Stuff

What a better title for an entry in my Blog but STUFF… Describes things so much and so little…

Top 100 Gadgets of all time

Mobile PC Magazine has a list of the top 100 gadgets of all time listed on their WWW site. Very few date from before 1900. The sextant, abacas and telephone telephone make up the majority of them. There is some interesting trivia there too. They list the Taser electronic gun, and the history of the name…

The Taser’s name comes from another book, written by Victor Appleton in 1911, called Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle. Our senior acronym cryptologist broke down the name as follows: Thomas A. Swift’s Electric Rifle, or Taser.

It’s Time, but not as we know it

I can’t find reference to this in my Blog, but I thought I had posted it. In December I went to Parkes Radiotelescope with a friend. This was cool. My friend posted a story on his Web Site. It is a good read. And there are some photos of me there.

Now, there is a Story on the SMH WWW site about how Australis is moving from GMT to UTC. This may not mean much, but basically means that Australia is going from astonomical based time to more accurate atomic clocks.

The article is not totally correct in noting that Atomic Clocks sell for $120,000. Some are that expensive. Some are cheaper. My friend in the USA who went to parkes with me has a few of these clocks. John’s atomic clock from memory is accurate to one second in 76 million years.

The photo to the right is of me in Greenwich in September last year.