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Used to a thousand inane press kits announcing useless pieces of junk, I wish it was 1968. Then, I could have received this Apollo 8 Press Kit, detailing the first manned mission to the Moon.
It's not just some unfounded stereotype that video game controllers have gotten more complex over time, just look at this fantastic chronological illustration.
Technologizer has meticulously reconstructed Apple's history in the form of sweet, formerly tantalising patent filings.
As the NY Times point out in their review of two upcoming histories of The Bomb, Robbert Oppenheimer originally assumed that little could stop anyone from developing nuclear weapons. Thankfully, he was wrong.
We all take LEDs pretty much for granted, but the guys over at MAKE have done a good job with this movie that shows the history behind the little glowing things. Turns out the Light Emitting Diode was one of those devices that was more or less discovered by accident, during an experiment at Marconi labs into a Cat's-Whisker Schottky barrier diode made from a chunk of silicon carbide: so MAKE, of course, shows you how to recreate that for yourself. Check it out: it's fascinating stuff. [Makezine]
Posted by Nick Broughall at 11:00 AM on November 12, 2008
For everyone who missed out on the apparently awesome Game On exhibition that was in Melbourne earlier this year, you're about to get a second chance to relive the glory days of gaming. You know, the time when Wonder Boy was the single best platformer on the market, and Mario was a little blocky around the sides?
The catch is that the exhibition is going to be held in Queensland this time, at the State library. Which sucks for Sydneysiders like me, who've been hopped over like Koopa shell on the exhibition's road to success.
The Game On exhibition will open its doors on November 17 and kick on through to Feb 15 next year, making it the perfect summer holidays adventure to take your kids. Or yourselves. There's also a Game On party happening on Saturday, November 22, if you can somehow manage to score some tickets to that.
The US government plotted to hide the fact that they were constantly flying nuclear-armed B-52 bombers over Greenland during the 1960s, the BBC has discovered in a recent investigation. The operation, called Chrome Dome, was designed to instantly respond to the Soviet Union if the latter launched a nuclear missile attack against Thule, a US Air Force base strategically placed near the North Pole. The Pentagon believed that this could potentially start a full-scale thermonuclear war, so they kept the birds in the sky at all times as a deterrent against Moscow. It was a "good" plan, until one of them crashed on January 21 1968.
In light of the news about the updated construction process for the new MacBooks, it is high time you got a brief edumication on the history of unibody construction. It may seem revolutionary, but the method Apple is using derives from the early 20th century monocoque ("single shell") technique of using an object's external skin to support structural loads. It has its roots in the airline industry where a price drop in aluminium in the 1920's made it affordable to meet the demand for stiff, strong, smooth skins that could handle the stress of high altitudes and increasingly powerful aircraft. By the end of WWII, almost all high-performance aircraft were built using monocoque or semi-monocoque technique.
Today marks the 25th Anniversary of the first commercial mobile phone call in history. On October 13th 1983, Ameritech executive Bob Barnett called the grandson of Alexander Graham Bell using the now legendary and bricktastic Motorola DynaTAC 8000X. Here's our modified mobile phone timeline highlighting this historic event. You can click on it to see the full 2,300 pixel wide version.
Posted by Nick Broughall at 11:30 AM on October 7, 2008
Did you know that there were over 200 different aboriginal languages in Australia? Of those, there are now only about 20 that are still in use today - the rest have essentially been wiped out. What's more, the Asia Pacific region is home to about a third of the world's indigenous languages, many which are now facing the possibility of being lost forever.
But, thankfully, a group of Australian scientists are in the process of digitising and cataloging these languages so that they will never be completely lost. The Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) is a collaboration between ANU and the universities of Melbourne, Sydney and New England. Already in its data banks are thousands of pages of notes, plus hours and hours of audio recordings as part of their research.
The archive has just won a Victorian eResearch Strategic Initiative (VeRSI) Award in humanities and social sciences, which gave them a $26,000 PowerEdge 2950 rack mountable Dell server as their prize.
In the future, it's efforts like this that will form the basis of cultural and historical studies throughout a large part of the world. Sadly, it's probably inevitable that these smaller cultures get absorbed into the global machine, but at least we'll have some record of the past. And probably on a Dell server, no less.
[Science in Public - Thanks Niall!]
The US government plotted to hide the fact that they were constantly flying nuclear-armed B-52 bombers over Greenland during the 1960s, the BBC has discovered in a recent investigation. The operation, called Chrome Dome, was designed to instantly respond to the Soviet Union if the latter launched a nuclear missile attack against Thule, a US Air Force base strategically placed near the North Pole. The Pentagon believed that this could potentially start a full-scale thermonuclear war, so they kept the birds in the sky at all times as a deterrent against Moscow. It was a "good" plan, until one of them crashed on January 21 1968.