pjt33 notes a recently published paper proposing that ocean currents could account for Earth's magnetic field. The wrteup appears on the Institute of Physics site; the IOP is co-owner, with the German Physical Society, of the open-access journal in which the paper appears. This reader adds, "The currently predominant theory is that the cause of Earth's magnetic field is molten iron flowing in the outer core. There is at present no direct evidence for either theory." "Professor Gregory Ryskin from the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University in Illinois, US, has defied the long-standing convention by applying equations from magnetohydrodynamics to our oceans' salt water (which conducts electricity) and found that the long-term changes (the secular variation) in the Earth's main magnetic field are possibly induced by our oceans' circulation."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week over at the CRAFT blog we saw:

Jia Jem's meat dress,

Jenny Hart's Crafting a Business column,

we welcomed a new contributing writer, Brookelynn Morris,

and we basked in the glow of this Google Chrome bento box video.

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This reconstruction of the earliest known olive oil factory demonstrates a simple yet ingenious process to extract olive oil from olives using pulleys, levers, and gravity decanting. This was much more effective than using mortar and pestle to make olive oil, typically used for small scale production. Dating back to the 6th century BC, this factory was located in the Ionian city of Clazomenae, on what is now the coast of western Turkey. This photo shows the press used to squeeze the olive oil out from burlap sacks filled with a paste of ground up olives.

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MojoKid writes "Intel has been rather successful at carving out a larger percentage of the netbook market with their low power Atom processor. Moving forward, Intel's executives believe there's a good potential to increase Atom's traction in adjacent markets by targeting its low-cost, energy-efficient chips at various multifunctional consumer gadgets including smartphones and other portable devices that access the Internet. Code-named Moorestown, a new version of the chip will offer a 50x power reduction at idle and reportedly will deliver enough horsepower to handle 720p video recording and 1080p quality playback. It is with this upcoming chip, that Intel will begin targeting the smartphone market In 2011. Intel also plans to introduce an even smaller, less power hungry version of the chip known as Medfield, which will be built on a 32nm process with a full solution comprising a PCB area of about half the size of a credit card."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Megan Simmons of ISKME tells us about the Sun Curve Design Challenge. OERCommons is a place where they are storing and sharing educational resources about the Sun Curve and other educational projects. The structure and systems were designed by INKA Biosperic Systems. You might also check out her photos of the project at Maker Faire.

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David Gerard writes "Google Chrome includes Ogg support for the <video> element. It also includes support for the hideously encumbered H.264 format. Nice as an extra, but ... they're also testing HTML5 YouTube only for H.264 — meaning the largest video provider on the Net will make H.264 the primary codec and relegate the equally good open format Ogg/Theora firmly to the sidelines. Mike Shaver from Mozilla has fairly unambiguously asked Chris DiBona from Google what the heck Google thinks it's doing." DiBona responded with concerns that switching to Theora while maintaining quality would take up an incredible amount of bandwidth for a site like YouTube, though he made clear his support for the continued improvement of the project. Greg Maxwell jumped into the debate by comparing the quality of Ogg/Theora+Vorbis with the current YouTube implementations using H.263+MP3 and H.264+AAC. At the lower bitrate, Theora seems to have the clear edge, while the higher bitrate may slightly favor H.264. He concludes that YouTube's adoption of "an open unencumbered format in addition to or instead of their current offerings would not cause problems on the basis of quality or bitrate."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's a traditional wood-bending technique that seems ready-made for CNC millers, and yet I can't find much online evidence that it's being done.

To make a kerf-bend, the wood is first corrugated on the inside of the intended radius. The width, depth, number, and spacing of the kerfs all affect the qualities of the finished bend. The open kerfs are flooded with glue, and the bend is made and clamped in place until the glue dries. Stuart Lees of Stu's Shed has a nice piece on the subject.

I imagine it's tedious work, cutting all those kerfs, at least if you're doing it manually with traditional tools, like a table saw or a fence router. And perhaps more intimidating, for some, is the mathematics of figuring out just how many kerfs you need, and just how thick, deep, and widely spaced they ought to be to achieve a particular radius. Yet both functions can be performed automatically by a CNC system--the cutting by the hardware and the calculating by the software.

