I’ve never actually been… but I hear the Dana Centre at the Science Museum does good talks with a ‘fun’ science tilt to them. Their blurb: “The Science Museum’s Dana Centre is an adult-only venue that lets you explore issues in contemporary science through dialogue, interaction, performance and art events in stylish café-bar surroundings.” Hmm, hope their talks are better than their blurb (’stylish café-bar’ must be a contradiction in terms and ‘adult-only’ always sounds dodgy…) Anyway, if you go, let me know if it’s any good.

I’ve been banging on about this for weeks in the studio so this post will come as no surprise to, and perhaps even elicit a sigh of exhaustion from my colleagues.

Anyway, this arrived in the post today:

The two Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977 were each graced with a gold-plated record. These records contained images, greeting, music and various sounds of Earth (avalanche, elephant’s trumpet, a kiss and so on).

The book is an account of why they did this, how the repertoire was selected and precisely what the record contains.

Although it is unlikely that the contents of the record will ever be reviewed by other beings (the vastness of space in comparison to the size of the craft puts paid to that) it’s remains an intriguing project and one which came with a certain amount of responsiblity - the attempt to represent, equally and accurately, the diversity of human life.

The book unfortunately does not contain the CD. This was only included as part of the 1992 Warner New Media edition - now practically impossible to get hold of it. But that’s okay. It’s a pretty amazing read and they were extremely innovative in a short, very-presssured period of time.

Anyway, enough about this. If you work in The Brand Union in the London office and would like a look, please drop by.

(I would publish some images but I’m not sure where I’d stand on the copyright on this one. There is a wikipedia entry though and I’ve also discovered a picture of the pictures.)

This is really old news but I’ve only just heard about it. (have I just committed blog suicide?)

Sun have made a server farm in a container (page and gallery). In the words of Mike (roughly), “you just drop it in, plug in the three core and you’re away”.

It looks awesome.  Name is Black Box. Think menacing and powerful. And it can deal with a magnitude 6.7 earthquake. There’s a video and everything.

I’ll take two please.

Why?
Because.

Apple recently released an updated to their Human Interface Guidelines document, which is the first point of reference for anyone designing applications for OS X.The guidelines make an interesting read for anyone interested in interface design and how people use computers. In particular, 2 chapters in Part 1 are worth a read: ‘The Design Process’, and ‘Human Interface Design’.Link: Apple human Interface Guidelines 

This can be a real pain. What are the options?

- burn to CD/DVD, put in post. Yawn.

- use yousendit or similar public FTP services. Up speed can be a bit painful.

- upload to your own server, download from server. Do I really have enough server space to spare. A few large files and it’s stuffed.

Latest trials are using Skype for file transfers and the Mozilla plug-in AllPeers for file sharing.

Skype was tested last night. Up speeds hovered around the 35-50 mark and, left for a number of hours, there was no drop-out. So a successful first trial. Will be doing that again. Especially as I’m moving to a faster broadband service soon (20Mb).

AllPeers next. I know you can’t wait for that one.

And then shares it with his colleagues. Nice one.

The segments weren’t any larger than normal though. Hmmm.

“Misery is expected to peak on Monday, as 24 January has been pinpointed as the worst day of the year.”

Oh no. But if you must learn more, there’s a BBC story.
(I must say that I  can feel a little of this today. But positivity reigns.)

Found by: Sean Rees