Catherine, the kids and I have made it back to Canberra successfully. The flight from SFO to SYD was actually pretty good. I was dreading the kids screaming the whole way, but that completely didn’t happen. They were a bit fidgety by the end, but so was I so that’s fair enough. Met by various…
Travel details so far
So, it looks at the moment like my travel schedule for the next month will look a bit like this: 30 September: Arrive in Canberra 3 October: Melbourne for LUV meeting 4 October: Return to Canberra 10 October: Melbourne for AUUG conference 13 October: Sydney 26 October: Canberra for CLUG meeting 27 October: Return to…
Why you should stand away from the car when the cop tells you to
This man makes a rather compelling argument:
Alan Cox’s IBM ThinkPad explodes
This burning laptop thing is starting to get old.
There is nothing of honour here
If you look at it just right, the universal radiation warning symbol looks a bit like an angel. The circle in the middle could indicate the head, the lower part might be the body, and the upper two arms of the trefoil could represent the wings… The U.S. Department of Energy has been grappling with…
AUUG 2006
There seems to have been some controversy over the future of AUUG, mainly caused by delays in organising some aspects of the conference, and Greg Lehey sending some email asking if it is time to wind up AUUG. I thought I should just post and say that I am speaking at AUUG 2006 and certainly…
When the Russians drilled 12 kilometres into the ground, they didn’t reach China
Beginning in 1962, the drilling effort was led by the USSR’s Interdepartmental Scientific Council for the Study of the Earth’s Interior and Superdeep Drilling, which spent years preparing for the historic project. It was started in parallel to the Space Race, a period of intense competition between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. The survey to find…
When Henry Ford imported America to export rubber
Wow. A few interesting random stories tonight. It appears that Henry Ford wanted to pay less for rubber for his car tires. What’s the logical solution? How about moving a piece of America to Brazil and trying to grow plants on rocks? …by the late 1920s, the infamous automobile tycoon Henry Ford set out to…
Natural nuclear reactors
In the early- to mid-1950s, Dr. Paul Kuroda from the University of Arkansas described the possibility of naturally occurring nuclear reactors lurking in the crust of ancient Earth… Such a reactor could not exist today, because too much of the Earth’s natural U-235 has decayed… but a billion and a half years ago, there was…
Nice write up of sci foo 06
Forbes has a nice write up of Sci Foo 06: Many of the SciFoo “campers” were the people that other conferences are built around: Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems (nasdaq: SUNW – news – people ) and inventor of Berkeley UNIX; Danny Hillis, co-founder of Thinking Machines, one of the first massively parallel supercomputers;…