In fact, it seems like such a natural fit that I'm having a hard time believing it's not already out there. So sound off, CNC-millers: Who's doing this today, and where can I learn more about it?

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We've had a few readers send in updates on the chaotic post-election situation in Iran. Twitter is providing better coverage than CNN at the moment. There are both tech and humanitarian angles to the story, as the two samples below illustrate. First, Hugh Pickens writes with a report from The Times (UK) that "the Iranian government is mounting a campaign to disrupt independent media organizations and Web sites that air doubts about the validity of the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the nation's president. Reports from Tehran say that social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter were taken down after Mr Ahmadinejad claimed victory. SMS text messaging, a preferred medium of communication for young Iranians, has also been disabled. 'The blocking of access to foreign news media has been stepped up, according to Reporters Without Borders. 'The Internet is now very slow, like the mobile phone network. YouTube and Facebook are hard to access and pro-reform sites... are completely inaccessible.'" And reader momen abdullah sends in one of the more disturbing Ask Slashdots you are likely to see. "People, we need your urgent help in Iran. We are under attack by the government. They stole the election. And now are arresting everybody. They also filtered every sensitive Web page. But our problem is that they also block the SMS network and are scrambling satellite TVs. Please, can you help us to set up some sort of network using our home wireless access points? Can anybody show us a link on how to install small TV/radio stations? Any suggestion for setting up a network? Please tell us what to do or we are going to die in the a nuclear war between Iran and US." Update: 06/14 18:32 GMT by KD : Jim Cowie contributes a blog post from Renesys taking a closer look at the state of Iranian Internet transit, as seen in the aggregated global routing tables, and concluding that the story may not be as clear-cut as has been reported.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Eurogamer has a story about how the design of motion-control input devices has evolved over the years, ranging from the Nintendo Power Glove and Sega Activator up to modern devices like the Wii Remote and the upcoming projects by Sony and Microsoft. Now that the technology has caught up with the ideas, EA CEO John Riccitello said he expects motion-control gaming to rapidly expand, eventually occupying half the total games market. He said, "We almost invested to create a platform extension like that for some of the games we're working on. We're very pleased, frankly, that it showed up at Microsoft, because I'd rather them pay for that. They can leverage it better, and we can build software. But I felt the market wanted that technology and I'm glad it's coming."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In this morning's NYT, there's an article on Twitter's SUL. It's excellent. I recommend everyone read it carefully.

NYT: The Tweet Smell of Success.

Here are some excerpts.

"Twitter has become a kingmaker of sorts, conferring online stardom to a mix of writers, gadget geeks, political commentators and entrepreneurs."

"...an actor like LaVar Burton, decades away from his glory days as a star of the TV drama 'Roots,' has a personal audience of 635,000."

"A writer with an interest in comic books can become the expert on comic books..."

"Did he realize he was helping to create an arbiter of popularity? 'We didn't think that far ahead,' [Biz Stone] said."

"The list is cobbled together by a team of employees whose identities were withheld"

"Ms. Sampson said 'there's sort of a criteria' for the list 'but not really.'"

Finally here are some comments and background that led to this.

Here's a neat companion story to the nation-rocking news that UK Members of Parliament have used their expense accounts to commit massive acts of fraud against the taxpayer: it turns out that Scotland Yard's top detectives have been doing the exact same thing, charging millions to their official AmEx cards, taking huge cash-advances at ATMs, buying clothes for their girlfriends, charging custom-made suits bought from mail-order bespoke tailors, etc. One officer charged £40,000 to his card in a single year. These were elite cops from special units -- including the anti-terror squad, whose members are charged with inflating their expenses from investigating the 7/7 bombings.

"It beggars belief that our police, who are supposed to be solving crime, are suspected of fraud on a grand scale."

Auditors at the Metropolitan Police Authority have spent two years examining receipts from the accounts of more than 3,500 officers. The Amex cards were issued in 2006 to detectives from specialist operations, which includes counter-terrorism and those involved in diplomatic and royalty protection.

