AFs so far today (mostly Google)

http://www.google.com.au/intl/en/gday/index.html
"Google Australia has introduced a new feature, enabling you to search
content on the internet before it is created."

https://mail.google.com/mail/help/customtime/index.html [linked to
from mail.google.com]
"Introducing Gmail Custom Time"

http://www.google.com/virgle/index.html [linked to from www.google.com]
"Earth has issues, and it's time humanity got started on a Plan B. So,
starting in 2014, Virgin founder Richard Branson and Google
co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be leading hundreds of
users on one of the grandest adventures in human history: Project
Virgle, the first permanent human colony on Mars."

Internally:
(1) We had a general announcement from one of the VPs letting us know that they needed us to donate any Pentium II's that we had lying around so that they could cut down on power consumption in our data centers. (It would have been more believable if they hadn't quoted the MHz rating on the PIIs wrong; it was never as low as 90. :) )
(2) A Kirkland email let us know that the caterers had all quit and that they'd be getting us hot dogs from Costco until further notice. (Someone responded by saying that sounded good to him.)
(3) The intranet employee directory pictures have all been auto-altered to include either a really impressive mustache or an equally impressive pair of granny glasses.
(4) There is now an internal page detailing conventions to be used when coding in INTERCAL.

And from XKCD, a convincing pickup line (at least to devotees of social networks and graph theory): http://xkcd.com/403/
(Note the Erdos reference in the mouseover FTW.)

Whee!

intellectual honesty? in a Presidential candidate?

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-oped0314obamamar14,0,7185898.story

...[Obama] had an important topic to discuss: the controversy over President Bush's warrantless surveillance of international telephone calls between Americans and suspected terrorists. I had written a short essay suggesting that the surveillance might be lawful. Before taking a public position, Obama wanted to talk the problem through.

In about 20 minutes, he and I investigated the legal details. He asked me to explore all sorts of issues: the president's power as commander in chief, the Constitution's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the Authorization for Use of Military Force and more.

Obama wanted to consider the best possible defense of what Bush had done. To every argument I made, he listened and offered a counterargument. After the issue had been exhausted, Obama said he thought the program was illegal, but now had a better understanding of both sides.

That's...impressive. Not many people I know go to that much trouble to make sure that they understand all sides of an issue before taking a stand on it, and I'm not aware of any politicians that behave so.

Of course the author of this article is biased...but if even half of what he says is accurate, he's got the potential to be a kickass President, by my standards at least.