This piece is inspired by this post on daringfireball, which, in turn, was inspired by AP’s style guide on phone numbers.

Their post is about where parenthesis goes in phone numbers. I don’t care much about that. What I care about is the fact that there is an international standard for phone numbers that they’re not using.

For international numbers use 011 (from the United States), the country code, the city code and the telephone number: 011-44-20-7535-1515.

• News Corp to Offer Plaid Stamps! – “Giving Murdoch the benefit of the doubt, then, I’m guessing he simply doesn’t mean what he said. Perhaps he just wanted to sow a little confusion, get some publicity and maybe a concession or two from Google.”
• The night the Berlin Wall fell – “For me it was that rare occasion when a story was unqualified good news. After years watching the way communism was practised, I felt no need to mourn its collapse. Whatever came next had to be better.” Twenty years since the fall of the Berlin wall.
• OMG Ponies!!! (Aka Humanity: Epic Fail) – “The real world has failed us. It has concentrated on local simplicity, leading to global complexity. It’s easy to organise a meeting if everyone is in the same time zone – but once you get different continents involved, invariably people get confused. It’s easy to get writing to work uniformly left to right or uniformly right to left – but if you’ve got a mixture, it becomes really hard to keep track of. The diversity which makes humanity such an interesting species is the curse of computing.”

• Cameron Todd Willingham, Texas, and the death penalty – I find that there are many convincing arguments against capital punishment but maybe it’s the emotional one that works in the end. It could be you?
• Why do some countries drive on the right and others on the left? – Fascinating look at why (and where) we drive on which side of the road.
• Hidden Developer Gems in Snow Leopard – I know it’s geeky but I’m more excited about the new APIs in Snow Leopard than any of the new stuff or even, to a certain extent, the performance improvements.