Photo of the Day: Thundercloud

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Firstborn children are the cleverest

I’m the youngest of three boys. I’ve sent this story to my oldest brother in the hope he might be able to explain it to me.

From Babel Fish to Woohoo!

Today’s Web column for CBC Saskatchewan’s Afternoon Edition… ********* If you’ve ever watched Star Trek, you’ve heard of the Universal Translator. The Universal Translator is a computer device that is able to instantly translate almost any alien language, no matter how bizarre, into American English. Of course, the Universal Translator doesn’t exist…yet. But all over …

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Photo of the Day: Planetary Disk Drive

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Laurey is now Aunt Eller

This caught my eye, since I just played Jud in Regina Lyric Light Opera‘s production of Oklahoma!: Oscar-winner Shirley Jones will be featured in the Pittsburgh CLO’s upcoming staging of the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic Oklahoma!, according to the theatre’s website. Oklahoma! runs through July 1st. Jones, who famously played Laurey in the 1955 film …

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Photo of the (Yester)Day That Was Actually Taken on Sunday, But Who Cares, Really?: Tablecloth Rainbow

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Isaac Newton: man of science…

…man of faith. In one manuscript from the early 1700s, Newton used the cryptic Book of Daniel to calculate the date for the Apocalypse, reaching the conclusion that the world would end no earlier than 2060.“It may end later, but I see no reason for its ending sooner,” Newton wrote. However, he added, “This I …

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Justine Larbalestier on beginning writers

A follow-up to John Scalzi’s comments on teen writers from Justine Larbalestier, who some time ago wrote her own piece called “Too Young to Publish.” She writes: Neither Scalzi nor I have any interest in stopping teenagers from writing. Au contraire. We both wrote then and got a hell of a lot out of it, …

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Photo of the Day that was Actually Taken on Father’s Day: Me and My Girl

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More from John Scalzi on teen writers

Sometime last year John Scalzi wrote a post at Whatever called “10 Things Teenage Writers Should Know About Writing”. I agreed with pretty much all of it (although Scalzi’s default writing style is more…well, I don’t think even he would disagree with the description “snarky”…than mine). In fact, I agreed with it so much that …

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So you think your job is bad?

Whenever you think you have the worst job in the world, there’s a sure-fire antidote: check out Popular Science‘s annual listing of the Worst Jobs in Science. Tenth on the list this year: whale-feces researcher. Rosalind Rolland, a senior researcher at the New England Aquarium in Boston, combs the Bay of Fundy looking for brown …

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"Science is easy!"

My daughter received a Webkinz for her sixth birthday last week. Webkinz are stuffed animals which come with a code that provides access to a website where kids can play games, buy things for the online version of their animals, etc. Among the Webkinz activities are quizzes about various topics. Among the topics: science. Which, …

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