The Sacramento Bee reported that:

Should voters reject Davis [in a recall], a replacement would be decided on the same ballot, chosen by a plurality of the vote, with no runoff. The more candidates, the smaller the percentage of the vote needed to win. That could give an ultra-conservative or -liberal, an untested celebrity or an obscure third-party candidate a window he or she might never have in a standard election.

Is it legal to touch military sensors hidden on public land? The government does't think so.

FBI agents have confirmed that a search warrant was served Thursday night on the home of a self-described military watchdog in the tiny town of Rachel, near the mysterious Area 51 military base. We've learned this action was initiated by the Joint Terrorism Task Force. The search warrant remains sealed and the FBI won't say what was seized from the home of Rachel resident Chuck Clark.

Retired astronomer and desert rat Chuck Clark has a new hobby. He's prowled the hills and deserts of Lincoln County for several years now, has photographed exotic aircraft in the skies, and keeps an eye on the top secret base known as Area 51. He's even written a book about the place. Over the past few months, he's discovered that the military has been installing secret sensor devices on public lands surrounding the base. Using a frequency counter device, he can tell when his vehicle trips a sensor. When that happens, he looks for the hard-to-spot wire atop the device, and then he digs them up, takes pictures, and puts them back.

John Robb has returned to the land of the living, er, blogging.

The ever insightful Philip Greenspun ruminates on the death of the American car industry:

You can buy a 27" TV for less than $200. It is made in China. If someone asks you what brand of TV you have, unless you're a geek with no life, you won't have a clue. You don't see ads for Daewoo or Apex TVs. When it breaks you throw it out. Forty years ago the TV industry employed at least one million Americans. TVs were made here. They cost so much that they needed to be financed, thus creating jobs in banks. If they broke every neighborhood had a TV repairman to come out and service the machine. Some of the most expensive advertising campaigns of the day were for [TVs]. Consequently, consumers were intensely brand-loyal and proud to own an RCA, a Philco or whatever.

John Patrick: "The motivation behind site redesign is typically a desire to increase traffic, make things easier to find, provide better organization of information, or improve the visual attractiveness of the site. These are all good things to do but my experience has been that the reason the traffic is less than desired is not because of the design of the site. It is not the look and feel, nor is it the lack of sophisticated information retrieval. I believe that the most important drivers of traffic are the availability of on demand, integrated, useful transactions and, secondly, the availability of access to expertise."

Yes, its early, but I want a hotdog. Where did you get the best hot dog you've ever eaten?

How to create a good map. I'll remember this for the next Talk Like a Pirate Day. via The Map Room: A weblog about maps, a good read itself.

Metaphilter is a "PHP based community weblog system based on the observed functionality MetaFilter." I'm currently using it for Libertyfilter. Anyway, to implement the Speak button in your Metaphilter-based blog add the following code to your <MPLinks> container.

<FORM METHOD="post" NAME="demoForm"
   ACTION="http://morrissey.naturalvoices.com/tts/cgi-bin/nph-talk">
<input type="hidden" name="txt" 
   value="<MPLinkData select="description"/ strip_tags="yes">">
<input type="hidden" name="voice" VALUE="mike">
<input type="hidden" name="rate" VALUE="8000">
<INPUT TYPE="submit" NAME="speakButton" VALUE="Speak">
</form>

Read my first post on the subject for more voice options.

Loyd pointed to this cool AT&T Labs Text to Speech converter.

I was bored, so now if you want to make your weblog posts speak, add the code below to your Movable Type individual entry template (or the main index template inside of the <MTEntries> container).

You can change the value of voice to any of the following to affect the sound and pronunciation of the speaker: crystal, mike, rich, rosa, klara, reiner, alain, juliette, charles, or audrey.

<FORM METHOD="post" NAME="demoForm"
     ACTION="http://morrissey.naturalvoices.com/tts/cgi-bin/nph-talk">
<input type="hidden" name="txt" value="<$MTEntryBody remove_html="1"$>">
<input type="hidden" name="voice" VALUE="mike">
<input type="hidden" name="rate" VALUE="8000">
<INPUT TYPE="submit" NAME="speakButton" VALUE="Speak">
</form>

The converter seems to allow no more than 49 words to be converted to speech. That's plenty for me.

Update: Chris Pirillo has implemented my SPEAK buttons. Congrats on being an early adopter, Chris!

Today, Google launched Google AdSense. Its a service that allows content publishers to serve Google AdWords on their own websites, and receive part of the pay-per-click. How much, you ask? Well, unfortunately, this program doesn't seem very well thought out or developed:

1. How much will I earn through this program? The AdWords ads you are able to display on your content pages are cost-per-click (CPC) ads. This means that advertisers pay only when users click on ads. You'll receive a portion of the amount paid for clicks on AdWords ads on your website. Although we don't disclose the exact revenue share, our goal is to enable publishers to make as much or more than they could with other advertising networks. (Emphasis, mine.)