Giving Him The Business - great college game referee detail though apparently first used by a ref in an NFL game 15+ years ago.

Decent plan for establishing a playoff in college IA football, though we'd have to decrease total games or make it ok to have possible 16 games for a couple of teams! I'm a big football fan, but still find this aspect frustrating. The lower division playoff games have been more exciting than the bowl setup.

Disturbingly funny motion picture of a guy and a kitten...

Interesting direction NIH could take on future funding - I've been discovering the pain and "system" young faculty must go through in order to compete for grants. Got my first (of many) rejection letter this past week and what I got out of it was: don't apply for money for anything new and exciting, just do simple things that you've already done all of the work for. Seriously, damn frustrating.

I've made reference to how much I enjoyed playing Portal previously even for a 4 hour game, well here are a few articles that touch on different aspects of it. Very short, Why Portal is perfect; overstuffed but entertaining, Portal is the most subversive game ever; and while I love the end-song for the game, apparently it was written by Jonathan Coulton (I know him from his many songs including "Code Monkey" (an important namesake) and "Re Your Brains") and here is a live acoustic performance of it with scenes from Portal. Portal did pick up the Video Game Awards "Best Breakthrough Technology" award today and yes, I did notice that 3 of the big VGA winners were stolen from me (Bioshock - game of the year, Halo3 - best multiplayer & most addictive & Portal).

Some older science news about a huge body of water discovered underneath East Asia.

Here's something cute that you can go to everyday - the Human Calendar. Fun how it works! Let me know when you see this as a widgit or maybe put it in someone's digital photo frame.