General

I’m approaching thirty in less than two years, and while things look good for me personally and professionally, something seems missing..  It’s been an introspective weekend, for sure…

Amsterdam: Burglars stole two famous paintings by Vincent Van Gogh from Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum early this morning. The stolen paintings are well known to art lovers: Beach at Scheveningen and Leaving the Church at Nuenen. [Adam Curry: Adam Curry’s Weblog]

Army-Navy Rivalry Reaches Symbolic Proportions. For reasons on and off the field, the annual Army-Navy game has become more of a symbolic ritual than a high point on the college football calendar. By Joe Lapointe. [New York Times: NYT HomePage]

End In Sight For Alpha [Slashdot]

RFID Journal.  Gillete to purchase 500 m RFIDs to tag products.  Wow.  Embedded Radio IDs are going mainstream.  From my friend John Smart’s Accelerating Times newsletter:

Powerful acceleration of this technology in the last year… A Hitachi chip small enough to place into paper money. Sub-ten cent chips, sub-$100 scanners. Transmission ranges up to 20 feet. MIT’s Auto-ID center is busily building out a Local Positioning System (LPS) for everything.

[John Robb’s Radio Weblog]

Lance Knobel isn’t surprised at today’s economic shakeup in the Bush cabinet. “After the smarts of the Rubin and Summers tenures in the ’90s, O’Neill’s two years of bumbling has been a particular let down. Lindsay has inspired as much confidence as O’Neill.” [Scripting News]

A farewell to arms, specifically, economic loose cannons. The only possible question that can be asked about the resignations of Treasury Secretary Paul OâNeill and White House economic advisor Lawrence Lindsey today is: what took so long? Did our president wake up this morning and say, ãThe economy is in the toilet. Guess I better do somethingä? Was that news to him? I like the New York Timesâ coverage best, including the list of OâNeillâs gaffes. ãIf you set aside Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the safety record of nuclear is really very good.ä Is that like saying, If you set aside unemployment, deficit spending, and recession, the economic record of the second Bush administration is really very good? [Jarrett House North]