Category: Blog

I use Word’s spelling check feature, but I don’t trust it. And I always turn off the grammar check tool. Looks like I made the right decision.

An interesting collection of werewolves, masks, and, well, “things”, made by a man with a really cool last name…

It’s just a speck of light, of course–but it’s still the first visible image of a planet orbiting a Sun-like star. Wasn’t that long ago there was debate over whether we’d ever know if there were planets around other stars. Now we’re starting to take their pictures.

I’ve written a bit about this before, but here’s a good round-up article on the current state of the burgeoning field of using brains signals to control computers.

Here’s a great vintage: Wine of the House-of-Tutankhamun Ruler-of-the-Southern-On, l.p.h.[in] the Western River, Year 5. No, we didn’t drink it–but King Tut did. And now, for the first time, scientists have been able to determine that it was red wine. Despite red wine’s health benefits, however, we probably can’t make the claim that King Tut …

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Cross-posted from The Willetts on Wine: Radical winegrowers–no, really–in France have bombed government offices to demand an increase in government subsidies. We like really expensive French wine–but the ordinary stuff leaves us cold. Give us a cheap New World wine over a cheap French one any day. Guess we’re part of the French winemakers’ problems.

Is that a great headline or what? Or am I just an unabashed science-fiction-loving geek? Don’t answer that.

It’s all at Locus Online. Don’t miss the tragic story of the deadly SFWA flamewar…

A performance by University of Calgary students next weekend may be the first ever of a mystery playscript dating back almost to Shakespeare’s time (though nobody is suggesting for a second it’s a lost Shakespearean play, I hasten to add). Since I’m currently involved with Globe Theatre‘s upcoming production of Twelfth Night, I found this …

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Think laughter is one of the things that separates us from animals? Think again.

Apparently it does if you’re a dwarf minke whale. If it worked for human females, of course, I might have managed to get married several years earlier than I did.

We tend to think of ancient Roman and Greek statues as having been made of pure white marble. In fact, they were usually painted in bright colors– as a statue of Venusnow on display for the first time in Jerusalem vividly demonstrates.