This post is mainly for my cohorts on the The Sky as a Cultural Resource course at University of Glamorgan. I run a Yahoo group that was originally created to support the Alien Worlds course. The idea is to build an independent community around the course material so that we can keep in touch during...
2009 is International Year of Astronomy – a subject I’m keenly interested in. My readers who live in Wales may be interested to know that The University of Glamorgan is running a nearly-free course this year titled “ The Sky as a Cultural Resource ”, in celebration of 2009 international year of astronomy...
Remember Clippy? Remember Office XP? It seems like the biggest selling point of Office XP is that Microsoft took away Clippy. Those office assistants were a pretty neat idea at the time, but are now regarded scornfully. How times change. I was cleaning up my hard drive today and stumbled across the story...
What do you suppose would happen if, say, a printer manufacturer produced a new, whizzy printer - the WhizzyPrinter 2000, but didn't bother to supply a driver with it? How do you think that would affect sales of the printer? What if the company PR department said, "we don't need to make...
I was watching the Bill Gates keynote at CES the other day when one of the presenters gave a demo of Windows Live Photo Gallery stitching together a mosaic of images into a single panorama. I have a few panoramic images so I thought I'd give it a go, and I am so impressed with it! I decided to give...
That little dot glinting in a sunbeam, less than a pixel, is Earth. Not a representation; not something someone made up – an actual photograph, taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft as it left the solar system forever, turning to take one last picture of the planets (click image for full size photo). Astronomer...
On Wednesday, 29th of March 2006, a total eclipse of the sun will be visible through a narrow corridor beginning in Brazil, making its way across the Atlantic, Northern Africa, through Russia and ending in Kazakstan, Mongolia. It is predicted that the solar eclipse would last a total of 4m10.9s. Areas...