The scheme was then extended to the specialist crime directorate, which counters organised crime, as well as conducting sensitive inquiries such as the cash-for-honours investigation...

Sources have told the Observer that some detectives had fallen into the habit of withdrawing hundreds of pounds at a time from cashpoints. Other officers appear to have filled in blank receipts from restaurants to account for cash payments.

Card fraud probe targets 300 detectives

A lot of people told me to stop writing about it, but Twitter's Suggested User List was just plain wrong, and I was sure that it would become more evident over time, and it has. Here's a brief recap.

1. Until early this year, follower-count was evolving as a user-developed way for Twitter users to give authority to each other. Like all things in Twitter, it was crude, a better version could have been designed, but that's the way things work in Twitter.

2. People like Scoble, Guy Kawasaki, Jason Calacanis and Leo Laporte, and to a lesser extent myself, brought authority with us from other places. In this way we were investing in Twitter, every bit as much as Union Square or Spark Capital.

3. The major tech pubs (Mashable, Om, TechCrunch) mostly ignored Twitter. They had much lower follower counts than the people above. Same with the celebs, Oprah, Ashton Kutcher, etc who weren't present at all until early this year.

4. Follower-count worked very much the way eBay users rate each other, same with Amazon.

5. The reason follower-count was so big was its huge visibility in the user interface. It was the biggest number you'd see when you clicked on someone's profile. In FriendFeed, where follower-count is visible but fairly buried, it isn't a big part of the culture. (I don't have any idea what my own follower count is in FF, in Twitter it's about 23K.)

6. Then Twitter adds the Suggested User List to the mix. The way I discovered it was noticing that @anamariecox's follower count, which had been around 3000, had jumped to 40,000 then 50,000 then 60,000, all in a matter of days. No one could figure out why until @ev posted a comment on a blog explaining. Then we could see the effect all over the place. All kinds of random people were jumping in follower counts only because they were on the SUL.

7. I wrote a piece on March 12 asking if a reporter could accept so much extra juice, for free, without disclosing.

8. Then the celebs come. Kutcher's campaign. Oprah. Cover of Time. Etc. Twitter explodes. Good for them. In the meantime, our investment is swamped, more or less lost. I don't begrudge celebs for their followers, as long as they earned them, as long as they brought users in as we did in step #2 above. What I object to, what anyone would object to, is Twitter gaming the system to favor people who did nothing to earn their follower count.

9. That's where it stayed until this morning when the NY Times ran a piece that more or less lays it out the way I've told the story. They add things I wasn't willing to add -- the utter incompetence and lazyness, lack of thought, lack of caring in any way about the users of Twitter. It's time for some sobriety. People don't like being pushed around like this. I've looked into the thought behind the SUL and found the same thing that the Times did. There is none. It's insiders doing favors for other insiders. It's newly rich and powerful entrepreneurs throwing their weight around, rewarding people and publications that do their bidding, and punishing those who are independent.

10. What is so frustrating about this is that Twitter has this incredible promise as a platform for journalism. How ironic that the NYT piece comes out as the people of Tehran are using Twitter, putting their lives on the line, to route around a corrupt government.

11. At some point there must be a way for users to convey authority for other users that isn't spoiled and polluted like Twitter's follower-count is. PageRank for people. We were bootstrapping a way to do that until the company blew it up. This opens the door for Twitter's competitors to take advantage, and come up with a way to convey authority that isn't subject to gaming. No vendor should put their finger on the scale to favor one person or organization over another. I want a level playing field, I want as much of a chance as anyone else. When I find out someone else is cutting in line, I lose all interest. I have lost that kind of interest in follower-count. Give me another field to play on, this one is spoiled. I don't see any way for them to fix it. We're going to have to start over from scratch to do that. Shame. We had a really good thing going.

Two Japanese smugglers were busted on the Italian-Swiss border with a suitcase whose false bottom was stuffed with $134.5 billion in US treasury bonds, including two one billion dollar Kennedy bonds (a denomination used for national currency reserves). Either these guys are the world's dumbest, most ambitious counterfeiters, or they're the biggest currency smugglers ever caught.

