The first Chris Keating knew of the arrival of the Holy Warriors aboard BPS Sanctification was the shrilling of an alarm that woke him from a deep sleep. Current word count: 84,733New words this session: 3,117Percentage of novel completed: 84.7 Two good sessions today. Just a little over 15,000 words to go to 100,000. (Whether …
Two Michigan State University researchers have unlocked the secret invisible-ink formula used by the former East Germany secret police, the Stasi: The Stasi’s technique of transferring top-secret messages worked like a piece of carbon paper. An agent would place a piece of paper impregnated with the chemical cerium oxalate between two pieces of plain paper. …
…but full of errors. I have sympathy for both the author and the proofreaders–Lord knows I make plenty of my own errers…er, errors…but these seem particularly blatant. The proofreaders certainly shouldn’t have missed them, but the author should have caught them himself when he read the galleys.
Scientists have a pop-culture reputation as either a) boring or b) mad. That they are not necessarily the former (although, based on the evidence, the jury is still out on the latter) was proven once again last month with the annual awarding of the Ig Nobel Prizes “for research which first makes you laugh, then …
It looked like all the Holy Warriors on the far side of the shuttle were also dead or wounded…but the snipers had gotten only three of the four machine-gunners inside. Current word count: 81,616New words this session: 2,767Percentage of novel completed: 81.6 Four-fifths done…
I can’t believe I hadn’t come across this until now (but then, the World Wide Web is a rather large place [if it’s a place at all (and how many paranthetical [like this] statements can one put in a single sentence, anyway?)]): Michael C. LaBarbera, a University of Chicago biologist, has taken a scientific look …
Regina’s Davin School at twilight. More photos here.
Cheveldeoff sat in the main briefing room of the Retribution with Grand Deacon Braun, watching the video feeds streaming back from the descending shuttle. Current word count: 78,849New words this session: 1,074Percentage of novel completed: 78.8 Everything today was written in the 45 minutes or so I had to myself in the snack room of …
From Scientific American: Researchers at the University of Minnesota have developed a new, carbon-neutral way to convert vegetable-based fuels to syngas, a breakthrough that could allow producers to power hydrogen fuel cells or create a replacement for America’s dwindling supplies of natural gas, all without relying on fossil fuels. Read the rest. (Via Transterrestrial Musings.)
From the “things I found in my mother-in-law’s house” series, this tiny totem pole is labeled, “Made in Canada by Ellen Neel and the Totem Carvers – Kwakiutl Indians.” It may be one of the 5,000 tiny totem poles Ellen Neel and the Totem Carvers once made for the Hudson Bay Company. Then again, it …
“BPS Sanctification to approaching vessel,” Chris Keating said into the microphone of the headset he’d worn since the ship’s computer had announced that another Holy Warrior vessel had entered the system.Current word count: 77,775New words this session: 2,511Percentage of novel completed: 77.7 I wrote more words than it looks like today; once again I backed …
…bringing people to my main website, a.k.a. Edward Willett’s Intergalactic Library. Good old “spider goats” are still on there, but the last batch of results shows that “time perception” has a commanding lead, with “physics of football” second. New to the list is one I don’t think I’ve seen before: “corpse-flower grower”. Here are the …
