The Mousetrap at 58
Part of my daily journey into work takes me passed the St. Martin's Theatre, home of Agatha Christie's stageplay, The Mousetrap. The play opened in London in 1952 and has been running continuously ever since, making it the longest opening run of any play in modern times. Last week I stopped to take a picture of the theatre and I snapped another one this morning. Happy 58th birthday to The Mousetrap.

Cynergy MultiTouch Calendar for AIR 2.0
There were lots of new feature announcements at Adobe MAX this year but one of the most exciting was support for multi-touch in Flash Player 10.1. This along with the likes of accelerometer are paving the way for a massive push onto smartphones. You won't be able to buy a smartphone next year that doesn't come with a Flash Player... okay, maybe just one. During the keynote Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch demonstrated multi-touch in AIR 2.0. What caught my eye was t

2012: Apocalypse Then
I wasn't really going to get into this one for a couple of years but Roland (10,000 BC, Godzilla, Independence Day) Emmerich has bumped it up my schedule. Next month sees the release of the 2012 movie, the premise of which is that the world will end in a massive catastrophic event on the 21st of December 2012. This is all said to have been predicted in the "long count" calendar system of the first millennium meso-american civilisation, the Maya. Oh god, where to start... Emmerich has a penchant for mashing up history (and geography for that matter; 10,000 BC had mammoths charging aroun

We Are Astronomers
A few years ago I studied astronomy up at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. The course was held in the the upper floors of the "new" or southern building. The original observatory was constructed in 1675 so "new" actually means late Victorian. By the time I got there the place was a little run down and a little dusty but it had bags of charm. In the roof of the building was the Thompson dome and inside that was the tiny Caird Planetarium - built in the 1960's, it seated less than 50 people. It didn't always work but every now and then the projector could be coaxed into action it was able to show the relative motions of the planets, sun and stars. A year or two after our c

125 Years of the Greenwich Prime Meridian
This week marks the 125th anniversary of the adoption of Greenwich as the Prime Meridian of the world. As I've mentioned before a meridian is an arbitrary line of longitude that traditionally marked the point from where celestial observations were made. There are actually several meridians at Greenwich, but what