Checking in after a quiet day...  worked mostly, while feeling guilty for not packing for my trip to Brazil :) and squeezed in a nice ride (last for a week, I'm afraid...)  And now I have just enough time to see what the world is up to, and then it is off to a party...  and tomorrow off to Sao Paulo.  My next post will be from South America - who knows, it could be upside down :)

If you're not tired of the Presidential election yet, you might enjoy these election maps...  the one at right depicts state-by-state results, with the areas of each state skewed by its population.  You can see just how not-close the election was...  [ via Brad Feld ] 

Dave Winer: changing the way we do news.  "What didn't change in the 2008 election is the way news flowed. This is a big disappointment to me and something that causes great concern. I see the newspapers dying, and the broadcast media failing to do news, and I want to evolve to the next thing, but it doesn't seem that's the way it'll go."  Dave and I disagree on a lot, but on this I agree with him completely. 

Philip Greenspun thinks we should let G.M. go bankrupt.  Me, too.  The longer this federal bailout period is taking, the more I think the whole thing was a mistake.  Markets work, if you let them.  And bailouts by the government is the opposite of letting them work. 

Speaking of bankrupt, here we have $1B Zimbabwe dollars.  Yes, that is a real note (thanks Adam Curry) and yes, it is basically worthless.  Actually I think it might have value as a collector's item; I wouldn't mind having one :) 

Mark Cuban has some good advice for Obama: Entrepreneurs will lead us out of this mess. Talk to Them.  "Your current group has no one with 100pct of their networth on the line. I promise you that the possibility of losing it all will provide a completely different perspective than any of the “knowledge” the esteemed, learned members of his current advisory team offer."  Indeed. 

This is really cool: Scientific American has pictures of the International Space Station.  The other day I linked the five most plausible sci-fi movies; well this ain't no movie, but it would fit right in with 2001's Discovery, don't you think?  I remember the old joke, it would cost less to send a man to Mars than to make a move about it, but that wasn't true; space travel is really expensive, especially when [non-expendable] people are involved.  But when you see the ISS and such, it such seems worth it... 

Sadly, it appears NASA have lost contact with the Phoenix lander as it freezes in the Martian North.  It's mission did last five months, nearly twice as long as the projected three months, and there is still a little hope... 

Surfing picture of the day, or any day; Kerby Brown takes on a monster...  unbelievably, the wave closed out and slammed him, but he survived... 

Here we have fifty strange buildings of the world.  And they are truly strange, and quite amazing.  There is a such a variety represented it is hard to pick my favorite...  but I did, and here it is :)  YMMV!