[Via TUAW]

It’s an incredibly thick book that I’ve been reading for what seems like ever, but I’ve finally finished Walter Isaacson’s great biography on Albert Einstein.

The following is the review I posted at GoodReads, a nice social networking website related to books:

Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson

My review

My Rating: 5 of 5 stars
A fascinating look into Einstein’s life. Definitely more aloof than I would have suspected, but seemed like such a genuine and friendly character.

It was also interesting to see how he was always “raging against the machine” as a young student (which helped him to expand on his theories of relativity) and then become more conservative in his thinking as he was older (as evidenced by his frustrating and unsuccessful search for a unified theory).

View all my reviews.

I shot a bunch of photos this evening along the Embarcadero and San Francisco’s waterfront districts. It was a beautiful night and I haven’t had a chance to use my wide angle lens in San Francisco much.

Twitter is one of my favorite social networking / news sites and easily the site I visit the most during the course of a day.

Recently, Ben Walker participated in a challenge: 50 songs in 90 days. One of the creations was this song about Twitter. Amazing.

An art installation was installed near Crissy Field, in the Presidio of San Francisco in August, featuring over 100 globes to raise awareness about global climate change. The installation is called “Cool Globes” and will move on to San Diego in October.

And here is a picture I took of the Golden Gate Bridge yesterday.

Via the Washington Post:

I was reading some blogs in the geoblogosphere and came across this excellent post regarding the current controversy over McCain’s political advertisements.

[T]he McCain/Palin supporters were getting a little worried about the two-week lying binge they’ve been on (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).

Seriously … if I were an undecided voter (that’s who they are trying to persuade at this point) I would be offended. Do they think people are that stupid?

Wasn’t John McCain about honor, integrity, and straight-talkin’? It’s actually quite sickening to watch. And they keep doing it even as the media (finally) catches on. It will backfire … the independents and undecided voters I know are fiercely against partisan sleaze shenanigans. Aren’t they running on reform now? You know, ending the “politics as usual”? (pssst … their campaign is run by lobbyists).

And Jeffrey Zeldman makes this point:

If you’re selling toothpaste, your claims must be vetted by legal and medical professionals. But not if you’re selling a candidate.

If you’re selling a candidate, not only can you lie about his record, but more to the point, you can lie about his opponent.

Here is the latest ad from the Obama campaign, calling McCain on his outright lies.

I often wonder why advertisements are designed in specific ways and what their target audiences are. While browsing through the PhysOrg website (a great science news website), I noticed the following textual advertisement from Google.

Two things come to mind. First, Google Ads are supposed to work by scraping the page they will be displayed on for keywords. The main things displayed on this page were about black holes, Large Hadron Colliders, dust devils on Mars, iPhone patches and how early whales potentially used their “hind legs” for swimming. So how would that apply to someone concerned about their looks?

Secondly, why is the word humiliated in quotations? Is the theoretical person who was called fat, not really humiliated? Just “humiliated?” The quotations seem absolutely out of place. Now, instead of worrying about my weight and whether or not a loved one called me fat, I myself (of a scientific mind no less, like many others who read that site) am wondering why the quotations were around the word humiliated, and not “fat” or “fast” or even “husband.”

Who wrote the copy for that ad?

Today, I picked up my 6th iPhone! This is my second iPhone 3G. Here is a brief history of my iPhone ownership and the interesting (and unique) problems I’ve had.

1.) Touch screen stopped working.
2.) Touch screen stopped working.
3.) Some weird short caused constant “device not designed for iPhone. Please use airplane mode” messages to appear, even if nothing was hooked up!
4.) Dock connector completely stopped working.
5.) iPhone 3G #1: Upgraded to iPhone 3G by choice. Hoping for relief. Just kidding! Glass screen began to delaminate from iPhone. Weird defect.
6.) iPhone 3G #2: Hopefully it will be perfect!

Some people have bad luck with iPods. I used to make fun of them. It appears I will have bad luck with iPhones. Stupid karma.

AP interview with Matt Damon on the possibility of Sarah Palin being President of the United States.

“I need to know if she thought dinosaurs were around 4,000 years ago.”

[Via Daily Kos]