Well, it’s official. IBM is selling its personal computing division to Chinese computer-maker Lenovo. The ubiquity and sometimes-elegiac tone of the coverage of the transaction points to a fact that I live with every day: people still think IBM is a hardware company. I have come to see the futility of trying to overpower that meme. No matter that over 60% of IBM’s revenue comes from services and consulting. When IBM does something again as revolutionary as invent a personal computer then maybe the public perception will shift. Until then — even after IBM is long out of the personal computing market — people will think it outrageous that I work on a Mac at the office and find it odd that many IBM client solutions have no IBM hardware at all in them.

‘Course, I use a ThinkPad too and I think it is a superb machine, the best PC laptop made. And I thought that well before I took a job with the big ‘BM. That’s the only part of the sale that gives me pause. I certainly hope Lenovo can keep up the quality. By the way, did you know the ThinkPad design was inspired by a traditional Japanese lunchbox?

And, no, I don’t believe the Apple rumors. It just doesn’t make sense to me. But hey, strange bedfellows abound.

Daniel Lubetzky is going to win the Nobel Peace Prize one day. You read it here first. Daniel is the founder of PeaceWorks, a not-only-for-profit business based on the principle that economic interdependence eventually can overcome socio-political turmoil. Basically they get people on opposite sides of a conflict to work together to produce high-end foodstuffs. But that’s only half the story.

The PeaceWorks Foundation — a group I have been working with for a few weeks now — is the non-profit wing of the company. Their main project is OneVoice, a unique grass-roots effort to promote the views of the vast swath of moderate Israelis and Palestinians. The process is fairly simple. Once Israelis and Palestinians are registered to vote with OneVoice (both online and by volunteers on the ground) they are asked to state their opinions on a variety of issues. The referenda are rolled out in phases and contribute to a progressively more honed and unified position statement that will eventually be forwarded as a mandate to global leaders. One interesting point is that, in an effort to promote negotiation, absolute rejection of a proposal is not allowed. You are alloted a limited number of points with which to register your relative level of discord. Use too many on any one issue and you may not have the ability to reject a point later in the vote. The mechanism is a gravitational pull to the center.

There’s a real urgency now with the upcoming Palestinian elections. Daniel and his team are preparing for television coverage, new voting, and a high probability that a supporter of the OneVoice initiative will succeed Arafat. To capture some of this momentum, they’ve created a blog. It’s nascent, but look for it to mature rapidly in the coming week or so.

I’m proud to be a part of this.

Today the World Community Grid opened to the public. Basically IBM has developed a distributed computing system (think SETI@Home) for tackling major problems in science and health, all with a humanitarian bent. Coverage in the Times and the Trib.

Rejoice, for now you can satisfy your hitherto unmet desire to crunch human proteome data with your computer’s free processing cycles.

I’m part of a team working with the International Freedom Center, one of the four cultural institutions that are part of the World Trade Center redevelopment. Today I visited Ground Zero for the first time. I’d gotten close before, but never felt I was ready or had enough time to be able to reflect on it. The experience was somewhat uplifting, really. There was so much human bustle and vitality orbiting it (and in it at the rebuilt PATH station). Like platelets coagulating over a deep wound.