http://www.smirkingloon.com/video/city_of_ants.php

A video of the inner workings of an ant colony shown by pouring 10 tonnes of concrete into the borrow giving us a fascinating glimpse into the ant universe.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/01/22.html

SLAs, downtime, switches and the five whys. Another great post by Joel Spolsky.

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSL2162706620080122

From the page: “Two new studies paint a conflicting health picture for women coffee drinkers, with one suggesting caffeine may lower the risk of ovarian cancer and the other showing it doubles the chances of miscarriage.”

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8b6351e4-c843-11dc-94a6-0000779fd2ac.html

“Each website they go to, [people] have to keep saying who their friends are,” says Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web. “If instead they had a file of friends, the website would be able to just pick it up: this is me, these are my friends and colleagues, do the right thing.”

The notion of a portable friends list is just part of a broader vision of making many different types of user-specific data portable between websites. That vision got a boost last week after Yahoo, the internet portal, said it would support OpenID, an initiative to develop a common login scheme across websites. The addition of Yahoo’s 248m users will more than triple the number of OpenID accounts.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/jan/21/environmental.debt1

The environmental damage caused to developing nations by the world’s richest countries amounts to more than the entire third world debt of $1.8 trillion, according to the first systematic global analysis of the ecological damage imposed by rich countries.

http://www.fulhamfc.com/Club/News/NewsArticles/2008/January/LitmanenTraining.aspx

Jari Litmanen training with Fulham. Are we going to sign the 36 year old Fnnish captain?

http://www.fresnobee.com/864/story/338057.html

Dead cat insurance.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/01/19/bokidsbooks219.xml

This is a pretty good list and makes me want to take a few hours out to explore some of the ones I remember from my childhood again.

http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/11364

Strange yes, wonderful… no.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080121-debating-copyright-reform-time-for-compulsory-licenses.html

From the page: “Imagine a world where you could legally acquire and listen to as much music as you want for a flat fee. How you got the music”iTunes, Rhapsody, Usenet”and where you listened to it wouldn’t matter. Your monthly license would give you carte blanche to snarf up as much music as you like. It’s an idea that’s been bandied about before, and it recently resurfaced in Las Vegas.”