School's a Yawn

April 3, 2009
by Rodney Olsen
2 Comments

yawn.jpgThe first week of April is always an interesting time as stories of April Fools Day pranks start to filter through.

I remember many years ago trying to think of practical jokes on the 1st of April. Most of the time it was only ever thinking about it. I don’t remember carrying out too many pranks.

I read this morning that an Albanian high school class managed to execute a somewhat dangerous April Fools Day stunt on their teacher. It seems that they all took sedatives and fell asleep in class.

All 20 students of a class in a school in Saranda, on Albania’s southern Adriatic coast, swallowed one or two Diazepam pills. They obtained the drug, similar to Valium, in a pharmacy, reports said.

When the teacher saw his entire class had nodded off, he got a little bit frantic and had all his students taken to hospital, where the story behind the joke unravelled. The school director apparently described the prank as “collective idiocy”.

I certainly wouldn’t recommend any stunts like that. Mind you there were several classes I can recall from my student days where I wouldn’t have needed any kind of help to drift off to sleep.

Did you ever manage to pull off an April Fools Day prank at school? Did you get ‘stung’ this year?



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Never lose your footy again

April 1, 2009
by Rodney Olsen
2 Comments

gBall.jpgWhat a brilliant idea.

Are you going to rush out to buy a gBall?

This weekend around the country, the gBall(BETA) will change Australian rules football as we know it.

Building on our core strength in search, Google was approached by a number of Australian rules football leagues to apply our technology in their search for new talent. In response, Google, in partnership with the official supplier of matchballs to the AFL, Sherrin, has developed the gBall. Incorporating specially developed Google technology, it will be used in all school and amateur competitions – and will go on sale to the public – this weekend.

Users can plug in and register their gBall online, using a simple interface. The gBall contains inbuilt GPS and motion sensor systems to monitor the location, force and torque of each kick. The data is interpreted by a new curvilenear parabolic approximation algorithm developed in Google’s Sydney office, known as DENNIS (“Dimensional, Elastic, Non-Linear, Network-Neutral, Inertial Sequencing”), which plots the ball’s trajectory, accuracy and distance.

If you want one, you’d better move quickly. I don’t think they’ll be available tomorrow.



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