Very strange: the pavement over the road is soaking wet and umbrellas are in active use, but this side of the road is just a little damp and I can't see any rain 
Anyway, rain or no rain, it seems the Internet isn't full yet:
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Anyway, rain or no rain, it seems the Internet isn't full yet:- Cheers Oral History: "The Best TV Show That's Ever Been" - "On September 30, 1982, NBC premiered a new sitcom called Cheers, a smartly written show about a bar owned by a retired relief pitcher named Sam Malone. Created by director James Burrows and writer-producers Glen and Les Charles, Cheers would become the last blast of pre-irony prime-time. There was no callous snark, no deconstructive riffs, and only a handful of time-stamped pop-culture references. For the most part, people sat around a bar and talked. But despite its elemental simplicity, the show sparked a quiet revolution in the way TV comedy was produced, with each half-hour episode playing into a soap-style arc of love, death, and bar-bets that would go on for eleven seasons." Weird to think Cheers started thirty years ago yesterday - that means it's as old now as The Jackie Gleason Show was when it started.
- Farid’s trek into the Sahara - "Last week when I put out an appeal on the website and e-mailed some contacts in Morocco, it was more in hope than expectation that someone in Morocco may be able to go and find out what had happened to 09(98) on the edge of the Sahara. We were receiving transmissions from a remote ridge of the northern edge of the desert, well away from main roads and in some of the most inhospitable terrain Africa – or perhaps, more accurately, the world has to offer. Surely, 09′s fate would remain a mystery? Well, not when you have Farid Lacroix to help you." Amazing story about tracking one of the Rutland Water ospreys.
- Discussion over - lets destroy the comments thread to save the right to reply - Good piece by Stuart Houghton on "the bottom half of the Internet": "Commenting is broken. What was intended as a home for free expression and debate has been squatted by belligerent contrarians and trolls. But can it be saved? Is the principle of a right to reply important enough to keep and is there a better way?" Of course, the first commenter doesn't address the ideas in the article at all, preferring instead to get snarky about the site
- Freemen on the Land are “parasites” peddling “pseudolegal nonsense”: Canadian judge fights back - "Almost a year ago, I and some other legal bloggers wrote about a phenomenon known as the Freemen on the Land movement. I called the post Freemen of the dangerous nonsense, for that is exactly what the movement is, for those desperate enough to sign up to it. Now a Canadian judge has done many judges around the world a huge favour by exploding the movement’s ideas and leaders (or “gurus”) in a carefully referenced and forensic 192-page judgment, which should be read by anyone who has ever taken a passing interest in this issue, and certainly by any judge faced by a litigant attempting the arguments in court." Excellent piece on Associate Chief Justice J.D. Rooke's forensic dismemberment of the ludicrous assertions of the Freemen, such as that all courts are Admiralty courts with no jurisdiction on land, that the copyright in your name is owned by the Government, and that your birth ("=berth") certificate is actually a bond traded on financial exchanges.
- A photographic tour of Pinner chalk mine - "This is the best sequence of photos I have received of beautifully taken shots of the main features of the Pinner mine. They were taken by Nick Catford in April 1996. He used a Hasselblad 500CM with 120 (6X6xm) roll film. The camera was set up with the shutter open but covered by a helper. This allowed Nick to use a normal light to walk to each new position (out of sight) and fire the single high powered flash gun when the helper briefly uncovered the aperture." I wasn't even aware of the extensive chalk workings beneath Pinner, but here they are
- The Adventures of the Real Tom Sawyer - "On a rainy afternoon in June 1863, Mark Twain was nursing a bad hangover inside Ed Stahle’s fashionable Montgomery Street steam rooms, halfway through a two-month visit to San Francisco that would ultimately stretch to three years. At the baths he played penny ante with Stahle, the proprietor, and Tom Sawyer, the recently appointed customs inspector, volunteer fireman, special policeman and bona fide local hero." Great piece on the man who was the inspiration for Mark Twain's hero.
- Haïkuleaks - Fabrice, of the Toulouse hackerspace Tetalab, ran the Wikileaks cables through Jonathan Feinberg's haikufinder and extracted 65 "haiku": "The three officials / have informed their capitals / but have no response."
- The 101 Most Useful Websites of 2012 - "These sites, well most of them, solve at least one problem really well and they all have simple web addresses (URLs) that you can memorize thus saving you a trip to Google." All kinds of useful stuff here, such as http://disposablewebpage.com/ which allows you to create a web page that self-destructs at a specified time, or http://www.sizeasy.com/ which allows you to enter the dimensions of a product you're thinking of buying and compare its size to things you already know the size of.
- Aircraft Carriers in Space - "Michael Peck spoke with Chris Weuve, a naval analyst, former U.S. Naval War College research professor, and an ardent science-fiction fan about how naval warfare is portrayed in the literature and television of outer-space." Excellent interview covering the few things done right, and many things done wrong, in the portrayal of space combat from the perspective of an expert on naval warfare.
- Space Colony Art from the 1970s - Still in space, but on a more peaceful note: "A couple of space colony summer studies were conducted at NASA Ames in the 1970s. Colonies housing about 10,000 people were designed. A number of artistic renderings of the concepts were made." And here they are
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