What do Madrid, Turin, Leiden and New York have in common? All four cities have a complete Egyptian temple! Back in 1960 when the Great Dam of Aswan threatened to cover Lower Nubia and all its ancient Egyptian temples under Lake Nasser, UNESCO made an international call to save the many historical sites, among which the massive rock temples of Abu Simbel, that were between 1964 and 1968 moved 200 meters away from the river. As a thank you present, the Egyptian state gave away four of the Nubian temples. More »

These last weeks I have been working on my site Disney Comics Worldwide (which I’ve had since 1995). DCW is a popular website with information on Disney comics and magazines from around the world. I’ve completely updated the design and user interface and added new functionality here and there. I’ve optimised the source code by moving from a table-based design to CSS-based DIV boxes that are positioned relatively on the page. More »

Nine days … seven astronauts … ONE space station. For ten days millions across the globe have followed the adventures of Stephanie, Mike, Steve, Piers, Mark, Thomas and Lisa … as NASA TV brought us 24/7 live images from cameras inside and outside the International Space Station. More »

Just five years after its first known public reference as a verb in a New York Post article, the word “google” earned an entry among the 165,000 terms in the 11th edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary. The definition: to use the Google search engine to obtain information about (as a person) on the World Wide Web More »

Now that Space Shuttle Discovery has safely entered orbit it is a lot of fun to watch NASA TV online and watch live feeds of the many cameras on and inside the International Space Station and the Space Shuttle. There are also nice animations, voice-over explaining what is happening and you can listen in on the conversations between Mission Control Houston, Discovery and the ISS. In the coming 10 days there will be a lot of live broadcasts from space; check out the STS-121 Television Schedule for all the times and details. The streaming video is of very good quality. More »

The Monkey Island adventure games were some of my favorite games ever. I loved to play the adventures of Guybrush Threepwood in the original Secret of Monkey Island back in 1990. Now Disney comes out with Pirates of the Carribean 2: Dead Man’s Chest this summer, and the designer of Monkey Island, Ron Gilbert, is struck at the resemblance of his Monkey Island’s LeChuck and the bad guy Davy Jones in Dead Man’s Chest. More »

The new version of my favorite news source digg was just released. The extremely popular site that allows users to digg for stories so that the most popular ones appear on the homepage, was always focused at technology news only, but today new topics have been added for science, world & business, videos, entertainment and gaming!

In the last months we have been having a lot of fun going to bird hides and nature reserves here in the Netherlands. It turns out that this country is great for bird watching, and we have suddenly turned into serious birders! It’s incredible how many easy-to-spot birds there are that I had never even noticed before; just this morning we saw four spoonbill from the car along the A4 highway! More »

The news headlines on page 101 of CNN International teletext here in the Netherlands sometimes don’t make any sense. It seems that they are just grabbed from cnn.com and stop whenever the space on the page runs out. Have a look at this strange and unclear story that was one of their leading teletext stories this week. More »

Dog poop is a big problem in the Netherlands — there are heaps all over the place. You always have to watch your step and walking on any grass in this country is like walking a minefield. Here in Leiden they have started a billboard campaign with posters that are quite explicit: one of them shows a child running after a ball that is about to roll into a fresh pile, and another shows an old lady with a steamy heap in the foreground. More »