Shine on you Crazy Diamond

Somewhere in a galaxy far, far way the time is …

Is it just me or does Yoda actually sound a wee bittie Scottish?

A few weeks ago I wrote about how wonderful it would be if a company like Google, who provide very useful maps of the Earth and the moon (so I’m lead to believe) put their heads together to produce a map of the galaxy? I’ve long been a fan of Science Fiction so besides pulling out an imaginary few million credits out my back pocket (to pay for a space flight, you see) watching stars, planets, comets, and general space junk go past on my computer screen would be the next best thing. But I might as well wait for the moon to turn green, I told myself. That is, it ain’t going to happen anytime soon.

It was quite by coincidence as I read my way down the ‘Why Microsoft is so bad’ website that I eventually came across Celestia, an open source application, bundled along with a few other Open CD products.

It’s more or less what I was hoping for. You’ve got stars, all the usual planets, and a few I’d never heard of. There is even a number of virtual tours to be taken … very educational. I had a lot of fun tracking the Cassini spacecraft around the galaxy. Because the designers thought of almost everything, you can speed up and slow down time and even reverse it (pity it’s only virtual!). Thus, I was able to retrace the craft’s path back past Venus to its eventual launch from Earth. Going in the other direction, i.e. forwards, it was fascinating to see Cassini spinning around Saturn, around and around … Watching that and all the moons do their celestial dance was exactly what I wanted for Christmas. Thank you Santa.

P.S. For the Uber-geek it’s also possible to download models of Star Trek and Babylon5 models.

If you’ve ever been curious about where words and phrases come from, eg.

What is the etymological origin of the word Trivia?

1. The loose stones on cobblestone roads that were a tripping hazard.
2. The news ‘of little importance’ that was posted wherever three(’tri’) roads(’vias’) intersected.
3. From ‘Torovia’, a small, relatively insignificant Bulgarian hamlet.
4. Name of small bone in the arch of the human foot.
5. From the Latin ‘trivium’, a word used in medieval schooling for the lower or elementary curriculum

Well, here’s a quiz for you.

Click here to see mine:

If you would like to show your friends or family just how clever and important you are (and you are!) you can get your own search engine by clicking on “Make Your Search Engine»” available on the Googlefor.com page.

Incidentally, I noticed there’s a yahoo version too, but exactly who is that going to impress?

Modern Scotland is constantly redefining itself. This weekend was no different as 134 belly dancers in Nairn wiggled their way into the Guinness book of records. Not exactly the usual image you conjure up when thinking about dancers in the Scottish Highlands. If I’m honest I’d prefer to go see some wiggling rather than some prancing any day.

Incidentally, I’m quite excited by this news as one of my friends is a belly dancer and teacher. I wonder if she was there.

Turn up your speakers, cos this sounds cool. You can hear more wise words (by Cool Men and women) by clicking here.

Here are some of my favourites:

Homer
Samuel
Sally
HAL
Austin
Brian

This is a nice site. It tells you what was number one on the day that you were born (in the UK or US). My number one was,

San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair) - Scott McKenzie

Ahh, how appropriate. I am, after all, a hippy at heart.

I recently wrote about my del.icio.us discovery. I’ve been having some fun searching through other people’s lists; you can tell a lot about a person from their bookmarks. I think instead of googling someone to find out what they’ve written or what’s been written about them it’s far more interesting to have a peek at what they like to read. I’ve come across some really interesting sites this way.

My latest discovery in the world of social browsing, StumbleUpon, looks awesome by comparison. It’s been available for a wee while, but it originally refused to run with the latest beta version of Firefox that I’m using (and I’m too stubborn to revert). To my surprise and delight that’s now fixed.

According to the website, it’s a way of sharing favourite sites and meeting people:

StumbleUpon is an intelligent browsing tool for sharing and discovering great websites. As you click Stumble!, you’ll get high-quality pages matched to your personal preferences. These pages have been explicitly recommended (rated I like it) by friends and other SU members with similar interests. Rating these sites shares them with your friends and peers – you will automatically ’stumble upon’ each others favorites sites.

The FAQ page explains that they only currently support Firefox because of technical deficiencies in the competition’s products (Do you think they’re making this bit up?) . Nevertheless, maybe I can tempt you to take try something new with this a little gem I would never have found otherwise. It’s a rather funky Japanese animation. Go on, bash those drums! Bash, bash, bash!

[UPDATE]
Apparently, you can see my all my favourites via this link.

I’ve updated the ‘Video of the Week’. This one comes from Weird Al Yankovic. I’ve never heard of him before, but he’s done a smashing Star Wars parody tune. I wonder if you can download the mp3 from somewhere. Hmm.