Category: Blog

I wouldn’t exactly call this the science fiction headline of the week, but…maybe the medieval fantasy headline of the week?

Not much to report from yesterday. I spent part of the day preparing and then delivering my Saskatchewan Book Awards entries (I entered The Iran-Iraq War, Ayatollah Khomeini and J.R.R. Tolkien: Master of Imaginary Worlds in the children’s literature category, and also entered the Tolkien bio in the non-fiction category; I might have entered more …

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Mercury is not a very nice place, but it’s an interesting one. NASA is launching a probe to the inmost planet on Monday. Who knew it was so hard to get to?

Don’t miss this online exhibit about the future in transportation…as they saw it in the past. Where DID I park my flying car, anyway?

Not very productive, these last two days. Tuesday I got very little done because I had one of those eye exams where they dilate your pupils–which meant, I discovered, while I could read text on the 19-inch desktop computer monitor, I couldn’t read it on my laptop when I took it down to Second Cup …

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Not very productive, these last two days. Tuesday I got very little done because I had one of those eye exams where they dilate your pupils–which meant, I discovered, while I could read text on the 19-inch desktop computer monitor, I couldn’t read it on my laptop when I took it down to Second Cup …

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NASA has begun preliminary work on a new moonship. Yay!

Actually, it sounds more like horror: “The bizarre case of the bone-eating worms.” These are worms that dine on whalebone. The females never leave once they dig into a bone; the males never taste the bone, because they live inside the females. This world of ours is a strange and fascinating place indeed.

This excellent (and long!) article from the Hudson Review, written by Bruce Bawer, explores European anti-Americanism through a survey of recent books on the topic. I highly recommend it.

The U.S. announces plans to work with at least seven other coutnries to harvest methane emissions as fuel, reducing global-warming pollution. Of course, that’s instead of, not in addition to, working harder to limit carbod dioxide emissions, so there’s still a ways to go, but it’s a grand idea, nonetheless.

The SpaceShipOne team has given its official 60-day notice and scheduled its first X-prize competition flight for September 29–and the Da Vinci Project has announced it will roll out its completed Wildfire spacecraft on August 5 in Toronto, and is still looking toward launches this fall–at Kindersley, right here in Saskatchewan. Cool!

Having prepared my science column for online subscribers and the Leader Post last night, today was devoted to tech-editing of a computer book for Wiley. Fortunately, it’s very clean (written by someone who knows far more about the topic than I do!) and I had very few comments to make, so I managed to get …

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