Huh?

My gMail account has been disabled! Oh noes :-(

Apparently I've breached the Google ToS, which seems... unlikely to me, but presumably further illumination will be forthcoming in due course.

Hopefully I can get it restored in short order :-/

Linkfest

I know that we frequently joke about how it'd probably be quicker to send email by carrier pigeon, at least in the office, but a South African IT company have proved it's true, says Yahoo! news. The pigeon carried a data card 50 miles in the time it took the firm's broadband connection to transfer 4% of the data contained thereon. So, pigeon 1, interwebz 0.

A couple of weeks back, The Guardian ran a piece lauding the Brits' near-universal love of biscuits. Fortunately, here's the Register on hand to warn us just how perilous this addiction might be with Custard Creams Can Kill: Official (there's that unique turn of phrase that El Reg deploys for headlines in evidence once again).

In this week's It Could Only Be Texas news, here's the Marfa Prada Store, 150 miles Southeast of El Paso, it's actually a piece of installation art: a Prada shop sitting in the middle of Texas nowhere.

However Ohio, not wanting to miss out on the action, offers us this tale of an armed robber returning to his victim a little later on to ask her for a date. And Pennslyvania counters with this story of neighbourly love, whereby a guy 'accidentally' fires a cannonball through his neighbour's wall.

This week's infographic comes via Teh Grauniad, and is an interactive graph of the number of nuclear warheads in the world, from 1945 to the present day. It is vaguely heartening to see that we're on the down slope... Wired had this graphic about ATMs in the US of A.

For all those sceptics who thought that Rodents Of Unusual Size didn't exist, proof finally surfaces in Papua New Guinea. They have fanged frogs, too. OTOH, these mice are neither large nor fanged, but they fly. Well, more 'float' than 'fly', per se, courtesy of some NASA wizardry with electromagnets. But still, how cool is that?

The whole energy equation in the UK has been looking dubious for a while now. Expect, then, more articles like this Times one predicting power cuts within the decade. The obvious *need* that the population will have for the message toaster, a device that imprints text messages onto toast clearly doesn't help matters.

Although seemingly disconnected with the Rise of the Machines, these exoskeletons developed in Japan could prove the building block for our machine overlords in the near future. More positive thinking over at The Times, where they enumerate 10 ways that technology could kill us all.

But not all tech is evil: witness the new pics from the repaired Hubble space telescope, which are awesome.

The Telegraph had this gallery of paintings drawn solely on the basis of StreetView, but I thought these glass sculptures of bacteria and viruses were cooler. And to cap off the picspam, The Grauniad has a gallery of entries for the CIWEM Environmental Photographer of the Year 2009, which has some good stuff.

This week's stupid YouTube vid is this synchronised effort of four Pugs tilting their heads. Another clip I rather liked was Al Franken drawing a map of the United States. I highly suspect that he's already got a chalk outline to copy or something, but it's still impressive.

The Order of the Phoenix Re-Read: Chapter 20

( OotP Ch 20: Hagrid's Tale )