I got caught up on some of my Atlantic reading while we were on vacation last month. These articles really impressed me:

How American Health Care Killed My Father: Excellent summary of the problems with American health care and how it won't be fixed by the current proposals. Offers a way that the system could work better, and I think it would work - if it could ever get passed into law (doubtful)!

The Founders' Great Mistake: Problems with the way the Constitution defines the president's powers and how to fix it.

1.4 gigapixel picture of Obama's inaugural address. I wasted a lot of time today zooming in on the faces in the audience. The user snapshots are pretty interesting (and funny at times).

As somebody who regularly uses the word "monkey", I took particular interest in this article: Your Boss is a Monkey. Good tips on the use of the least-reinforcing scenario.

Want to download someone's flickr photos easily? Try FlickrDown.

Cool article from IEEE Spectrum on Kiva, a company that manufactures robotic warehousing solutions: Three Engineers, Hundreds of Robots, One Warehouse.

This is a pretty good ad from the London city government on bicycle safety: Awareness Test

Recently, to save money and conserve natural resources, our condo association decided to stop sending paper statements for monthly dues. Most people in our association use bill pay to automatically pay their monthly dues, but a few people still wanted a monthly reminder to send in their payment.

We use Yahoo Groups for our condo messages, so I checked there to see if it had something that could do the job. Yahoo Groups does offer a "monthly periodic e-mail feature", but it is fatally flawed in two ways. First, it doesn't appear to work. Second, it doesn't let you specify when the message will be sent.

Fearing that I might have to write something up myself to solve this problem, I first started searching around for a solution. I was pleasantly surprised to find Letter Me Later. It's great! Perfect solution, very configurable, yet still easy to use. Check it out if you ever find yourself needing an automated e-mail scheduling service!

Russ sent this to me, and I love it! Great delivery, gets the point across with very little text: one week's worth of food around our planet.

The NY Times web site has an awesome piece about the Wealthiest Americans Ever. They present a large amount of data in a lucid format and with an intuitive, fun-to-use user interface.

As somebody who flew close to 100,000 miles last year, I can definitely sympathize with the poor soul who wrote a letter to Continental Airlines complaining about Seat 29E. Definitely check out the PDF version of the letter so that you can enjoy the hilarious diagrams. (Unfortunately, Snopes prevents direct links, so cut-and-paste this URL to see it: http://www.snopes.com/travel/graphics/seat29e.pdf).

This is awesome: U.S. States renamed for countries with similar GDP

I've been using GotAPI.com quite a bit lately... it's a really clean implementation and great one-stop shopping for all of those function calls whose parameters you can never quite remember...