Driving home yesterday evening I nearly jumped out of my skin when a bright flash of light reflected in my rearview mirror nearly blinded me, closely followed by what I can best describe as a cartoon-character-gets-zapped sound effect that I heard even through closed windows and the air conditioning going at full blast. In a move that probably says more about my sense of self-preservation than anything else, I threw the TARDIS into park, jumped out, and ran toward the source of the sound - a rapidly descending power company cherrypicker below what used to be a small transformer on the …

On 1 February 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia was destroyed while re-entering the Earth's atmosphere following a touch-and-go mission due to the damage incurred by the orbiter during lift off some days earlier. The crew was killed and the shuttle lost, presumably with all of the data collected while in orbit going with it. Save for the data from experiment CXV-2, which gathered information pertaining to the point of critical viscosity of xenon gas.. while poring over the wreckage of the Columbia, the recovery team operating out of the Johnson Space Center found most of the fragments of a 400 …

Early today someone threw an improvised bomb at a US military recruiting station, whereupon it went off some time later and caused minimal damage to the structure. Witnesses watched an unknown man on a bicycle ride by and throw the device, housed in a green ammunition box probably purchased on the surplus market, at the building. The New York City bomb squad reports that the device was technically classed as a low explosive, which means that technically it didn't burn fast enough to really be considered an explosion. The device was made using black or blasting powder they say, which …

It seems that Google has changed its mind about one of their more famous open projects, namely, allowing web developers to use the SOAP protocol to pull data from their network. They've quietly killed the Search SOAP project and pulled the developers' kit from the website. Here's the thing: Google's SOAP API is used to teach developers how to integrate other sites' functionality into their own. You might say that it's the gold standard, about which many books have been written (well, all of them, actually). An open source project called EvilAPI has arisen to provide continued accessbut it's anyone's …