It gets better: Italian law says that the penalty for currency smuggling is 40% of the seized cash, and that 40% (US$28 billion) will take a huge bite out of Italy's public debt.

If the certificates were real, for Italy it would be like hitting the jackpot. The fine alone would amount to US$ 38 billion, five times the estimated cost of rebuilding quake-devastated Abruzzi region. It would help Italy's eliminate its public deficit.

If the certificates are fakes the two Japanese nationals could get a very lengthy jail sentence for fraud.

As soon as the seizure was made the US Embassy in Rome was informed. Italian and US secret services were called in to assist the Italian financial police.

Some important international financial newspapers had already reported on the existence of 'funny money' circulating on parallel, i.e. unofficial, financial markets.

US government securities seized from Japanese nationals, not clear whether real or fake (via @stacyhebert)

Tactical corsets: a corset that's bulletproof, comes with pistol holster, pepper spray holster, and an "interrogation pouch."

Tactical Corsets (via @richardkadrey)

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The RIAA's first trial verdict having been tossed out last year, the RIAA is coming back for a second round starting Monday. This time the trial will be in Minneapolis, rather than Duluth, and the defendant will have a team of pro bono lawyers on her side. But perhaps the most important new development is that this time, the 'technical' evidence garnered by MediaSentry and 'explained' by the RIAA's expert witness Doug Jacobson, will not get the free pass it got the first time around. In the 2007 trial in Capitol Records v. Thomas, no objection was made by defendant's lawyer to the MediaSentry/Doug Jacobson 'evidence' upon which the RIAA relied, and the evidence was admitted without objection. This time there will be no free ride, as defendant's tech-savvy lawyers have already filed a list of objections to the RIAA's proposed exhibits. Most notably, they attack the 'technical' materials submitted by MediaSentry and Dr. Doug Jacobson under Rule 702 of the Federal Rules of Evidence, which requires evidence based on 'scientific, technical, or other specialized knowledge' to be based on sufficient facts or data, to be the product of reliable principles and methods, and to be the result of those principles and methods having been applied reliably to the facts of the case. If the evidence fails to meet those standards, it is inadmissible. This judge has already shown acute awareness of these principles in deciding which subjects the defendant's expert could and could not address. This should be interesting."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Bill Gurstelle is guest blogging here on Boing Boing. He is the author of several books including Backyard Ballistics, and the recently published Absinthe and Flamethrowers. Twitter: @wmgurst)

Today's the end of my guest blogging stint on BoingBoing and I'm in the mood for a summertime road trip. Unfortunately, my car is 1999 AWD Ford Explorer with a 5.0 V-8 and gets, maybe, 16 miles to the gallon. The thing about it is that nothing ever goes wrong with it. It's a great vehicle, gas mileage aside. Wired magazine ran a great article explaining that the greenest vehicle is the car you already own. So, If I do go somewhere, I'll rent a Civic instead.

A great road trip requires more than just driving. It should be something like and retracing the route of Lewis and Clark. Or retracing the route of H. Sargent Michaels 1905 "Photographic Guide for Motorists from Chicago to Lake Geneva."

Matthew Algeo new book, Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure, is the account of a great road trip. The book's conceit is marvelous: almost immediately after leaving office, ex-president Truman and his wife Bess got behind the wheel of a new Chrysler New Yorker and drove from Missouri to New York and back, as plain old private citizens.

Harry loved to drive, so he and Bess loaded up the trunk with a few suitcases and took off. No bodyguards, no secret service. Harry and Bess ate in roadside diners, stopped at country gas stations, and just made like normal people, as well as the recently retired leader of the greatest nation in the free world could do. Impossible to imagine Clinton, Bush, or Bush doing that (Carter, maybe.)

Algeo retraced the route, visiting the places Turman stopped at. He uses newspaper accounts and interviews with the still living but now usually elderly people that interacted with Harry - waitresses, hotel clerks, even a cop who stopped him on the Pennsylvania Turnpike for driving too slow - to weave together a terrificly interesting story.

