As I mentioned last week, I recently spent a couple of days at the Chateau Montebello, the world’s largest log hotel. Ironically, that same weekend, another famous log structure, the central building at the Minaki Lodge in northern Ontario, burned to the ground. Both Montebello and Minaki were built more than 70 years ago. But …
Category: Blog
Thought-controlled devices
I’m back home from three weeks in Toronto and the Ottawa region and ready to resume blogging, with this story about monkeys learning to use a thought-controlled robotic arm–great news for paralyzed people and with all kinds of other potential uses. I can see couch potatoes clamoring for just such an implant so they can …
What he said
Orson Scott Card reacts to Harold Bloom’s reaction to Stephen King’s National Book Award–and says what I wanted to say, only better. (Scroll down to the bottom of the column.) And by the way, you should regularly check out these Card columns, in which, as promised, he reviews everything. You may not agree with him, …
It’s getting closer…
But China won’t be telling us much until they actually pull it off.
Winners of the Ig® Nobel Prize
May I have the envelope please… I normally do a column on these. Maybe I still will.
A quick update
I haven’t been blogging for the last 10 days because I’ve been on vacation, but I am still alive and so is Hassenpfeffer! I’m in Toronto at the moment; look for a return to regular blogging when I get home in mid-October. In the meantime, why not visit one of the fine sites listed to …
The ideal e-book reader gets closer…
I have an inherent interest, having experimented with e-publishing (with Spirit Singer), in the development of a truly useable (and loveable) electronic reading device. Electronic paper is one technology that may give it to us. Apparently it may give us even more.
The worst jobs in science
Just last week, at the conclusion of the column on the dinosaur extinction debate, I wrote this: “Science is anything but a collection of dull facts: it’s a living, breathing, growing and very human enterprise. That’s what makes it fascinating.” That is, of course, true (would I lie to you?), but the fact is, nothing …
Reading Report
I finished Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman yesterday, and the most recent issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine today. I don’t know why I didn’t read Good Omens earlier: it’s brilliant. Exactly the right blend of Pratchettian humour and Gaimanian darkness, and of particular enjoyment to someone raised in the Church of …
The Mystica
I’ve been slowly playing my way through the computer game Gabriel Knight III (yes, I know, it’s ancient–what can I say? I was kind of busy the last three or four years), in which the characters are provided with a computerized reference to all things mystical. Turns out it really exists: it’s The MYSTICA.ORG and …
I talk to my keys, but they never listen to me…
I hope this prediction is correct, although I rather imagine I’ll keep my keyboard for writing even when speech recognition is perfected–my brain has been wired to route my thoughts through a keyboard for something approaching 30 years. But I’ll bet there’ll be newer writers who take to dictating fiction the way I took to …
Wheels in the Sky
Some interesting history about how the concept of space stations went from science fiction to reality, thanks to Wernher von Braun.
My latest live walk and vlog
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