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 Sydney, SLUG meeting 2 November: Return to Mountain View Let me know if you're interested in meeting up when I am around.
This man makes a rather compelling argument:
This burning laptop thing is starting to get old.
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 that problem recently, as they designed the warning markers to use at Yucca Mountain and at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) nuclear waste storage facilities.
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 intend to attend.
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 a suitable drill site was completed in 1965 when project leaders decided to drill on the Kola Peninsula in the north-west portion of the Soviet Union. After five more years of construction and preparations, the drill began to nudge its way into the ground in 1970. Damn Interesting Wikipedia.
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 break the back of this rubbery monopoly. His hundreds of thousands of new cars needed millions of tires, which were very expensive to produce when buying raw materials from the established rubber lords. To that end, he established Fordlandia, a tiny piece of America which was transplanted into the Amazon rain forest for a single purpose: to create the largest rubber plantation on the planet. Damn Interesting Wikipedia.
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 enough of it around to make the idea plausible. In point of fact, it has since been discovered that it actually happened. Damn Interesting, Wikipedia.
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; Esther Dyson, long-time technology pundit and now venture capitalist; the Google duo, Larry and Sergey, along with their new compatriot, Larry Brilliant, who helped squash smallpox and is now running the billion-dollar Google Foundation; and Donald Hopkins, who directs health programs at the Carter Center and is leading the fight to eradicate guinea worm disease.
Joseph Pujol, a man of singular talent, was born in Marseilles, France in 1857. In his early youth it became clear that he was a natural entertainer, singing, dancing, and performing for his parents' house guests. He had a love for music, and over the years he became handy with a trombone, but it was a different wind instrument that led to his eventual fame and fortune. Damn interesting Wikipedia