For those just tuning in, "Detour From Beer" means this post has nothing to do with beer.

And believe me, this particular post REALLY isn't beer-related -- hmmmm . . . unless you want to visualize beer.

In today's Wall Street Journal, Walt Mossberg test drives Google's new browser and compares it to the new version of Internet Explorer. For the time being, I think I'll stick with Firefox.

Unrelated to browsers and several degrees up the "wow" scale is many-eyes.com, a website with software that allows people to create visual comparisons and analyses of, well, just about anything. Someone could use the software to construct a visual that compares the number of times Obama used the word "tax" in his acceptance speech to the number of times McCain used the same word.

Warning: I've had only sporadic success getting into the website the past few days. My guess is that its owners, a group at IBM's Watson Research Center, weren't prepared for the traffic generated by this New York Times article about the website and software. The article is worth reading because it provides a short, coherent explanation of what the software can do, complete with an image mapping the occurrence of names in the New Testament (no surprise, "Jesus" gets the biggest bubble).