Maybe prospective parents should be issued one of these. It beats that old high-school “treat this egg like a baby” drill. (Via Medgadget.)
Willett’s Law of Non-Fiction Writing
In honor of my turning in of the last materials required for my book Genetics Demystified, I present: Willett’s First Law of Non-Fiction Writing No non-fiction book outline survives contact with the actual content. In any event, the book is done, and thus, though I still have a million other things crying out for attention, …
Particle accelerator helping to uncover Archimedes’s words
Here’s another story on using modern technology to uncover the secrets concealed in an ancient manuscript. In this case the technology is a particle accelerator, and the document is the Archimedes Palimpsest, thought to be a 10th century copy of an original long-lost Archimedes manuscript which was copied over by a later scribe. I saw …
Waiting for the Queen
My almost-four-year-old daughter Alice waits in the rain for her chance to give flowers to Queen Elizabeth yesterday morning, May 18. Alice and I and a family friend made the trek around the end of the lake Wednesday morning to see Queen Elizabeth be officially welcomed to Canada. We took flowers, more in the faint …
Live performances from dead pianists
A remarkable concert in Raleigh, North Carolina, this Thursday, May 19, will feature Glenn Gould performing excerpts from Bach’s Goldberg Variations, and the great French pianist Alfred Cortot playing a Chopin Prelude, on a nine-foot Yamaha grand piano. What’s remarkable about it is that Gould died in 1982 and Cortot in 1962. But the performances …
Robert J. Sawyer on Net.talk tomorrow
Oh, and while I’m on the subject of science fiction, Hugo and Nebula-Award winning author Robert J. Sawyer will be our guest on the Access Communications TV program Net.talk that I host every Thursday. You have to live in Regina (and be an Access subscriber) to see it, alas, but if you happen to, please …

