The Never Yet Melted blog has been out of action since Thursday afternoon, when a SQL database error occurred.

Unfortunately, tools for repairing the SQL database at my host service are not accessible by customers, and are managed remotely by a subdivision or subcontractor of the hosting company, who is roughly as accessible as your average divinity. You can pray (i.e., send an email), but that doesn’t mean God answers.

I have learned a few things, and will try to avoid a recurrence. My apologies to readers who came here only to meet the dreaded SQL Error 127.

According to Information Week, a trio of Dutch researchers are watching the Blogosphere as a whole, tracking its emotional state, and correlating the changes to external events.

The three from the NWO (Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research) have produced a program, dubbed “MoodViews,” that spots trends in attitudes, if not in latitudes, of more than two million bloggers, and thus, they say, of the overall “mood patterns” of the Web.

“The clearly measurable responses to worldwide events suggest that these instruments pick up the global mood,” Maarten de Rijke, a professor at the Universiteit van Amsterdam and part of its Intelligent Systems Lab, said in a statement. Colleagues Gilad Mishne and Krisztian Balog work with de Rijke on the project.

Each day, MoodViews reviews 150,000 blog entries for target words and LiveJournal mood indicator tags, then categorize them into one or more of 30 to 40 different moods, ranging from “cranky” and “confused” to “horny” and “hopeful.”

The results are published daily as a series of graphs at the MoodViews site.

Careful, there has been been a significant spike in CRAZY over the last 24 hours. (My guess is that this represents leftwing anger at Michelle Malkin, but I have not yet investigated.)

A mildly amusing little animation. Caution! Loud. Be sure to turn your volume down, before clicking on the link.

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Your connection speed tested for downloading and uploading. Useful to know and amusing.

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Somebody took some typical Chinese restaurant menus and ran the radicals through a translating program, one very much like Google’s language tools or Alta Vista’s Babelfish, producing predictably comedic results.

Popular Science (I didn’t know that it was still being published) tells us how to preserve a snowflake in superglue. Cool.

Hat tip to Frank Dobbs.

Pruned, a landscape gardening blog, offers a look at topiary in a petri dish, bacteria pruned by the application of antiseptics. And this interesting offering is a follow-up to an earlier feature on the same subject.

Here

Terry Gillam depicted a similarly-designed Homo sapiens organ in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), used by the Sultan to play his new composition: The Torturer’s Apprentice.

Let’s hope this kid does not go into politics when he grows up. video

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Hat tip to Kathryn Jean Lopez.

John Dvorak is predicting it will. The Joy of Tech mocks, but I think the argument makes an awful lot of sense.

Apple has always said it was a hardware company, not a software company. Now with the cash cow iPod line, it can afford to drop expensive OS development and just make jazzy, high-margin Windows computers to finally get beyond that five-percent market share and compete directly with Dell, HP and the stodgy Chinese makers.

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Samuel F.B. Morse – Yale Class of 1810

The Globe and Mail reports:

WASHINGTON — Word came, ironically enough, in an announcement over Western Union’s website.

Last Friday, 162 years after Samuel Morse sent out his first message over a telegraph line, the legendary U.S. company quietly ended its telegram service in the United States, citing a decline in business that began in the 1920s and hasn’t let up since. “We regret any inconvenience this may cause you and we thank you for your loyal patronage,” the company said.

In the peak year of 1929, when Western Union still operated what has been called “the nervous system of American business,” the company handled 200 million telegrams.

Last year, faced with competition from phone calls, faxes, e-mails and cellphone text messages, it handled barely 20,000. Most of its multibillion-dollar business now comes from money transfers.