Jan 1, 2005

Every year, the National Archives of Australia releases secret government documents from thirty years ago. These are always released on January 1st, and tend to be nothing more than an interesting insight into the mind of the government of the day. Not this year. Read on to find out why. According to this morning’s Age, 1974 was the year that the Labor government under Gough Whitlam “lost its grip on reality and its own conduct”, and “the year Treasury lost its influence on Government decision-making”.

Nov 21, 2004

Zac showed me an experiment this morning. It works best on the morning after a wild party, when there are a few half-inflated helium balloons floating around. Hold your hand over a balloon, palm to one side, then rapidly fan your hand from side to side. The balloon rises - and as you fan faster, the balloon rises higher. Why is it so? Scientific explanation after the jump. The principle at work here is Bernoulli’s Principle - it states that in fluid flow (which includes a moving current of air), an increase in velocity occurs simultaneously with a decrease in pressure.

Nov 9, 2004

Or, to give this article its full title, I Want But Am Absolutely Not Allowed To Buy Because It Would Be Utterly Pointless… If you’ve read Gizmodo or Engadget in the last month or so, you’ll have seen at least one article devoted to drooling over this: This is the Motorola v3, aka “Razr”. Its shell is anodized aluminium; it weighs 89 grams; and in this tiny clamshell, it packs Bluetooth, a digital camera (only VGA resolution, unfortunately), an MPEG4 video player (despite having only 5.

Nov 7, 2004

Goodbye, little iPaq! I sold my iPaq h3850 today, after two years of faithful service. When I bought it in August 2002, it was the top of the line - and had the >$1k price tag to match. I could have had one of the 3950s, with that weird Bluetooth thingy that everyone was talking about; at the time, though, I was sure that Bluetooth would be just another weird fad like that peer-to-peer thingy - and besides, it was $300 more for Bluetooth.

Oct 23, 2004

And it’s not Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. NASA’s Learning Technologies division have written an application that takes Landsat and other satellite photos, overlays them on height data from the Space Shuttle’s radar height mapping mission, and turns it into a fully interactive 3D world globe. Pan, zoom, tilt, you name it, WorldWind does it. Warning: the application itself is a 250MB download. Also, you need at least a DSL-speed internet connection - because the high-resolution data is stored on NASA’s servers, rather than downloaded with the program.