I’m swamped, but here’s a video of a uniquely Atlanta experience. And if you like to learn about things the (slightly) old-fashioned way, here’s the story, with photos.

You can now swim with the whale sharks at the Atlanta Aquarium.

Shark bait? | The Newcomer

The Business Case For Rich Internet Applications
Simple Models Show The Business Value Of RIAs
by Ron Rogowski
with Harley Manning, Megan Burns, Jeffrey Hammond, Henry H. Harteveldt, and Steven Geller

PDF makes the use case for rich internet apps.

Forrester_RRogowski_BusCase_for_RIAs3_07.pdf (application/pdf Object)

The following script can be used to allow visitors to increase or decrease the size of text on your page. This can be useful for visitors who have trouble reading smaller text and allows them to increase it to something they can view more easily.
Decrease Font Size Increase Font Size

This script will change the font size of any text within a paragraph ( tag). If you wish to change text within other tags edit the getElementsByTagName('p'); part.

In order for this code to work your page must be using pixel sized fonts (px) rather than relative sized fonts using 'em' or '%'. Of course if you do use other font units the code can be easily adapted for these. If the script cannot find the font size of a paragraph it will default it to 12px.

Controlling Font Size With Javascript

Wish you could display company news, information, and promotional materials on the TVs hanging in your office or at your events? Perhaps you would like the ability to provide updated information to all your employees in a central location.
Introducing YourScreen, a simple affordable way to deliver customizable content to any TV screen in your network.

Atlanta startup YourScreen has interesting stuff.

YourScreen - TV The Way You Want It...

(We weren't in costume, of course, but the character actors at Quark's seemed to appreciate having trained improvisationalists to riff off of.)

This is the geek equivalent of "I think that stripper likes me"

Vegas Star Trek Experience Closing Down

Who invented surfboard leash?

The man behind the surfboard leash is a surfer from Santa Cruz named Pat O'Neill. Pat O'Neill is in fact the son of Jack O'Neill - the inventor of the wetsuit. Pat has come up with the idea in 1971 when he used a surgical cord to attach his surfboard to his leg. He put the cord onto a surfboard using a suction cup. Pat used his invention in the surfing competitoon in Malibu and was disqualified from the event for wearing his leash. The leash was called a kook cord by others in the event and the name stuck until today. There is sill some controversy when using a lesh but mostly it is a standard piece of equipment. The general feel of those days was that if you lost your surfboard you had to swimm and earn it back.

Surgical cord used for the first leaseh was much to stretchy. It caused the surfboard to snap back towards the surfer. This is also the way Jack O'Neill lost his left eye. Pat recalls: "It was extremely hard to see the surgical tubing, and when I fell off my board, the board went into the wave and stretched the tubing out 22 to 23 feet. And then it came racing back like a speeding bullet. People had never seen anything like this. They thought it was a remote control or something."

SURFBOARD LEASH - 360Guide

WASILLA -- Back in 1996, when she first became mayor, Sarah Palin asked the city librarian if she would be all right with censoring library books should she be asked to do so.

According to news coverage at the time, the librarian said she would definitely not be all right with it. A few months later, the librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, got a letter from Palin telling her she was going to be fired. The censorship issue was not mentioned as a reason for the firing. The letter just said the new mayor felt Emmons didn't fully support her and had to go.

Palin pressured Wasilla librarian about banning books

Westmoreland was discussing vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin's speech with reporters outside the House chamber and was asked to compare her with Michelle Obama.

"Just from what little I’ve seen of her and Mr. Obama, Sen. Obama, they're a member of an elitist-class individual that thinks that they're uppity," Westmoreland said.

Asked to clarify that he used the word “uppity,” Westmoreland said, “Uppity, yeah.”

That would be Georgia Republican Rep. Lynn Westmoreland. I suppose on the bright side he left out the normal noun that goes with it.

TheHill.com - Westmoreland calls Obama ‘uppity'

The Daily Show has a segment with video clips of Dick Morris, Karl Rove, Bill O'Reilly, and others complaining about the media's unfair treatment of Sarah Palin, along with earlier video clips of these folks dishing out the same garbage about other women, including Hillary Clinton.

Gold Star.

Daily Show on Republican hypocrisy - Boing Boing

Two small areas located roughly 200 miles off the coast of Charleston, S.C., contain enough methane to meet the country's gas needs for more than a century. And this is only one of at least two dozen similar reservoirs discovered in U.S. coastal waters since the early 1970s.

The paradox is that while gas can be extracted from methane hydrates, doing so poses potentially catastrophic risks. Methane hydrates are frozen water molecules that trap methane gas molecules in a crystalline, lattice-like structure known as a hydrate. Unlike normal ice, hydrate ice literally burns--light a match and it goes up in flames. As temperatures rise or pressure rates fall, the hydrate disintegrates and the water releases the gas.

A substantial amount of evidence suggests that weakening the lattice-like structure of gas hydrates has triggered underwater landslides on the continental margin. In other words, the extraction process, if done improperly, could cause sudden disruptions on the ocean floor, reducing ocean pressure rates and releasing methane gas from hydrates.

A mass release of methane into the sea and atmosphere could have catastrophic consequences on the pace of climate change. More than 50 million years ago, undersea landslides resulted in the release of methane gas from methane hydrate, which contributed to global warming that lasted tens of thousands of years.

Energy's Most Dangerous Game - Forbes.com