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• Realism in UI Design – "The more realistic something is, the harder it is to figure out the meaning."
• Jan. 19, 1983: Apple Gets Graphic With Lisa – And without the Lisa there wouldn't have been the Mac…
• Googlephone No Match for Kafkaesque Carriers – Steven Levy finds that mobile (cell) carriers are all evil… I wish this was an isolated problem but it seems to happen everywhere. Does anyone actually like their provider?

• Google Android Personal Thoughts – "Uniformity is not a word you’ll find in Android’s dictionary. How about the fact that the application icons aren’t the same size. Uh, why? Since there’s no transparent padding around the icons … there’s no uniformity in the touch areas when you go to tap on an icon." These things probably don't seem important to Google but the attention to detail is what makes the iPhone (usually) a pleasure to use. I've not used an Android handset but these things would bug me pretty quickly.
• Japanese Photographer Bends Electricity to His Will – Beautiful.
• The Cost of Care – Nice graphic showing the relationship between the cost of healthcare and life-expectancy.

• Separating Explosives from the Detonator – A sensible response to the pants bomber…
• Google ‘open’ memo betrays deep corporate delusion – "Aside from Apple, no tech outfit is more secretive about what goes on inside the company."
• Q: “Once in a blue moon” is a rare event. But what does “blue moon” really mean? – These things are never as simple as you think they should be…

• US switch to new lethal injection scrutinised – However you do it, killing people is a cruel and unusual punishment.
• Rudiments of Language Discovered in Monkeys – "Lemasson … suspects that a dense jungle environment drove the evolution of syntax. Since the monkeys had trouble seeing each other, they compensated by talking."
• Google DNS – Why would Google make their own DNS service if there's no direct way to sell advertising from it?

• News Corp to Offer Plaid Stamps! – "Giving Murdoch the benefit of the doubt, then, I’m guessing he simply doesn’t mean what he said. Perhaps he just wanted to sow a little confusion, get some publicity and maybe a concession or two from Google."
• The night the Berlin Wall fell – "For me it was that rare occasion when a story was unqualified good news. After years watching the way communism was practised, I felt no need to mourn its collapse. Whatever came next had to be better." Twenty years since the fall of the Berlin wall.
• OMG Ponies!!! (Aka Humanity: Epic Fail) – "The real world has failed us. It has concentrated on local simplicity, leading to global complexity. It's easy to organise a meeting if everyone is in the same time zone – but once you get different continents involved, invariably people get confused. It's easy to get writing to work uniformly left to right or uniformly right to left – but if you've got a mixture, it becomes really hard to keep track of. The diversity which makes humanity such an interesting species is the curse of computing."

• The giant Apollo 11 post – The best of the web on the 40th anniversary of the moon landing.
• Year two – Nice analysis of where the App Store need to change in order to keep both customers and developers happy.
• Let's all take a deep breath and get some perspective – "[Google are] starting to look like the new Scott McNealy. Remember him? Ran a company called Sun, which had a great little business going until McNealy became obsessed with Gates and started doing things like paying millions of dollars to buy StarOffice so he could get into that booming free software business."