• Okay, Hill geeks, riddle me this: Who gets ranking on Judiciary now? Does Hatch get another run? #

• Go Ahead, Steal Me
  Optioning Lethem's books and stories for the low, low price of only a buck a piece.
• Searching for the Benefits of Google Health
  A flaw that others have picked up on: the program uses insurance company billing data, and not medical records, to put together your profile. And you can imagine how accurate that is.
• CBC upset over Obama’s stance on black farmers
  The president is taking some heat over what seems to be the Justice Department's intention to cap Pigford settlement payments at just $100 million, in contrast to how Senator Obama pushed legislation to aggressively right the wrongs of how black farmers were slighted by the federal government.

• Internet Users in Developing Countries Drag on Sites’ Profits
  In a potential threat to the global network, some companies are considering blocking access to their sites from Africa, Asia, and elsewhere: "[S]erving videos to the entire world is just not supportable at this time.”

• Oregon Trail for the iPhone
  So great. I'm not even much of a computer games person, but I keep finding myself attempting to ford a river or pan for gold (using the iPhone's built-in accelerometer!) whenever I have a few minutes free.
• Mum and Pup and Me — Growing Up the Only Child of the Charismatic and Complicated Buckleys
  A nicely written piece from Christopher Buckley on the aggressively unique pair of characters that were his parents.

• Just talked to @jasonliebman about that #iraqtech trip; fascinating stuff on introducing Mesopotamia to the free/hosted web. #

Connecting kids on the autism spectrum with Google's 3D modeling tools.

Apologies in advance, but you're just going to have to bear with me as I learn how to build awesome visualizations. It's my new thing. Behold, trends in the popularity of different cheese varieties from 1970-2007, based on data from the USDA Economic Research Service.

What's with that blue cheese spike in 1973?

• How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write
  Steven Johnson's predictions for what will change when books finally enter into the "infosphere."
• Banker to the poor gives New York women a boost
  At least one bank's doing well — The micro-lender Grameen's Bronx branch.

Michael Pollan makes an interesting point about how we deal with food safety in the U.S. that I don't think I've heard articulated before. (You know, I think that fella is going places. Mark my words.) The context is a regional-based food system, which Pollan argues in favor of. You've likely heard some of the debates over whether the carbon footprint of local foods is really all that much smaller than foods trucked/flown/shipped in from elsewhere. But trying to eat foods within the same general range in which you might take a long weekend road trip has a lot going for it on other fronts. Pollan:

Food eaten closer to where it is grown is fresher and requires less processing, making it more nutritious, and whatever may be lost in efficiency by localizing food production is gained in resilience; regional food systems can better withstand all kinds of shocks.

All well and good. But the part that caught my attention is that Pollan argues that one straightforward way of advancing regional eating would be to tweak our food safety regulations so that they're actually sensative to differences in scale. So, imagine a farmer raising and butchering a few dozen chickens for sale on her farm. Under this model, she'd be given a softer touch than a national processor sucking up chickens from near and far and spitting them back out across the country. Jane Farmer's ability to wreak havoc is simply less than Perdue's. Size is a factor, and so is location.

So you could develop a food regulation algorithm (I don't think it would need to be that complicated — I just like saying "algorithm") that takes them into account. The resources we'd save on regulating small producers could go to getting the FDA, USDA, and other responsible agencies to actually do the oversight many of us probably already expect that they're doing. You could even imagine that producers might find it worthwhile to go the route of inputting and outputting foods more regionally than they currently do. It's the sort of gentle nudge that might seem right up Obama's alley.

• Thinking Bolt Bus should advertise its wifi under the banner of "Sometimes!" I know I paid $18, but can't help feeling a bit argh-y. #
• Don't see it reported much, but seems all the Maersk pirates were rather young — we're talking sub-19 or 20. http://bit.ly/LzyMu #

• The Color of Palo Alto
  Even after seeing this presented at Politics Online '09, I'm still not sure I really get it — but my gut tells me it's pretty neat.

• Now *that* would be a public service. RT @cjoh: There needs to be a Twitter Vote Report for Ben and Jerry's lines on free cone day. #

• Kerry Schedules Hearing On Future Of Journalism
  "The history of our Republic is inextricably linked to the narrative of our free and independent press. Yet today, America’s newspapers are struggling just to stay afloat. I called this hearing to directly address a problem that for too long has had us turning the other way. Whatever the model for the future, we must do all we can to ensure a diverse and independent news media endures.”

• I'm blogging…from a bus! The BoltBus wifi isn't half bad. This may have just become my preferred method for getting to and from DC. #

• A Judicial Opinion on Shakespeare's Plays
  It's populists vs. aristocrats on the high court over whether Will really wrote them.

• Heh. The contestant on "Wait, Wait…Don't Tell Me" this morning is Dennis Shulman, the Dem candidate in NJ's 5th this past election. #

Science Progress, the science and technology wing of the vast Center for American Progress empire, has put together a nice little book detailing what a progressive vision for innovation might look like. It's called "Science Next," and in it are lovely pieces by folks like Chris Mooney and Vint Cerf. Elizabeth Edwards wrote the introduction. I'm enormously humbled and pleased to have two essays in the book — one describing the fragmented and fractured federal food oversight system, and the other profiling the rather neat Peer-to-Patent program where citizen-experts help the U.S. Patent Office make sense of software patent applications. Not sure how widely it's being distributed, but I found a copy in my neighborhood Barnes & Noble. Many of the essays, I suspect were written before the election (mine both were) and were more advocacy pieces than anything else. But with the Obama Administration looking like it's chomping at the bit to be a science-based presidency, there's a good chance that these essays will really serve as an early look at "what's next." If it's up your alley, hope you might think about picking up a copy.

• Two cents on Chopra: broadband got a big boost and FCC an ally. He (and others) learned how to wire VA. More here: http://bit.ly/chopra_bb #
• Wondering upon what I should turn my awesome predictive powers next (http://bit.ly/aHt3b), a.k.a VA's Aneesh Chopra's the new U.S. CTO. #

• Cobbled Effort Seeks to Fill Food Safety Vacuum
  Producers are reduced to hiring their own inspectors, which is something like bringing your own chef to a restaurant.

• Beyond the whole doomed-to-repeat aspect to Obama's "what's done is done" approach, strikes me that it's not really his decision to make. #