Rosanne's Lounge

Ganked from derigueur : Soy tu aire. Spanish interactive art, requires Flash 10. Utterly beautiful.

It’s funny, I remember sitting at a press conference many years ago and having some Adobe guru demonstrate for us the various things they were working on for Flash, which at the time was nothing more than a plug-in that played animation. It seemed so far beyond what the Internet as we knew it could do and it seemed like yet more vapourware, something we saw every other day at the height of the dotcom boom. I’m so glad this one has become a reality. We need more ways to make art and beauty in the world.

I had a young friend come to stay with me for three days this week. Aged nine, he flew down unaccompanied from Canberra because it was the last week of school holidays.

Having him here was grand, despite my emotional turmoil around personal issues. There were a couple of observations I made though.

Having recently read a bit of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque cycle, I got chills reading that a long-lost manuscript of the Royal Society’s minutes in Robert Hookes’ handwriting has been found in a cupboard in Hampshire in the UK.

The notes describe in detail some of the most astounding and outlandish scientific thinking from meetings of the society between 1661 to 1682. There is the very earliest work with microscopes, confirming the first sightings of sperm and micro-organisms. There is correspondence with Sir Isaac Newton and Sir Christopher Wren over the nature of gravity, with the latter’s proposal to fire bullets into the air to see where they might drop. And there is a page that lays to rest the bitter controversy over who designed the watch that would eventually lead to the first measurements of longitude.

How cool is that?