Listening to the fairly epic audio book of "Atlas Shrugged". Only heard of it following Adam Curry's comments on the No Agenda podcast. I think if I drive an average of 2-3 hours per day, listening to it in the car, I should get through it in a month! Only trouble now is how do I find time to catch up on all the No Agenda shows I'm missing? Summary below:

Atlas Shrugged is a novel by Ayn Rand, first published in 1957 in the United States. This was Rand's fourth, longest and last novel, and she considered it her magnum opus in the realm of fiction writing. As indicated by its working title The Strike, the book explores a dystopian United States where leading innovators, ranging from industrialists to artists, refuse to be exploited by society. The protagonist, Dagny Taggart, sees society collapse around her as the government increasingly asserts control over all industry, while society's most productive citizens, led by the mysterious John Galt, progressively disappear. Galt describes the strike as "stopping the motor of the world" by withdrawing the "minds" that drive society's growth and productivity; with their strike these creative minds hope to demonstrate that the economy and society would collapse without the profit motive and the efforts of the rational and productive.

Internet viral advert for Samsung LED screen technology.

Had to hack the code a bit, looking at the original source, lifting the video ID from the URL and entering it directly into the code. If the embedded video below is messed up, the original URL was:
http://video.telegraph.co.uk/services/player/bcpid1137883380?bctid=17075685001

Remember this on the BBC? David Belle's "Parkour" commercial. (YouTube)

Watched another TED talk: Michael Shermer on Strange Beliefs. Recommended!

From TED profile:

"Why do people see the Virgin Mary on a cheese sandwich or hear demonic lyrics in "Stairway to Heaven"? Using video and music, skeptic Michael Shermer shows how we convince ourselves to believe -- and overlook the facts."

As founder and publisher of Skeptic Magazine, Michael Shermer has exposed fallacies behind intelligent design, 9/11 conspiracies, the low-carb craze, alien sightings and other popular beliefs and paranoias. But it's not about debunking for debunking's sake. Shermer defends the notion that we can understand our world better only by matching good theory with good science. Thus, in order to explore a conspiracy theory that pre-planted explosives caused the World Trade Center towers to fall on 9/11, the magazine called on demolition experts.

Shermer's work offers cognitive context for our often misguided beliefs: In the absence of sound science, incomplete information can powerfully combine with the power of suggestion (helping us hear Satanic lyrics when "Stairway to Heaven" plays backwards, for example). In fact, a common thread that runs through beliefs of all sorts, he says, is our tendency to convince ourselves: We overvalue the shreds of evidence that support our preferred outcome, and ignore the facts we aren't looking for.