So, I need a road trip. Maybe I'll retrace the route of the Ken Kesey's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test trip, or Hernando Desoto's quest for the fountain of youth through the Southeast. I'm still thinking of more.

dritan writes "While most of the transition to digital seems to have gone smoothly, those who use Windows Media Center saw their screens go dark. Users are complaining that Media Center did not pick up changes to channel assignments that took place on Friday. Someone forgot to update the static channel lists distributed with the program guide. Users either have to wait for Microsoft to fix the problem, or manually edit the configuration files." Reports indicate that the FCC received upwards of 300,000 calls on Friday from consumers seeking late help with the transition, but they were prepared, with over 4,000 operators available to handle problems. The FCC's DTV website also had over 3 million hits on Friday. Both phone and internet traffic have now tapered off, and supplies of converter boxes appear to have held out just fine.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ravjen writes with news that "Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis AG said they have successfully produced a swine flu vaccine weeks ahead of their expectations. The vaccine was made in cells, rather than grown in eggs as is usually the case with vaccines." This announcement came just a day after the World Health Organization declared H1N1's spread to be a pandemic. The vaccine has not been tested in humans yet, so the first batch is set to be used in clinical trials and pre-clinical testing. If all goes well, the new production method would allow Novartis to get the drug to market in large quantities by this fall. Other drug companies, such as Baxter International, have confirmed that they're in "full-scale production" of H1N1 vaccines as well.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hugh Pickens writes "The BBC reports that scientists say they have disproved the theory that fingerprints improve grip by increasing friction between people's fingers and the surface they are holding. Dr Roland Ennos designed a machine which enabled him to measure the amount of friction generated by a fingerprint when it was in contact with an acrylic glass at varying levels of pressure. The results showed that friction levels increased by a much smaller amount than had been anticipated, debunking the hypothesis that fingerprints provide an improved grip. Ennos believes that fingerprints may have evolved to grip onto rough surfaces, like tree bark; the ridges may allow our skin to stretch and deform more easily, protecting it from damage; or they may allow water trapped between our finger pads and the surface to drain away and improve surface contact in wet conditions. Other researchers have suggested that the ridges could increase our fingerpads' touch sensitivity."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the MAKE Flickr pool

• Super classy bike trailer [above, bottom-right]

• Sci-fi-chic eyeshades use ancient design [above, bottom-left]

• Bio-friendly drain cleaner

• Mobile speaker water bottle

• Playing card polyhedron [above, top-left]

• How-To: Joystick from scavenged parts [above, top-left]

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An anonymous reader writes "Johan Van den Brande has developed a Twitter client for the Commodore 64, allowing 140-character messages to be posted directly from this TV-connected 1982 home computer. This YouTube video shows how the Twitter client is — slowly! — loaded from a 5.25" floppy disk, how the latest Twitter messages are downloaded and shown on the TV screen, and how this tweet is posted. All that is needed is a C64, a TV, and a C64 Ethernet card. The Twitter client is implemented with the Contiki operating system, which otherwise is used for connecting tiny embedded systems to the Internet."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes "In its just-disclosed patent application for the Online Personal Appearance Advisor, Microsoft describes the 'invention' of its three Microsoft Research employees in these words: 'The contributor uploads self images for viewing and rating (or voting) by viewers who choose provide an opinion on different fashion and/or cosmetic looks of the contributor.' So what do you think — is Microsoft's invention really Hot or Not?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Years ago, my friend John Gilmore told me he thought accounts of the spread of botnets (massive networks of virus-compromised machines that can be used in concert to send spam, attack servers, etc) were overblown, because if botnets were really all-pervasive, then the price of using them should have crashed. Now comes this spam, on one of my personal blogs, and I wonder, has the great botnet price-crash finally hit?

Tired of a competitor's site? Hinder the enemy? Fed pioneers or copywriters?

Kill their sites! How? We will help you in this!
Obstructions of any site, portal, shop!

Different types of attacks: Date-attack, Trash, Attack, Attack, etc. Intellectual
You can work on schedule, as well as the simultaneous attack of several sites.

On average the data, ordered the site falls within 5 minutes after the start. As a demonstration of our capabilities, allows screening.

