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And here's one of the beach at Mirissa, 30km south of Galle, but very badly hit by all accounts.

A very sad event.

It isn't necessary to read Pratchett's books in the published order but I recommend that you at least read the 'sets' in order. The sets are sub-series of books featuring the same characters (the city watch, witches, Rincewind, etc).

For instance, the books focusing on the witches include:

Wyrd Sisters
Witches Abroad
Lords And Ladies
Maskerade
and others.

There will be some things happening in Lords and Ladies that you'll want to know about from the previous two, but it wouldn't make any difference if you'd read The Color of Magic, or most of the other books that come first chronologically.

I'd recommend his books to anyone! This site http://www.co.uk.lspace.org/ is very informative. And here is a reading order guide I found through a link on that site. It pretty much confirms what I've suggested.

Scroll down to the area titled "Slow Fall 2" at this site for a cool example of diamagnetic braking.

A free coaster!
Microwave it and convert it into a clock!

Or better yet, if you have a tesla coil you can impress all your friends!

What happens is that the air is broken down TO PLASMA between the wires so that it conducts electricity, just like lightning 8-D. The spark then convects upwards due to the very hot air. After it's shot off, air is broken down at the bottom again, and another spark is started.

The best photos are probably HERE, but they're yellow sparks (i think that's to do with the gas) which isn't in my opinion as cool as brilliant blue ones :). TechTV also has a page on it and a cool-ish video if you can view asx files. Their JL is pretty weak though, because it stops before the spark "falls off" the end - meaning the wires are too far apart for the voltage to be that small to be able to turn the air in between into plasma.

I always thought thoes things worked on corona discharge. (Basically, corona discharge is what happens right before you get a spark. When the voltage quite literally pushes electrons off the (-)end of a wire. You can get it to do work.) It's way past my bed time but I think the Biefeld-Brown Effect that the lifters use is due to the time delay and the charge imbalance that the delay creates between the two plates. I came up with this from this pic.
As far as the electrogravatics, I don't have any URLs handy for that one, but I believe it has to do with exploiting the connection between electricity and gravity. People are working on this because of the unified field theory that brings together the different forces like electritcy, magnitizam, gravity, and acceleration. The link between electritcy and magnitizam is already apparent and we exploit it (motors, solonids, maglev trains). This has now become known as the electro-weak force and gravity is due to the strong force. The strong and weak forces are what hold the nucleus of atoms together. And I think that it's the 6 flavors of quarks that form the forces.
(Please forgive me if I got the physics on this wrong, I am quite tired.)

Actually the displays used on the Goldfinger bomb are side-projected incandescent ones like these mike@electricstuff.co.uk (creator of the DIY nixie clock page)

..and when you get bored with microwaving them, Put them on a Tesla coil

I didn't really care for Sourcery. And just to show how subjective it all is, Small Gods was the first one I'd read, and I enjoyed it (the gods-die-without-believers premise reminded me quite a bit of Harlan Ellison's Deathbird Stories). I'm currently reading the 3 "Night Watch" books. I loved Guards! Guards!, am currently enjoying Men at Arms, and am looking forward to Feet of Clay. I'll have to check out Jingo after that (actually, this page suggests that Jingo is another Watch book?).

A poll would be cool, but really long. I wonder what the longest (most options) Slashdot poll is...
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This one perhaps? Linked to from lspace.org.

here

Heh, you thought just putting them in the microwave was cool, Now show what you think of those inferior OS's/ISP's Tesla Coil CD Zapping

Coincidentally, Backbytes in Computing has been talking about microwaving CDs recently, and posted a link to some pictures of the Tesla coil version of the CD-microwaving trick.

Looks far more spectacular...