Random Developments

Last March, a member of the US Congress — Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA) — announced to the public that he’s an atheist, becoming in this way the first openly non-theist member of the US Congress in history. It was big news at the time, it was even reported in the mainstream media in Australia.

A few days ago, an Australian Member of Parliament — MP Ian Hunter (Labor-SA) — sent a letter to a newspaper responding to a report that claimed that he was reading a book while other MPs prayed. His response said that, being an atheist, he does not pray and therefore chose to “improve [his] mind by reading” instead. That wasn’t exactly big news, and I guess most people didn’t even hear about that — even in his own seat of Adelaide (I don’t think it would have made the news at all, hadn’t he also said that prayers in Parliament are “an archaic practice which wastes the time of the MPs”).

Leaving aside the fact that MPs regularly pray in Parliament (every day, in fact, at the opening of proceedings), that shows a significant difference in attitude regarding atheism between the two countries… (and, yes, US representatives also pray in Congress).

I attended the Google Developer Day, “Sydney edition”, yesterday. There were lots of interesting announcements: the first session was about Google Gears, and it was very exciting. The demonstration (achieved by, literally, unplugging the laptop from the network mid-presentation) went very well, and gave everyone ideas. Soon after, Mapplets were also introduced (well, actually they had been mentioned briefly at Where 2.0 the day before); they’re sort of gadgets for Google Maps, allowing the creation of “instant mashups”.

Also interesting were the “non-announcements”. Everyone got a brochure at the beginning of the day with a list of several Google products, and one of them was the Google Mashup Editor; when I read it, it sounded like it was something new, but it wasn’t mentioned by anyone during the day, so I kind of assumed it was actually something “old” that I hadn’t heard about. It turns out it wasn’t.

It was a great event, and it was interesting being the first ones to learn about Google Gears (as one of the presenters mentioned, usually Australia wakes up to news from the US; yesterday, it was the other way around). It was a bit ironic that, being at the event, I couldn’t play with the tool (or even write about it) yesterday, while everyone else who got the news online could start right away. But they didn’t get the great free food Google gave us