Our prices

24 hours of attack - $ 70
12 hours of the attack - $ 50
1 hour attack - $ 25

GeckoStone makes tesselated paving stones that look like Escher's interlocking lizards. (hilariously, they've registered a trademark and claim copyright on this work derived from a classic Escher work that is, itself, copyrighted -- and there's no evidence that they licensed the design from Escher's estate; every pirate wants to be an admiral!)

GeckoStone (via Make)

Robbo sez, "Rocky Gaudrault, CEO of TekSavvy [ed: fantastic, indie Canadian ISP that does not practice throttling, unlike the major semi-monopoly, Bell Canada], sent this email to customers today. Seems important for people in Canada even if they aren't TekSavvy customers:"

In March 2008 Bell started throttling its Wholesale Customers (TekSavvy among a group of many) without notice. We attempted to have the CRTC force Bell to stop as it removed our ability to do business and give Market choice. The throttling was done in the name of congestion, even if Bell, at the same time launched higher speeds (which they did not share with their wholesalers) and also dabbled with launching IPTV, which consumes even more capacity.

The CRTC sided with Bell in November 2008 but launched a Public Hearing to discuss Network Management Practices, clearly showing they made a decision on throttling without having all the details in hand to do so. As a result we launched a request to reverse their decision from November (The Review & Vary) in May 2009.

The only way we are going to make a difference at this point is to get full public support to stop companies like Bell from bullying the market and the regulators! The Telecom and Cableco Monopolies control 96% of our marketplace, so if we don't stand up and voice our concerns, this will become a two party dance where choices and services are going to be completely removed and rates raised to unreasonable levels!

Here are the details on how to submit your comments:

1) Go to: http://support.crtc.gc.ca/crtcsubmissionmu/forms/Telecom.aspx?lang=e
2) Select "Part VII / PN" from the drop down list and then click "Next"
3) In box entitled "Subject" line, insert "CRTC File #: 8662-P8-200907727"
4) In the box entitled "Description / Comments / Questions", insert any comments that you may have on the review and vary application.
5) If you would like to attach a document, select "yes" and follow the instructions for attaching a file.
As indicated in the Title, I believe the deadline is June 22nd, so don't wait to long

PS - R&V details here.

Man, would you look at how hard it is to link to a specific docket at the Canadian telco regulator? It's almost as though they don't want activists to be able to exhort people to go and take action. Either that, or they don't know how the Internet works. I'm not sure which one is worse.

Submit a telecom-related request (Thanks, Robbo!)

Laurent sez, "The Switzerland's Piraten Partei (Pirate Party, of course) will be loaded July the 12th in Zurich. There is also a Facebook group : Piratenpartei Schweiz - Parti Pirate Suisse - Partito Pirata Svizzero Mondial."

The original Swedish Pirate Party won a seat in the recent EU election (two seats, once the Treaty of Lisbon is ratified), the German PP got 1% of the popular vote, and there are affiliate parties all over the world now. All this in just a few years -- I wonder how far the Green Party got in its first three years?

Parti Pirate Suisse (Thanks, Laurent!)

The Associated Press (who once suggested that bloggers should pay for five-word excerpts of its stories, and should be forced to promise not to use those excerpts to make fun of the AP) have found a new progressive streak and announced a plan to syndicate investigative journalism stories financed by nonprofits:

Starting on July 1, the A.P. will deliver work by the Center for Public Integrity, the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and ProPublica to the 1,500 American newspapers that are A.P. members, which will be free to publish the material...

As they sharply reduce their staffs, many newspapers have cut back on investigations or given them up entirely. When there are barely enough reporters to cover the daily news from the local courthouse and the school board, it is harder to justify assigning someone to an in-depth project that might take weeks or months.

At the same time, independent groups doing investigative journalism have grown in number and size, fueled by foundations and wealthy patrons, and are offering their work to newspapers, magazines, television and radio news programs, and news Web sites. ProPublica was created in 2007 and the Investigative Reporting Workshop in 2008. The Center for Investigative Reporting has operated for more than three decades, and is doubling in size. The four groups combined have more than 50 professional journalists.

A.P. in Deal to Deliver Nonprofits' Journalism (via /.)

