I'll admit, I've typed "lol" when I haven't actually laughed out loud. However, reading one of Gruber's recent comments did in fact cause me to do just that. Except that I didn't actually type it anywhere.

In any event, here's the cause:

Everyone out there with a stiffy for the “rewritten in Cocoa” Snow Leopard Finder needs to get a grip. Cocoa is just an API. It is not some sort of magic technology where you just sprinkle a ton of square brackets in your source code and you instantly get a better UI.

From Daring Fireball.

Recently PETA sent a letter to premium ice cream maker Ben & Jerry's, suggesting they make all their ice cream from human milk rather than cow's milk. Surely it's a tactic meant as a thought-provoker, a suggestion full of shock value to get people thinking about where their ice cream comes from. Because they can't honestly be suggesting that be the path we take. Can they?

Imagining that their goal is to have all ice cream production utilize human milk sources rather than bovine isn't too hard, but if you run the numbers it becomes obvious they haven't thought this through at all.

The US alone consumes two billion gallons of milk as ice cream every year. That's a little under five and a half million gallons a day. Assuming a lactating human female can express a gallon a day—which is probably a lot for an 8-hour shift—you'd need a workforce of around six million women or more, to allow for vacation days, sick time, etc. Could you get that many women to choose such a career path? Keep in mind that since diet affects the taste of milk dramatically, they would have to be on strict diets while working, unless flavored ice cream from flavored milk became popular. Even then, they'd have to eat specific foods.

If we assume we can find six million women willing to produce milk for ice cream, we'd have to hire them, of course, which means salary and benefits. I would think an absolute rock-bottom number would be around $35,000 a year, and very likely quite a bit more. This makes our single gallon of human milk cost a bare minimum of $100. I'm not sure how much Ben & Jerry's pays for their milk, but I would lay long odds it's less than a hundred bucks a gallon. In fact, since I can buy a gallon of whole milk at the market for about $6.00, I'd guess that bulk buyers can probably get it for less than that, maybe $5.00 per gallon if they're getting really high-quality stuff, or organic, or non-GMBH, what have you.

Still with me? We're almost there! It takes about a gallon and a half of milk to make a gallon of ice cream, and since we're working with minimums so far, we'll stick with it and just assume Ben & Jerry's doesn't use more to create their premium ice creams, which have less air (and therefore, more of everything else, including milk) in every gallon. Now we know that their pints of ice cream, therefore, cost them $0.31 in milk to produce.

But human milk will cost them $6.25 for that same pint, or twenty times more than cow's milk. If a pint of Ben & Jerry's is $5.00 retail, and we generously assume that only 25% of the cost to produce it is in the actual ingredients, and furthermore that 80% of the ingredient cost is in the milk and milk products, it's not too far to walk to set the price of human-sourced premium ice cream at $30.00 or more.

Once you get over the creepy factor, and get past the FDA, and the ACLU, and whoever else might have a problem with this little scheme, you're still going to have to fork over a whopping thirty bucks at retail for your new human-milk pint of Ben & Jerry's latest limited edition: "Don't Be Such A Baby".

Paul Newman was a lot of things in his life; most famously an actor, and one of my favorites. His roles in Cool Hand Luke and the Best Picture winner The Sting are career-defining. The bookend performances as Fast Eddie Felsen in The Hustler and The Color of Money earned him a Best Actor Oscar, and his work with friend and colleague Robert Redford in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid offer even more unforgettable moments in cinema history.

He was also a great ambassador of motorsports, discovering racing at the relatively late age of 45 after his role in Winning. He was a driver himself for a number of years, coming in second in the Le Mans 24 hour endurance race in 1989. Later, his racing team helped younger men get the experience needed to rise to the top of their profession, such as Adrian Sutil, who recalled his time with Newman during coverage of this weekend's Formula 1 Grand Prix in Singapore. Other F1 drivers once in his stable included the great Nigel Mansel.

A dedicated philanthropist, Newman's foundation distributes 100% of the profits from the Newman's Own brand of natural foods to numerous charities around the world. To date, the program which he once described as "a joke gone out of control" has raised over 250 million dollars in donations. The company's motto is still "Shameless Exploitation in Pursuit of the Common Good".

Paul Newman died in his home Friday morning of cancer. He has three daughters with his wife of 53 years, Joanne Woodward.

They say rain is the great equalizer, and in Monza for the 2008 Italian Grand Prix, it was certainly the truth. Sebastian Vettel became the youngest winner of a Formula 1 race when he took the top spot on the podium for Scuderia Torro Rosso, followed by McLaren's Heikki Kovalainen in second place and BMW's Robert Kubica in third.

Ferrari seemed to completely disintegrate in the inclement weather at their home track, finishing sixth and ninth, which allowed McLaren's second and seventh place finishes to erode their lead in the constructor's championship, now standing at a close 134 to 129 lead for the Italians.

Lewis Hamilton still leads the driver's championship in spite of his penalty from the Belgian GP (the appeal of which was denied this week), with Ferrari's Fellipe Massa close behind, and Kubica takes over third place. BMW's Polish sleeper just might end up being this year's champion, but Hamilton and Lewis will have to drop quite a few points for him to scramble to the top with only 4 races remaining.

Tim Bray on Driving:

Like most people on the left half of the New World, driving has informed and constrained and enriched my adult life. I’ve enjoyed it. Indications are that mine will be one of the last drive-everywhere generations. The shape the tribe settles into may be more pleasing, and strengthening local culture is a fine thing, but the loss of the time-behind-the-wheel, with the music playing, going places, well, it’s sad.

One time years ago I even wrote a terribly long (pages and pages) poem about driving; here’s the beginning:

To walk is best of course. And I
would rather drive than fly. Would turn
Earth's curve beneath my tires. Would burn
Earth's blackened past in engine fires;
burn time that space is measured by
from edge of map to edge of sky.

Tim goes on to describe ups and downs of daily driving, but the above stands well on its own.

From ongoing.

Mozilla's Mitchell Baker outlines the company's plans to have a mobile browser by 2010.

Perhaps I'm more of a cynic than previously thought, but in what is quite possibly the hottest segment of the web market today, saying you're going to release something in two years sounds a little like saying "the sun will explode someday".

Sullivan Luvay Knoll is due January 15th, and so far is proceeding exactly on schedule. We got a look at her insides (and outsides) yesterday, and it turns out (not unexpectedly) that Eden is growing a fine specimen of human female in her little person factory.

I had planned to include a photo in utero here, but Eden nicked them on her way to work this morning.