Richard Hansen settled himself into the thick blue upholstery of the chair at the head of the long, oval, gold-colored metal table, and looked around at his senior staff.Words today: 1,435Total thus far: 2,504Percentage completed: 2.09
Category: Blog
I’m a caryatid!
The stage version of Beauty and the Beast, as presented on Broadway, had a cast of roughly two million (that’s just a guess). At Persephone Theatre here in Saskatoon, we have a cast of 14. This means all of us poor players must play in our time many parts. I, for instance, play the Narrator, …
Return of The First Sentence I Wrote Today
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and a journey of 120,000 words began today with the first word of my next novel, Terra Insegura: Bump. That has a period, but it’s not really a sentence. Or maybe it’s a condensed sentence: just like there’s an implied "You" at the beginning …
Roboethics
Download the audio version.Get my science column weekly as a podcast. *** A couple of weeks ago I wrote about research aimed at making robot-human interactions more comfortable for humans. With more and more robots finding more and more uses in society, that kind of research is important. But there’s something else we’re going to …
Shield your eyes, or you’ll go blind:
It’s an entire blog devoted to awful (unbelievably awful) Swedish album covers. Because somebody‘s got to make sure these things aren’t allowed to slink quietly into the dank mists of history… (Via ColbyCosh.com.)
A digital restoration of the Mona Lisa…
…can be found here. Whether this is a completely accurate representation of Leonardo’s painting as it originally appeared is impossible to know, of course, but one thing is certain: it didn’t always have the dim, yellowish appearance we associate with it today.
Rehearsals have begun!
Sorry for the brief hiatus right after promising to post more. I headed up to Saskatoon on Friday and spent the day in rehearsal for Beauty and the Beast at Persephone Theatre (great cast, all-Saskatchewan–or at least all from Saskatchewan originally; it looks to be a lot of fun), and discovered I didn’t really have …
I, for one, welcome our new robot masters…
…or apparently I would if I were a cockroach: Cockroaches will often choose shelter unwisely when under the influence of robots, a new study shows. Usually when the creepy crawlers are let loose in a brightly lit area, they gather under the darkest shade they can find. ***But when the bugs were joined by tiny …
What’s it like in Level 4?
Download the audio version.Get my science column weekly as a podcast. *** It’s a staple of movies and TV shows: the Level 4 lab, where scientists in “space suits” race against the clock to find a cure for a mysterious ailment. But what’s it like to work in a Level 4 laboratory in real life? …
Lest We Forget: Remembrance Day resources on the Web
This week’s CBC Web column… **** Most flowers are dead this time of year, but there’s one that only blooms in November: the poppy of Remembrance Day. King George V created Remembrance Day in 1919 in memory of members of the armed forces who were killed during war. But it’s hard to remember a war …
Rise of the (giggling, dancing, punning) robots
Download the audio version.Get my science column weekly as a podcast. ***Robots were once science fiction: in fact, the word comes from the Czech word “robota,” meaning work, and originated in Karel Capek’s popular 1920 science-fiction play R.U.R. (for Rossum’s Universal Robots). These days, there are robot vacuum cleaners, lawn mowers and dogs, and all …
My latest live walk and vlog
Buy Autographed Books
