Swipestudy is a flash-card study tool for the smartphone age, very useful for studying foreign languages and preparing for exams and best of all its all free.

If you’re running Windows you can download it as an App here otherwise just goto http://swipestudy.com on your PC or smartphone.

You can see what people are studying right now by following @swipestudy at twitter.

Hmm maybe we should put more thought into our tweets…Library of Congress Will Save Tweets as History

Knowing that the Library of Congress will be preserving Twitter messages for posterity could subtly alter the habits of some users, said Paul Saffo, a visiting scholar at Stanford who specializes in technology’s effect on society.

“After all,” Mr. Saffo said, “your indiscretions will be able to be seen by generations and generations of graduate students.”

People thinking before they post on Twitter: now that would be historic indeed.

Read the article here: nytimes.com

The 33 ton bronze statue by Sir Richard Westmacott (located in the south east corner of the park) was erected in 1822 by the swooning “Women of England” and, cheekily, was the city’s first nude monument. Strangely, the muscled vision of manhood it depicts is of neither Wellington nor Achilles, but is actually based on a statue of a horse-tamer in the Piazza del Quirinale in Rome. The bronze was salvaged from captured French canon, and a fig leaf addition was later added to “preserve public decency”.

Wellington-mania swept across London during the first half of the nineteenth century; this colossal figure was the first of many public celebrations of the Iron Duke. He was indeed the celebrity mega-star of his day.

Back in June 2004 I setup a little makeshift observatory on Mount Steele in Moore Park to observe a very rare event, a Transit of Venus in front of the sun, an event that links directly back to the Captain Cook’s journey to the southern seas and by lucky chance ended up discovering Australia.

Transits of Venus are among the rarest of predictable astronomical phenomena and currently occur in a pattern that repeats every 243 years, so this transit connects to observations also made from Tahiti 1769 on the first voyage of Captain Cook, at a location still known as “Point Venus”.

My advanced equipment setup on Moore Park hill, a telescope, white plastic plate and park bench:

And there she is!

And after a bit of ‘post production’, processing….

Transits can currently occur only in June or December. These dates are slowly becoming later in the year; before 1631, transits occurred in May and November. Transits usually occur in pairs, on nearly the same date eight years apart. This is because the length of eight Earth years is almost the same as 13 years on Venus, so every eight years the planets are in roughly the same relative positions. This approximate conjunction usually results in a pair of transits.

The next transit occurs in 2012 June 5–6, Visible in its entirety from Hawaii, Alaska, Australia, the Pacific and eastern Asia, with the beginning of the transit visible from North America. The next is not then until 2117 December 10–11..so don’t miss 2012 !!!!

Bristol June 6 2012… Got a brief glimpse before the queens diamond jubilee clouds moved in…notice the bunting on the balcony

the virtual mobile sunrise view from Bristol (technology has moved on during the intervening 8 years)

and simultaneously at virtual sunset in Sydney.