Homo Sum:
humani nil a me alienum puto

I was just having a conversation on Friday with someone about a bunch of Google employees who had ordered up a ridiculous amount of silly putty so they could do an experiment with dropping it from a great height. As someone educated in a faculty of engineering, this made tremendous sense to me: I’ve done [...]

“I feel sure of only one conclusion. The ability to design and create new forms of life marks a turning-point in the history of our species and our planet.” If you haven’t read this yet, read it. I’m going to need some time to take this all in, but I’m going to have to go [...]

Links, pithy comments, you know the drill. The graphics on this one might not be astonishing, but the idea of supermassive black holes being flung from collisons at galactic cores is probably cool enough on its own to sustain interest. I love how science writers drop line like “these objects can have masses equivalent to [...]

Since I was just talking about scale and space in the comments, I thought I should also pop in this little number I saw today on the site of absolutely-damn-great SF writer Walter Jon Williams. (If it were me, I would have worked O Fortuna into the soundtrack–but then, if it were me it wouldn’t [...]

What you’re looking at there is something called The Local Cavity–although in this case “local” takes on a meaning somewhat larger than in typical conversation. It’s essentially a 300-light-year in diameter hole in space. Maybe ‘hole’ is stretching it a bit, since it’s not so much that it’s empty, as that it’s WAY less full [...]

That’s an image from the “Blood Falls”, a five-story, blood-red waterfall that pours very slowly–the falls are frozen, and so flow slowy–out of the Taylor Glacier in Antarctica’s McMurdo Dry Valleys. That multi-coloured bump in the lower left is a tent, if that helps you get an idea of scale The falls were first observed [...]

What you’re looking at there is the sad and beautiful story of the death of two stars, and the casting of two other survivors into the darkness. I’ve been sitting here playing with the My Solar System gravity simulator since reading about it in Discovery–it’s a cool educational toy for modelling interaction of bodies under [...]

OK, my open tab situation has got to the point where I was forced to research new Firefox plugins. I might talk about that soon, since that old “favourite plugins” post is waaaay out of date, and due for an updating. Right now, though, I want to run through a bunch of these things, attaching [...]

And the professor is back to lead us through the second in our series of posts looking at real, actual, modern science stories that illustrate the “we’re living in science fiction” notion. Last time we focused primarily on medicine, and specifically on different kinds of regeneration. We’re still working our way through modern mad medical [...]

I am dragging the Professor out of the archives to headline a series of link posts I’m going to be doing about medical “we live in science fiction now” stories (and maybe some medical “mad science”) pieces as well. I’ve been gathering these stories for quite some time–each one alone is a bit shocking or [...]

It’s weird–or maybe not so weird, really–but reading certain news items my reactions are almost entirely filtered through my years of training as a science fiction reader. Sometimes I read the story and suddenly see all kinds of comparisons between some real world event and things I’ve read–either direct connections, or analogies. Sometimes I read [...]

You may recall that I was pretty seriously geeked a while back by the implications of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Well, they’ve taken a new image, using infrared light this time, which lets them see even deeper. There is information, images, videos, and more about the newly release survey at the Hubble site.

You know the punchline: “I don’t make the rules, I just enjoy them.” I pull this out every now and then when Dr. Wife points out to me some way in which our society is constructed to make things better for men, while giving women the less pleasant end of the stick. I’m sure I’ll [...]