuff happening in the browser world. (I'm sure there are other browsers like Opera, and custom browsers for mobile devices, but really...)

Check out Pogo from AT&T, built with the help of 3-D visualization technology from Vizible. The Mozilla folks have started putting out cool new concepts for Firefox - Aurora, Bookmarks and the Mobile browse experience.

If you've used PicLens from CoolIris, you'll see some similarities with these efforts - that's probably where it is headed. Now - is there much point trying to create yet another browser today? Maybe there's still room for innovation after all...

Terraforming a new home?

The discovery of water on Mars is exciting, and is probably going to encourage scientists who believe in Terraforming Mars into a human-friendly habitat. What this means is that when all the hills in Silicon Valley are covered with new million-dollar homes, and we run out of space to build more, we can hop on a NASA or Virgin Galactic flight from Moffett field (after our Mars innoculations and injections) for the open-houses in the Victoria Crater or Mariner Valley, Mars, GX 004.

Pause for thought, though, given the very important point that if we can't change the environment on our own little blue planet, how are we going to paint the red planet green?