Yes, you can promise too much - Australia is still without a government, but the conservative leader has not had a good week. Aside from getting burned for offering A$1B for a new hospital in Hobart, turns out there is about A$7B worth of issues with their proposed budget. Something for the politics junkies out there.

Hooded figures are a new category , with glowy magic castle swords down.

129,864,880 tomes (and one turkey probe).

In 1947, as he was dying in a Warrnambool hospital, Pooran Singh asked for his ashes to be collected and taken to India, to be scattered in the River Ganges. To respect his wishes, the funeral home in Warrnambool arranged for his body to be sent to the nearest crematorium, in Melbourne, and his ashes returned to Warrnambool to await collection and return to India. In June this year, the story about the still waiting ashes was featured in a SBS broadcast. more inside

That's funny....new proton measurement could be exciting stuff

Crater face - great piece of short animation. (my cat is trying to help, so let's hope the URL is still OK) via

End of the journey this Sunday - that's the plan for Hayabusa, which will release a capsule carrying a sample (hopefully!) of the asteroid it landed on years ago.

The half life of the teaspoons was 81 days. via

Israel's strategic ambiguity around nuclear weapons under pressure. Apparently it negotiated to sell nuclear armed missiles to South Africa in 1975, though the Israeli president (his signature is on the documents in his then capacity as Defence Minister) denies the interpretation.

Ninjas foil mugging! No, really...''There was the policemen and there was the ninjas,'' he said. ''It was not something that I would expect.''

Clouds - better from space

A brief, incomplete and mostly wrong history of programming languages, 1842 - Ada Lovelace writes the first program. She is hampered in her efforts by the minor inconvenience that she doesn't have any actual computers to run her code. 1983 - In honor of Ada Lovelace's ability to create programs that never ran, Jean Ichbiah and the US Department of Defense create the Ada programming language.

Stock photos - maybe not such a great idea to use in an election.

No one can spell fuchsia. And other fun things (people go a little crazy after spending time naming colours). I'm sorry I missed this when they were running it - but results from the XKCD colour survey are in.

Gonna party like it's 1996 - add that special old-timey Geocities feel to any website.

Only the worst scifi and fantasy covers. I think I have a few of these in my bookcase...

Porn for the blind - a 13cm thick book of explicit softcore tactile nudes. (And I now know that Playboy has been (controversially) published in Braille off and on since 1970.)

An Act for the Encouragement of Learning - the British Council and the 300th anniversary of the first copyright law.

Waterboarding guidelines . This is the stuff of nightmares.

Not left to chance. Making sure you get that amazing wildlife shot by renting the wildlife is apparently a widespread, if somewhat under the radar, practice. more inside