Two news stories cropped up this week that left me thinking: is this important, or is this not important? 

Google and TypeKit announced a remote @font-face loading API that is so simple a monkey could use it, to the cheers of markup monkeys worldwide.  I'm no expert on typography – as a developer I leave type decisions in the hands of designers whenever possible – but this felt like big news.  So I wanted to explore this brave new world.  I imagined a vast library of open-source fonts heralding the beginning of typographic excellence online, for once and for all, for free.  But the brave new world consists of a whopping eighteen typefaces.  Didn't we already have about that many free fonts at our disposal? I'm currently typing on an iMac which can display six thousand typefaces, and the big news is that the fonts available to me online have gone from a handful to…a slightly bigger handful?  Hardly seems revolutionary, but as a first step, I dunno…maybe this is really, really great?

Also this week the news broke that the Ventner Institute announced what they called a "synthetic cell", which really means that they generated a DNA sequence in a computer, manufactured a real DNA sequence out of its component subsections, and swapped the sequence into an existing cell. Then the man-made genome took over the cell's operation, the cells were able to replicate, and so on.  While I'd love to have been a scientist involved in such awe-inspiring trickery, the result is hardly what I'd call a "synthetic cell".  I mean, when I get in my car and drive it, I would not call that "human-machine hybrid achieving synthetic auto-locomotion".  The car's already built.  I just drive it.

Of course, the unquestionably big news this week is that you can play Pac-Man on the google homepage today.  Looks like it was done entirely with XHTML/CSS and Javascript, too.  No Flash necessary, so you can actually (sort of) play it on an iPhone.  Folks: the world has officially changed.