Well I'm  b a a c k ...  after a whirlwind few days in Boston and New York, flew back to L.A. today.  It was fun to go, and it's great to be back home.  And checking the blogosphere, we find...

How do we know McCain is making progress against Obama?  Well, we can read the latest issue of the New Yorker, in which virtually every article drips Democratic venom.  Attacks everywhere, on McCain, on Palin, on their spouses, you name it.  They are clearly pretty worried.  And I guess they have reason to be, but I must wonder whether it helps; first, the readership of the New Yorker already feel this way, so they're preaching to the choir, and second, this kind of partisanship mostly backfires.

At the Vuelta Levi Leipheimer is back in gold.  And Contador is in second - anyone still doubt Astana are the best cycling team in the world right now?  It will be interesting to see who between these two wins overall, Contador is the better climber, and there is a lot of climbing left, but Leipheimer is the better time trialier, and you can make a big gap in a time trial.

Turns out there is a good design for implementing copy and paste on a touchscreen-based system like the iPhone, the good old Newton already solved this problem!  Click here for a nice demo.  The basic idea is that the edge of the screen is the physical reality of the clipboard, you drag stuff to it to copy, drag stuff from it to paste.

Clive Thompson on the Age of Awareness.  "How News Feed, Twitter and other forms of incessant online contact have created a brave new world of ambient intimacy."  I guess I would have to use Facebook's News Feed, Twitter, or another form of incessant online contact to really get this.  For me, email and texting are as ambiently intimate as I get :)

Here we have the really cool ScanRobot book scanner.  I love the way the "out of the box" design accommodates so many different form factors for books.  Using vacuum to keep the pages flush against the scan head was inspired.  Still, you can see it would take quite a while to scan a book...