The brief at the Daily Routines blog is to collect stories of "How writers, artists, and other interesting people organize their days." I'm a total creature of habit, even when I'm on the road, a 5AM-rising daily writer; the last thing I do before bed is all the breakfast prep for a huge, elaborate three-course breakfast for the family so that I can bang it all out in ten minutes after getting to inbox0 from the night's email and getting through all the morning's blogposts, hot and ready by 7AM. I get a nap, half an hour's reading and half and hour's yoga every afternoon, get in two pages of the novel, two pages of the short story, and about 3 to 5 times a week, I write a column. Every Monday is podcast day. Monday and Wednesday night, I leave the office ten minutes early, get the kid from day care and make sure she's bathed, fed and in bed by 7 when the sitter comes by so Alice and I can go to a proper 1.5h yoga class around the corner. Sunday mornings we have breakfast out, and I walk the kid to the PO Box, stop and play in the park on the way back, drop off all the stuff from the box at my office, then come home and put the kid to bed while Alice kills zombies on the Xbox. I love my routine.

Despite all this activity Churchill's daily routine changed little during these years. He awoke about 7:30 a.m. and remained in bed for a substantial breakfast and reading of mail and all the national newspapers. For the next couple of hours, still in bed, he worked, dictating to his secretaries.

At 11:00 a.m., he arose, bathed, and perhaps took a walk around the garden, and took a weak whisky and soda to his study.

At 1:00 p.m. he joined guests and family for a three-course lunch. Clementine drank claret, Winston champagne, preferably Pol Roger served at a specific temperature, port brandy and cigars. When lunch ended, about 3:30 p.m. he returned to his study to work, or supervised work on his estate, or played cards or backgammon with Clementine.

At 5:00 p.m., after another weak whisky and soda, he went to bed for an hour and a half. He said this siesta, a habit gained in Cuba, allowed him to work 1 1/2 days in every 24 hours. At 6:30 p.m. he awoke, bathed again, and dressed for dinner at 8:00 p.m.

Daily Routines (via Kottke)

Hugh Pickens writes "The Register reports that a longtime Wikipedia admin has been caught offering to edit the online encyclopedia in exchange for cash. Someone noticed a post to an online job marketplace where he was advertising his services: 'Besides technical writing, I also am an accomplished senior Wikipedia administrator with several featured articles to my name,' read the post, which has since been changed. 'If you need a good profile on Wikipedia, I can help you out there too through my rich experience.' Wikipedia promptly opened a discussion page to try to reach consensus on the community view of 'paid editing.' So far opinion seems to be divided between those who say it's ok as long as full disclosure is made and 'edits are compliant with WP:NPOV, WP:RS, WP:BLP, WP:N,' and others who believe that paid editing automatically creates a conflict of interest. Back in 2006, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales shot down a company known as MyWikiBiz, which promised that you could 'author your legacy on the Internet.' The company subsequently had to reinvent itself with no reference to Wikipedia. 'It is not ok with me that anyone ever set up a service selling their services as a Wikipedia editor, administrator, bureaucrat, etc., I will personally block any cases that I am shown,' wrote Wales."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazing photos coming out of Iran on Flickr.

Ergasiophobia alerts us to a somewhat alarming technology demonstration, in which a Web site you visit generates a pretty good list of sites you have visited — without requiring JavaScript. NoScript will not protect you here. The only obvious drawbacks to this method are that it puts a load on your browser, and that it requires a list of Web sites to check against. "It actually works pretty simply — it is simpler than the JavaScript implementation. All it does is load a page (in a hidden iframe) which contains lots of links. If a link is visited, a background (which isn't really a background) is loaded as defined in the CSS. The 'background' image will log the information, and then store it (and, in this case, it is displayed to you)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

You can make these interlocking reptile gecko pavers yourself, by pouring concrete into a mold sold by GeckoStone in Hawaii. Any resemblance to the work of a certain mathematically-inclined Dutch graphic artist is purely coincidental. Besides looking fly, GeckoStones "naturally create their own borders, and thus won't wander off into your garden." Some other cool tessellating patterns are available on the site.

Props to Steve for submitting this.

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