The smallest extrasolar planet ever found–just 5.5 times the size of Earth–has been discovered in orbit around a red dwarf (the most common type of star in the galaxy) using a technique called microlensing. Best of all: The find suggests Earth-like planets are abundant in the galaxy and validates a technique that should be able …
Probably thanks to books and movies, many people think that the older the wine, the better. That’s not necessarily true. As one rule of thumb notes, more good wine is drunk too late than too early. Wines kept too long in the bottle actually deteriorate, and some wines simply never benefit from being kept in …
…in today’s Canadian federal election: a 104-year-old man from Manitoba. Later today, my wife will help her 83-year-old mother, who is almost blind and can barely walk, to the polls so she can vote. And in a coffee shop earlier today, I heard three 20-something know-nothings pooh-pooh the whole idea of voting, with one boy …
Why do I have a strong suspicions some of these may soon be appearing in our house, shared with a four-year-old?
I don’t post pictures of myself very often, but here’s one: this is me singing in Weyburn on Friday the 13th for a Rotary Club fundraising event called Homegrown. Since I’m holding the mike in this slightly fuzzy shot, I must have been singing “I’m Beginning to See the Light.” Most of the others I …
Here’s an interesting article on e-books (and Sony’s new e-book reader in particular) from the Wall Street Journal It’s by Terry Teachout, the WSJ‘s drama critic, and one of my favorite arts bloggers.
The Lord of the Rings musical begins previews on February 2. Here’s an update on the state of the production so far, after almost $28 million has been spent.
Saskatoon’s Broadway Bridge at Night Originally uploaded by Edward Willett. Here’s a photo from our hotel room at the Delta Bessborough in Saskatoon last Wednesday. It was a beautiful (unusually warm, as it has been for a month-plus now) January night. The photo looks better in black and white than it did in the orange-and-white …
This is certainly the first time I’ve seen anything on Canadian politics in New Scientist online: According to a new computer algorithm, Prime Minister Paul Martin, of the Liberal Party, spins the subject matter of his speeches dramatically more than Conservative Party leader, Stephen Harper, and the New Democratic Party leader, Jack Layton. Spin, in …
Via BoingBoing, I found this collection of photos from a recent visitor to the Weyburn Mental Hospital, which I mentioned in an earlier post due to its connection to LSD experiments in the 1950s. I suppose the place is a bit creepy (I always thought the driveway to the hospital in the above photo should …
I got back from Saskatoon yesterday about this time, but I had to hit the ground running and haven’t had time to blog–I had to prepare for last night’s Net.talk (the phone-in computer show I host on Access Communication’s community TV channel), then go to rehearsal for Regina Lyric Light Opera’s upcoming musical brunch, featuring …
Here I am, sitting in the lobby lounge of the Bessborough Hotel in Saskatoon, going over my plans for tonight’s Genetics Demystified reading and reception…and, since I have my Audiovox Harrier with me, and since I recently signed up for an unlimited data plan, I figured I might as well blog. We had a pretty …
