Apparently inhaling a single cigarette can be enough to trigger nicotine addiction: A new study published in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine shows that 10 percent of youth who become hooked on cigarettes are addicted within two days of first inhaling from a cigarette, and 25 percent are addicted within a month. The …
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When I posted my eulogy for my father, James Lee Willett, for Father’s Day, I neglected to provide one important link: many of Dad’s sermons are online as MP3 files. You can download them here. My previous post reminded me!
The Big Pharaoh, an Egyptian blogger, writes about the arrest and imprisonment of members of a group I’d never heard of before: The Quraneyeens. Here’s his explanation of what they believe: They’re Muslims who believe in the Quran, and only the Quran. In traditional Sunni Islam, religious jurispudence and law are mainly derived from two …
Are you getting enough sleep? Probably not: the average North American sleeps an hour less per night than was common 40 years ago. Ordinarily, if we fail to get enough sleep one night, our body attempts to make up for it during the next night by sleeping longer and/or sleeping more deeply. Since alarm clocks …
In the latest issue of Dave Langford’s excellent ‘zine Ansible, Ursula K. Le Guin responds to this quote: “Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it.”‘ Ruth Franklin (Slate, 8 May 2007)Her answer is lengthy and …
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Robert A. Heinlein was undoubtedly my favorite author at one time of my life (I devoured the Heinlein “juveniles,” liked some of his mid-career adult stuff, was left cold by Stranger in a Strange Land, and kept reading his later stuff mostly hoping that it would somehow enthrall me as the earlier stuff did, which …
Bigelow Aerospace‘s Genesis II inflatable space module continues to perform well; the company has released the first high-resolution photos from orbit. I like their slogan: “Getting you excited about space again.” Not that I’ve never not been excited, personally. I was pleased to watch my six-year-old daughter enact a flight to the moon in the …
Wired regularly posts a “this day in technology” item. Today’s caught my eye: apparently, it was on this day in 1888 that the first known musical recording was made–Handel’s oratorio Israel in Egypt: Israel in Egypt, assigned the catalog number HWV 54, is an oratorio, a form in which Handel excelled. Like his more famous …
Dark Wisdom: The Magazine of Dark Fiction, Issue 11, is “now at the printer” and includes a short story by me entitled “The Wind.” I’m pleased but somewhat surprised by this development, since I emailed the magazine a couple of times trying to find out the status of the story: it was accepted, but the …
…snapped by high school students from the ground.
