NASA celebrates its 50th Anniversary in style – with a Flash-based website.

NASA is celebrating it's 50th Anniversary with a party.

Not a crazy, balls-out, scientists running around getting naked and drunk kind of party. No. What they're having is a balls-out, online, multimedia, Flash-animated, interactive website kind of party. Rock on!

Actually, they are gonna have a real party (a 'gala', no less) later in the year ('balls-out', as yet unknown), but they really have launched an interactive, online, what-i-said-above website to celebrate, and it's really quite good. I've been playing with it for over an hour now, and it's endlessly fascinating. It really is!

I mean, I'm a sucker for pictorial versions of anything. I hate sitting down with a sheet of text and having to read it all, so an interactive, online, thingamy-what-i-said-above is a great fun way for NASA to really communicate (especially to the kids) what exactly it is they've been doing for the past 50 years.

Happy birthday to the CD: 25 years old today

dvd.jpgExactly 25 years ago today — August 17th, 1982 — Philips manufactured the first compact disc, at their factory near Hanover, Germany.

Co-developed by Philips and Sony, over 200 billion CDs have been sold in that time.

The first CD to be manufactured at the plant was “The Visitors” by ABBA, though the initial catalogue of CDs launched in November 1982 were mainly classical music recordings.

Unsurprisingly, Japan were first to see CD players and discs, with European and US consumers getting hold of the technology in March 1983.