How To Ride Your Bike To Work

"When I tell people that I ride my bike to work they say "that’s great" as they look at me like I might be a couple cards short of a deck. For most people, the conversation stops there, but for those of us who get more engaged, I usually end up hearing something like "I would love to ride my bike to work, but…" It’s the "buts" I am going to address today."

http://www.blog.thesietch.org/2007/08/29/how-to-ride-your-bike-to-work/

Thirty years tracking faint whispers from space

"Yet the bank of computers that would look at home in black-and-white episodes of Doctor Who cannot be junked. Housed at the Tidbinbilla space tracking station, outside Canberra, the 1970s hardware is now our world's only means of chatting with two robot pioneers exploring the solar system's outer limits."

http://www.smh.com.au/news/science/thirty-years-tracking-faint-whispers-from-space/2007/08/31/1188067368154.html

City Dwellers Live Longer, Save More by Driving Less

"researchers believe that New York City residents may simply be healthier than other Americans, in large part because -- unlike many other Americans -- they walk almost everywhere."

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/007191.html

Convert & Save MS Office Word/Excel files to Open Office or PDF format using Google Docs & Spreadsheets

1) Upload a supported Word or Excel file to Google Docs & Spreadsheets
2) Right Click on the file in the Google File manager (on IE and Firefox only)
3) Select Save as Open Office or PDF for Excel files or Save as HTML, OpenDocument, PDF, RTF or Text for Word files.

http://thinkabdul.com/2007/09/01/convert-save-ms-office-wordexcel-files-to-open-office-or-pdf-format-using-google-docs-spreadsheets/

Russia endorses ODF

According to the Russian Ministry of Information Technologies and Communications "within the project to form an e-government concept in the Russian Federation, support of ISO/IEC 26300: 2006 is planned."

http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2007/09/russia-endorses.html

What would a relativistic interstellar traveller see?

"To see stars fly by like in certain sci-fi series, she would have to travel much faster, on the order of light years per experienced ship second. This corresponds to the actual velocity of 0.9999999999999994c, or (1 - 6x10^-16)c. At this extremely high ultra-relativistic velocity, radiation from the universe would emanate from a single point in the direction of travel, and all radiation, even the cosmic background, would be Doppler shifted out to gamma ray wavelengths or far radio, with next to nothing in between."

http://www.xs4all.nl/%7Ejohanw/PhysFAQ/Relativity/SR/Spaceship/spaceship.html

The Last Question - by Isaac Asimov

This is by far my favorite story of all those I have written. After all, I undertook to tell several trillion years of human history in the space of a short story and I leave it to you as to how well I succeeded. I also undertook another task, but I won't tell you what that was lest l spoil the story for you. It is a curious fact that innumerable readers have asked me if I wrote this story. They seem never to remember the title of the story or (for sure) the author, except for the vague thought it might be me. But, of course, they never forget the story itself especially the ending. The idea seems to drown out everything -- and I'm satisfied that it should.

-- Isaac Asimov

http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm

Little-known Gmail features

Gmail has a bunch of lesser-known feature that can end up being very useful once you get to know them.

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/top-10-little-known-gmail-features-part.html