Category: Blog

This sounds promising: a new approach to battling viral infections that could eliminate (or at least lessen) the problem of viruses adapting to the drug over time. The focus is on smallpox, but it sounds like it could work with any virus.

Oh, yeah, this is going to be a BIG seller: a nagging computer that keeps track of your daily activities and then alters a five-years-in-the-future digital image of yourself to show you how fat/flabby/wrinkled/stooped your current lifestyle is likely to make you. Yeah, people are going to LOVE that.

A new technology could make it possible to combine computer-generated images with live TV images on the fly.

Paradoxically enough, sometimes “big science” involves very small objects. Particle accelerators are one good example. Another is the burgeoning field of nanotechnology: the technology of very small things. January was a very big month for very small things at the University of Toronto, with two related announcements about a new breakthrough that could give us …

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I like musical theatre. I enjoyed The Phantom of the Opera on stage (not as much as, say, Chicago, but I enjoyed it). I was kind of thinking of going to see the movie version if I got the chance. Suzy McKee Charnas has some good reasons why I needn’t bother.

OK, I’ve definitely been watching too much Star Trek, but still, you gotta admit that a body-scanning holographic imager sounds like something that belongs in a Federation starship, not a clothing store!

An idea whose time has come (?): caffeinated beer. (May require registration.)

A while back I noted the similarity to Star Trek‘s tricorders of devices that could read DNA “bar codes” to identify different species; here’s another invention that has a definite tricorder feel to it. Alternatively, it could be I’ve simply watched too much Star Trek…

Remember when Genesis crashed to Earth? The first scientific samples of what at first appeared to be a total write-off have been shipped to researchers. Hoo-rah!

Do you think there are too many books being published? I do, when i look at this list of all the books being released in the U.S. on February 21–my own Lost in Translation amongst them. What were all those other publishers thinking? Didn’t they know MY book was coming out that day? Sheesh!

“Walter Twiddle” is, of course, an anagram of Edward Willett, courtesy of the Internet Anagram Server, which, by the way, is a place you do not wish to go unless you have time to waste. I did, obviously. Some additional anagrams for my name: A LEWD DIRT WELT – At least, that’s what my friends …

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Having thus looked to the past with a Rawhide reference (and pretty much established, should there be any doubt, that I’m no longer a spring chicken), I now look to the future with this cool account of a spherical security robot.