Category: Blog

Photo of the Day that was Actually Taken on Father’s Day: Me and My Girl

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More from John Scalzi on teen writers

Sometime last year John Scalzi wrote a post at Whatever called “10 Things Teenage Writers Should Know About Writing”. I agreed with pretty much all of it (although Scalzi’s default writing style is more…well, I don’t think even he would disagree with the description “snarky”…than mine). In fact, I agreed with it so much that …

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So you think your job is bad?

Whenever you think you have the worst job in the world, there’s a sure-fire antidote: check out Popular Science‘s annual listing of the Worst Jobs in Science. Tenth on the list this year: whale-feces researcher. Rosalind Rolland, a senior researcher at the New England Aquarium in Boston, combs the Bay of Fundy looking for brown …

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"Science is easy!"

My daughter received a Webkinz for her sixth birthday last week. Webkinz are stuffed animals which come with a code that provides access to a website where kids can play games, buy things for the online version of their animals, etc. Among the Webkinz activities are quizzes about various topics. Among the topics: science. Which, …

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Photo of the Day: The Bird Who Came to Dinner

This bird joined us for dinner at the Wascana Country Club this evening, perching just on the other side of the dining room window glass. More photos here.

For Father’s Day…

…the eulogy I wrote for my father, James Lee Willett, who died five years ago. EULOGY FOR JAMES LEE WILLETT, 1926-2002 James Lee Willett was born January 9, 1926, in Mesilla, New Mexico, to Ewan Chambers Willett and Bessie Brown Willett. He received his elementary education at Burkburnett, Texas, and his secondary education at Coffeyville, …

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Photo of the Day: Glasses at the Ready

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Do particles communicate backward in time?

John Cramer, who writes the “Alternate View” columns for Analog Science Fiction and Fact (one of the “Big Three” science fiction magazines, the others being Asimov’s Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction) has drummed up enough private funding to proceed with an experiment to test his theory of “quantum retrocausality”: The …

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Photo of the Day: Colourful Caterpillar

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This could be big!…er…small!

Spintronics+plasmonics=spinplasmonics: A University of Alberta research team has combined two fields of study in nanotechnology to create a third field that the researchers believe will lead to revolutionary advances in computer electronics, among many other areas. Dr. Abdulhakem Elezzabi and his colleagues have applied plasmonics principles to spintronics technology and created a novel way to …

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Photo of the Day: The Fly

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No puddles now…

…but Mars may once have been covered by ocean.