Steven Spielberg missed a bet with his movie, Jurassic Park. He focused on the age of dinosaurs. If he really wanted to freak people out, he’d focus on a much earlier era, the Carboniferous Period: a.k.a. “The Age of Cockroaches.” Yes, cockroaches, those scuttling, light-fearing pests we’ve all encountered at one time or another, were once …
Category: Blog
Multiple births
In 1934, an Ontario farmer asked his local newspaper if a birth announcement for five babies born at once would cost the same as a birth announcement for a single baby. A local reporter filed a wire story about the farmer’s suddenly expanded family, and almost overnight, the Dionne quintuplets became media celebrities–to the point …
Adapting to space
In the movies, spaceships have artificial gravity, because it’s a heck of a lot easier to film that way. Real-life astronauts aren’t so lucky. The men and women who inhabit the Mir space station spend months in weightlessness. Sure, it’s a lot of fun–flying around, leaving objects hanging in mid-air–but inside those cosmonauts’ and …
Icebergs
They say that a movie is only as good as its villain, and the new movie Titanic, now packing people into theatres all over the world, has a whopper: a giant block of ice that tears open the “unsinkable” ship’s hull and, a couple of hours later, send it to the bottom. Icebergs have bedevilled ships …
Quantum teleportation
“Beam me up, Scotty, there’s no intelligent life here!” How often have you wished you could escape unpleasant situations just by flipping open a communicator and asking to be instantaneously whisked away? (Using your cell phone to have yourself paged doesn’t count.) Well, teleportation of human beings–causing them to vanish in one location and instantaneously …
Scuba diving
Now that winter has descended upon us in earnest, many Canadians are planning a trip south to Florida or the Caribbean, where they’ll bask in the warm sun, eat exotic foods–and maybe even try a little scuba diving. “Scuba” is a word in its own right now, but originally it was an acronym for “Self-Contained …
‘T’was the nocturnal time of the preceding day to the day we call Christmas
With apologies to Clement Clarke Moore ‘Twas the nocturnal time of the preceding day To the day we call Christmas (which is, by the way, Just a modern twist on the eons-old fight To use feast and fire to end winter’s night). And all through our dwelling (a.k.a. the house), Not a creature was stirring, …
Edmund Scientific
Sears calls its Christmas catalog the Wish Book, but while it’s true that, as a kid, I spent a fair amount of time each year browsing through its pages of toys, there was another catalog I found even more interesting, not just at Christmas, but all through the year: my own personal “wish book,” the …
Body clocks
It’s very rare for me to be actually awakened by an alarm clock. Generally I wake up on my own just a few minutes before the alarm is set to go off–which is actually kind of annoying, since mornings when I have to set an alarm to get up are invariably mornings when I want …
Comdex ’97
Each year, more than 200,000 people descend on Las Vegas with more on their minds than gambling and Wayne Newton. They’re there for Fall Comdex, the largest computer show in the world (a.k.a. “Nerdvana”). This year’s Fall Comdex just wrapped up, and the one trend that stood out was the ongoing effort to change the …
Global warming update
What with all the talk about the greenhouse effect recently, I decided it’s time for a quick review… The term “greenhouse effect” is usually used today in reference to a predicted gradual warming of the Earth caused by an increase in various gases in the atmosphere, primarily due to human activity. Really, however, the greenhouse …
Pumpkins
Maybe it’s their cheerful orange color or their round, sort of huggable shape, but people love pumpkins. And this is the time of year when pumpkins really come into their own. In mid-October we’re eating them in pies, and by the end we’re carving them into jack-o-lanterns. All the fruits we call pumpkins belong to …
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