While there are about 50 small Tornadoes reported on land in the UK each year - the most of all countries in Europe - this one due to the damages created is quite unusual. Within less then a minute that the tornado lasted it severely damaged more then 100 houses and injured a series of people.

Trees were ripped up from the roots and the video footages and images show houses in rubble. Early estimates by insurances are in the region of dozens of USD millions.

While this was a rather short event it does provide a taste for what to expect when storms will increase in strength and frequency due to Global Warming.

More information together with pictures and videos can be found at:

• BBC
• Sky News
• Times Online
• The Sun

There are seemingly still some copies of Kurt Vonnegut’s silk screen print of Trout’s Tomb available. Two links for those of you that don’t know who Kurt Vonnegut or Kilgore Trout are.

Available only through Kurt Vonnegut’s web site for USD 300. I want one of those polychrome silk screen prints, lets see what Santa Claus will bring…

Yahoo has just released its Top searches of 2006 list, leaving us with the impression that people are using it only to find information on Brittney, Shakira or Paris Hilton. Nevertheless George W., N.Y. Yankees, Spider-Man and American Idol are scoring top as well.

Recently the American Mathematical Society has featured an article with an in-depth explanation of the type of mathematical operations behind Google’s search engine pagerank. The story with the title How Google Finds Your Needle in the Web’s Haystack points out because roughly 95% of the text in the 25 billion web pages indexed by Google is composed from a mere 10,000 words determining relevance requires extremely sophisticated sets of methods.

…Brin and Page introduced Google in 1998, a time when the pace at which the web was growing began to outstrip the ability of current search engines to yield usable results. At that time, most search engines had been developed by businesses who were not interested in publishing the details of how their products worked. In developing Google, Brin and Page wanted to “push more development and understanding into the academic realm.” That is, they hoped, first of all, to improve the design of search engines by moving it into a more open, academic environment. In addition, they felt that the usage statistics for their search engine would provide an interesting data set for research. It appears that the federal government, which recently tried to gain some of Google’s statistics, feels the same way.

There are other algorithms that use the hyperlink structure of the web to rank the importance of web pages. One notable example is the HITS algorithm, produced by Jon Kleinberg, which forms the basis of the Teoma search engine. In fact, it is interesting to compare the results of searches sent to different search engines as a way to understand why some complain of a Googleopoly…

Encourage by the article we had a look how our so far most popular story (Top 10 time waster games) is ranked with Google.

It turned out that Duvet-Dayz.com has a pagerank of 3 (out of more then 1 million pages) plus we are also featured by the links on position one and seven.

Not bad for a web site that is public since a mere 1.5 months. And we do not use any specific SEO tricks or tools - it’s content only.

Update 07-December-2006 6.15am
Some people over at slashdot.org commenting on the AMS article suggested the following “slightly” simplified version of the Google algorithm:

SELECT advertiser, description, link, adcost
FROM tblAdvertisers
WHERE adword LIKE %searchstring%
ORDER BY adcost DESC

Adobe has made a new version of its popular free PDF Reader software available for download.

New features of Adobe Reader Version 8 include a simplified user interface, the possibility to collaborate and hold online meetings on documents, more secure document workflows, improved hardware support and support for 3D graphics, extended online and offline forms features, plus to possibility for large volumes of information, such as technical manuals, to condense any type of PDF file into a single booklet for printing.

Reader 8 will support Microsoft® Windows Vista™*; Windows® 2000 with Service Pack 4; Windows XP Professional, Home Edition, and Tablet PC Edition; Mac OS X v.10.4.3; Solaris™ 9 and 10; AIX® 5.3; HP-UX 11i v1 and v2; Debian and LSB 3.1 Red Hat®; SUSE™, Turbolinux; and Asianux.

More information and the download link on the Adobe Reader page

US shopping site Uncommon Goods has two types of coffee mugs that use image changing effects to visualize a message.

One shows the effects of global warming by morphing from the current shape of the continents to expected coastlines after oceans started to spread across the continents with ice caps melting and water levels rising. (direct link)

The second shows how the U.S. Bill of Rights has changed by the amendments that have been invalidated by Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Reagan. (direct link)

Available for USD 12 each and more information from Uncommon Goods.

For those of you who could never get enough of playing SimCity there is a new social Network site that with its pixel graphics look much like the popular game.

CityPixel is a pixel based 3D city (New York) where you can move around, enter buildings, buy apartments, chat, blog, share videos etc, play games, and socialize.

There are quite a few others doing similar things (Cyworld, Faketown, Habbo Hotel etc) but CityPixel is taking this concept a step further. Have a look - worth for the animation alone.

Click on the image for the jump

While Digg is loosing some of its most active users it was reported that some government agencies are now jumping in and planning to use social network technology…

Great cartoon from Geek and Poke

Visual Acoustics is a “concept for interactive expression“.

Play music by moving your mouse on the screen and let the music create drawings at the same time. Great interactive idea and excellent implementation. Have a try.

Click on the image for the jump (multimedia)

For those interested in a tour of the International Space Station there is now a video online explaining some of the details of the project and the station modules in a fly around.

Click on the image for the jump (multimedia)

According to UK newspaper the Daily Telegraph horse rustling is becoming big business in Britain (again).

Once considered deeply unfashionable, piebald (black and white) and skewbald (any other color and white) horses are now the prime target for gangs and the growth in thefts has led to predictions of the worst year on record for rustling.

These horses have gained substantially in popularity - both in Europe and America - and a traditional colored cob can now cost up to USD 120,000 in America. This promises huge profits with only USD 6,500 cost to transport it across the Atlantic.

The International League for the Protection of Horses (ILPH), a charity with officers in Britain and America, is saying that thieves are using loopholes to secure documents for stolen animals, by transporting them to other European countries together with legally owned horses and then flying them to the US.

Detective Inspector David Collings, an equine liaison officer with Hampshire Police, said it was relatively easy to get stolen horses out of the country. …Horses are a thieves’ paradise. When stolen ones are mixed in with others, it is very difficult to detect…

Helen Evans, a co-ordinator for Horsewatch, which monitors the thefts, said: …We’re heading for our worst year on record…