The Thoughts and Feelings of a Melbourne Person
David Thomas at La Trobe University here in Melbourne has been using Google Earth to do archaeological research in Afghanistan. An excellent idea given the inaccessibility at the moment, and something that could also be useful in other areas like Iraq.
The ABC news is reporting that Olive Riley, born in 1899, has died in Broken Hill. She’s been having her reminiscences put up on her blog for a while now and I’m sorry that I’ve only heard about her because of this.
Her site is down now, but the ABC News has a [...]
For those of us who were lucky enough to be around in the UK academic community in the late 80’s and early 90’s there’s a nice reminder of just how, well, interesting things were in the paper “The Good Old Days: Networking in UK Academia 25 Years Ago” by Jim Reid (who was at Strathclyde [...]
For the past few weeks I’ve been reading “Codebreakers“, a collection of memoirs and essays by former staff at Bletchley Park, aka the Government Code and Cipher School (GCCS) War Station-X, Room 47 Foreign Office, etc. which worked throughout the war breaking enemy ciphers such as the German Enigma machine, the decrypts of which were [...]
In 1969 Bob Wilson (later the first director of Fermilab) was called before a hearing of the US Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy to answer questions about particle accelerators. In it Senator John Pastore demanded to know how such a device improved the security of America and Bob Wilsons response of “nothing at [...]
The BBC Timewatch programme is covering the first excavation of Stonehenge since 1964 which started on March 31st and runs until April 11th. Their website has details of the background to the excavation, the experts that have organised it and daily video reports from the trenches (ahem).
For the first few days they’ve been [...]
I’ve not been able to get to blog for the last week, so I thought my first post would be in support of the Federal Governments apology (flash video) for their treatment of the indigenous peoples of Australia (the text of the motion is here).
So whilst I am a (very) new Australian I recognise [...]
On a similar theme to Google offering to host open source scientific data, the US Library of Congress has announced on its blog1 a project that has published over 3,000 photos from the LoC archives and seems to be going down a storm with Flickr users!
This is a pilot for what seems to be a [...]
Some folks wonder why Christmas is on December 25th given there is absolutely no clue in the bible, so here’s a handy passage from Professor Ron Hutton’s1 excellent book “The Stations of the Sun” quoting the Scriptor Syrus, a Christian writer in the late 300’s CE:
It was a custom of the pagans to celebrate on [...]
Marshall Kirk McKusick and the “Unix Heritage Society” have released a 4 CD set that contains, amongst other treasures, a complete set of the various BSD UNIX releases ever done, from 1BSD through to 4.4BSD (both regular and “lite” (sic) versions).
The whole set costs just under USD $100..
