Not the first one I’ve downloaded. No, the first one I’ve written! It’s on sale now in Apple’s App Store, and is the only search hit for “SpinClock”, at least at present. It’s also a big reason why this blog hasn’t been updated recently, since I was giving the project all of my spare time since Christmas.

After being amazed by its e-paper display, the next thing I had to notice, out of necessity, was the user interface. (If I didn’t want to gaze forever at the same page in the same book, that is.) Its interface is unexpected but good, with one persistent annoyance.

My Kindle arrived at my house just before noon on February 1st. Were you expecting that my first post about it would occur one hour later? Or would you realize that I would be too busy reading it to write about it? Because that’s what has happened.

OK, this is not really fresh news, since it broke back in March and it’s now late June. But the hexagon on Saturn continues to be just as astounding despite my delay in reporting. What is up with that amazing planet and its amazing moons? Am I going to have to devote an entire blog category to covering every shocking new finding coming from there? When searching for a reference in the news to the hexagon, I was pleased to see that MSNBC shares my awe about the entire Saturnian neighborhood (although they did not mention Iapetus’ dark spot or ridge, because they mistook the press release for science fiction, I guess).

As I mentioned earlier, I went on the South Beach Diet about a month or so ago. The short story is that it really does work. I lost a lot of weight quickly (about 10 pounds in the first couple of weeks) and I think that I’ll be able to keep it off. I like seeing how many more vegetables I’m eating, and learning some new recipes. But it requires what feels like a cultural change—like moving to another country.

My complicated life has turned into a complicated game, and I prefer it that way. As a busy suburban husband and father with a surfeit of responsibilities, time spent on playing a game like The Sims was difficult to defend, even to myself. Why would I invest any amount of time directing and improving the lives of little pretend people in a little pretend house instead of the real people (including myself) in our real house? The answer is that until recently, the successes in The Sims were attainable, and the real-world ones not so much.

Sometimes I run across something that I have to read two or three times, making sure of the source, just to reassure myself that I’m reading something about the real world that I live in. Today it’s an almost magical algae that eats carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide and produces biodiesel and ethanol. And if you weren’t already sold, it turns out it’s cost-effective as well.

In case you haven’t read it, there’s a great story on the surprising longevity of the two unmanned Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. They were designed to work for at least 90 days but they’re entering their third year of exploration.

I knew that my e-mail inbox was out of control for quite a while; I just couldn’t think of what to do about it. Last week, however, a colleague showed me an article from MacWorld on how to organize your inbox so that it isn’t constantly full. It’s an absolutely brilliant idea: your incoming messages should be organized according to workflow, not category. It has tamed my inbox like nothing else I’ve tried. Yesterday was the start of my second week using this new approach, and I gotta say, it is the bomb diggity.

Today I discover, from Slashdot, that Iapetus has a “belt”. Not a ring, mind you, but a belt. It is “a long narrow ridge that lies almost exactly on the equator of Iapetus, bisects its entire dark hemisphere and reaches 20 kilometers high (12 miles).” Oh MAN! Read on to see why else Iapetus is so cool.

Why do we have a two-party system in this country? It turns out that the major reason has to do with our system for tabulating votes. Check out electionmethods.org, and read about the Condorcet method, which is their recommendation for a voting system. [Alas, electionmethods.org no longer displays this, but you can read about the Condorcet method in the Wikipedia.]

Wired magazine has a truly amazing article on China’s big plans for big nuclear power. But the most amazing thing about the article is the nuclear technology itself, something called “pebble-bed” technology. Bottom line: it’s meltdown-proof, cheaper, smaller, and faster to set up than existing nuclear tech, which was designed for Navy submarines, not civilian power needs.