Championship DNA courses through Taylor Phinney’s 6-foot-4 frame.

His father remains the leader in race victories by an American, with more than 300. He was the first American to win a road stage of the Tour de France. At the 1984 Olympics, he won a bronze medal in the team time trial.

Taylor’s mother was 14 when she finished seventh in the 1,500-meter speedskating event at the 1972 Olympics. At the University of California, she became a national champion in rowing. She won the gold medal in the debut of Olympic women’s road cycling in 1984, 10 months after marrying Phinney

It is a pretty remarkable story -- about "perfect" genetics (this was written days before Taylor, son of two Olympians, broke records to qualify the country and himself for these Olympics) and how imperfect those genetics can be (his father is ravaged by early onset Parkinsons).

If you have healthy parents, would you trade them for Legendary Healthy parents with a chance of early decay, and a chance to be a world-class athlete?

For the Phinney Family, a Dream and a Challenge - New York Times

Even as hundreds of other dotcoms fell by the wayside at the turn of the century, these three made it through the great internet crisis and have since prospered, to varying degrees and at different times. Their fates have reflected the evolution of the web as a whole, and now suggest its future direction. null

Funny little cartoon at the top.

Yahoo!, eBay and Amazon | The three survivors | Economist.com

"Swim or Dive" in the Georgia Aquarium. If I find a reason to visit Atlanta, this will be near the top on my list.

Swim or Dive Program - The Georgia Aquarium

You're probably going to read this.

It's a short paragraph at the top of the page. It's surrounded by white space. It's in small type.

To really get your attention, I should write like this:

* Bulleted list

How we read online. - By Michael Agger - Slate Magazine

To make a long story short, this morning, Rand got in touch with Google and was advised that changing the URL so it doesn't end in ".0" would be a wise decision. Google would prefer not to make an official or public comment, but they did give us permission to share this tidbit. Naturally, we investigated deeper, and found that it's not just inadvisable, but literally impossible to get a URL indexed in Google's engine if it ends with a .0

SEOmoz | Unwritten Google Webmaster Guideline: Don't End URLs in .0

There's a ongoing SMS / email fraud underway.

Clever. Evil, but clever.

419 SMS scams - F-Secure Weblog : News from the Lab

The State of Real Estate, by Jonathan R. Surridge, May 25th 2008

Great presentation on the housing bubble and the disaster we remain in.

JSurridge.pdf (application/pdf Object)

This means that the average lifetime of a molecule of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, before it is captured by vegetation and afterward released, is about twelve years. This fact, that the exchange of carbon between atmosphere and vegetation is rapid, is of fundamental importance to the long-range future of global warming, as will become clear in what follows. Neither of the books under review mentions it.

Freeman Dyson writes a book review.

The Question of Global Warming - The New York Review of Books

New imaging research shows that brain activity differs in sleep-deprived and well-rested people. The study, in the May 21 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience, shows that individuals who are sleep-deprived experience periods of near-normal brain function, but these periods are interspersed with severe drops in attention and visual processing.

This seems a more plausible explanation than the typical "reduced cognitive ability" statement applied. I had sleep apnea for several years, undiagnosed, and did reasonably impressive cognitive things at the time. I guess I also had distraction or ambition trouble. Hyperconcentration, and then not so much. After treatment (CPAP, then surgery), cognitive function did not improve (not anywhere like my physical energy level did).

Sleep-deprived brains alternate between normal activity and ‘power failure’ | Think Gene

ERROL MORRIS: One other question occurred to me. Take these two smiles, the “say cheese” smile and the smile of genuine pleasure. Wouldn’t natural selection have built into our perceptual apparatus the ability to quickly discriminate between the two?

PAUL EKMAN: Well, it apparently hasn’t. One has to try reasoning backwards, “There must not have been any advantage to being able to tell the difference between the two.” The most important thing in terms of adaptation is for you to know that the other person is either actually or simulating enjoyment. And that was more important than whether they really were enjoying themselves. The fossil record doesn’t tell us much about social life. All one can do is to say there is no really good facial signal that evolved. Now when people laugh in a phony way, that’s a little easier to pick up. But even then, most of us want to hear good news. We don’t want to hear bad news. So we’re tuned to it. We’re very attracted to smiles. They’re very salient. But telling the feigned from the genuine, we’re not good at that for any emotion, for anger, fear. It takes quite a lot to train a professional, a National Security or law enforcement professional (we do quite a bit of that) to be able to distinguish between the two. There are no clear-cut obvious signs. So what must have been important was to know what a person was intending, not what they were feeling.

This is a pretty comprehensive essay about revisiting one of the more important photographs from Abu Ghraib. There is an impressive back story, and a lot of research here. "Standard Operating Procedure" looks to be intense, if this is the kind of work Morris is doing. Which is typical of Errol Morris, but still.

Long essay but worth it.

The Most Curious Thing - Errol Morris - Zoom - New York Times Blog