In 1980, or thereabouts, New Scientist held a competition. Readers were asked to submit questions to examine unusual subjects. The prize winners were presented in the March 13, 1980 issue:

University of Creation

Institute of Advanced Theology

Final Year Examination

Paper I: Practical

Candidates must attempt all sections in the order given.

Section 1 Practical Cosmology

In the container No 1 provided, you will find one void. From this you are to create a universe with an inhabitable planet. This planet should have earth, sky, water, night and day as an absolute minimum. Marks will be awarded for originality.

NB Candidates are advised to create a handful of dust for use in section 3.

(Time allowed: 2 days)

Section 2 Applied climatology

Devise a system of zoned climate and weather bands for the planet created in section 1. The weather created should be seasonable, with seasons varying with locality, and should be suitable for the propagation of the vegetation provided in container 2.

(Time allowed: 2 days)

Section 3 Advanced techinques in genetics

Using any raw materials you wish, create a varied collection of wildlife for the planet. There is no limit on variety, but your collection must include aquatic, amphibious, air breathing, and flying creatures which must be able to reproduce their own kind. Other forms may be created provided they are able to thrive and mutliply in the location in which you place them. Marks will be deducted for any imbalance introduced betweeen sections 2 and 3. The handful of dust from section 1 is to be used to created a living being in your own image together with a breeding partner. These will be needed in section 4.

(Time allowed: 1 day)

Section 4 Neuroengineering

The life forms created at the end of section 3 are to be provided with the ability to think and reason, using a heuristic central nervous system. Candidates are warned to take extreme care in this secion, as the slightest error could damage the delicate balance created in sections 2 and 3.

(Time allowed: 1 day)

Candidates will be allowed one day’s grace before Paper II: Theory.

Alan Jones, Dartford New Scientist, 13 March, 1980

Did a bit of tidying up yesterday and came across a couple of receipts dating back to 1990. Them were the times when I had an Amiga 500. They didn’t have a hard drive, just an in-built floppy disk drive which booted the system. I assume that the inbuilt memory acted as a RAM drive to hold the system instructions. So to load a word processing program you would have to remove the boot disk and then load the program.

With all that swapping in and out driving me around the bend I went and bought an external 3.5 inch floppy disk drive. The cost? $199. I had occasion to buy another one (internal) last year - $10.

The second receipt was for some additional memory. The Amiga came with 512KB built in, but there was a plug where a ROM unti could be added. The cost for an additional 512KB was $149. This took the total memory to 1MB. I notice that now you can get 1GB (1000MB) for about the same price. So that’s a two-thousandth reduction in the cost.

If I remember correctly that additional memory was held in place under the console with a piece of sticky tape.

Thought I’d pass on a link to this tip for speeding up Firefox. I’ve had a preference for this browser for some years. But lately I’ve found the system as sluggish as a wet sponge. I know that some of the problem is at the other end. But I thought some of it could have been local. And I was right. Found this trick for use with broadband and it worked a treat:

forevergeek.com/open_source/make_firefox_faster.php [ opens in a new window/tab ]

PS speaking of sponges - how deep would the oceans be if there were no sponges on the bottom?