If you don’t know Bill Mauldin’s work from the Second World War…

…you owe it to yourself to check out this collection of cartoons. These are like old friends to me, because my Dad had a copy of Bill Mauldin’s book Up Front, where these cartoons were collected. It’s great to see them again. Hmmm. I wonder where the book went?

Putting it together…

…bit by bit. (An 800-year-old manuscript by a Jewish philosopher, that is.)

Sunburst Award shortlist for best Canadian SF announced

The shortlist for the 2006 Sunburst Award for the best Canadian “literature of the fantastic” includes: Cory Doctorow, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (Tor) Holly Phillips, In the Palace of Repose (Prime Books) Robert Charles Wilson, Spin (Tor) James Alan Gardner, Gravity Wells: Speculative Fiction Stories (HarperCollins Canada) Alison McLeod, The Wave Theory …

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Photo of the Day: Alice Turns Five!

Five years ago today was opening night of The Play’s The Thing, the first play I ever directed for Regina Little Theatre. It was also opening day of the long-running hit Margaret Anne and I, collaborators on the project, decided to entitle “Alice Laura Mae Willett.” Happy birthday, sweetheart!

A meteoroid hits the moon…

…and NASA has the video.

Older, wiser…and happier!

Everyone knows that young people are much happier than old people. There’s just one problem with this truism. Like many other things that “everyone knows,” it isn’t actually true. That’s the conclusion of a unique study recently carried out by researchers at VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System and the University of Michigan. The researchers conducted …

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We must colonize space!

Hey, it’s not just my opinion. Stephen Hawking thinks so, too.

The fountain of youth…

…found in Korea?

More on that Norwegian meteorite…

The Norwegian newspaper that reported on the meteorite that hit a remote part of that country last week has a follow-up article, complete with a photo of the impact site. It looks like the comparison to the Hiroshima bomb was probably an over-estimation: Truls Lynne Hansen of the Northern Lights Observatory (Nordlysobservatoriet) in Tromsø disputes …

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Photo of the Day: A Fungus Among Us

More photos here. More on the mushrooms of Saskatchewan here.

This is very, very small, but it could be big

I get a lot of hits on my main website to my column(s) on water desalination. I may have to revisit the topic soon, according to an article in Technology Review: “A water desalination system using carbon nanotube-based membranes could significantly reduce the cost of purifying water from the ocean. The technology could potentially provide …

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If you have a math test coming up…

…you might want to try to get hold of this research device: A minority of people with autism have one or more extraordinary intellectual talents, such as the rapid ability to calculate the day of the week for a given date, or to count large numbers of discrete objects almost instantaneously – they’re often called …

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