Monthly Archives: November 2002

Clarke got it crooked

Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. Essay by Vanessa Layne.

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catalog for a reference library

“CanonicalTomes is a volunteer-created, volunteer-administered, and user-contributed database of books or other works which define their respective domains. The hope is that in time, someone approaching a field for the first time, or someone from within the field looking for … Continue reading

Posted in general | 1 Comment

tits over time

Some public-spirited person has posted [and soon thereafter removed] all of Playboy’s centerfolds from Norma Jean to Miss October 2002. (I can’t resist a complete series of anything at all interesting.) It’s not without interest to compare the earlier and … Continue reading

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that’s just the drugs talking, dear

Do you enjoy dictionaries as much as I do? The Office of National Drug Control Policy (boo hiss) publishes this one: Street Terms: Drugs and the Drug Trade. (Link provided by Michael Travers, as an aside from a digression about … Continue reading

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1897-1997

Teller doesn’t talk, but he writes. His story A Memory of the Nineteen-Nineties, a sequel to Max Beerbohm’s “Enoch Soames” (which I read sometime in the Eighties), almost makes me wish I’d thought of making the same pilgrimage. Teller’s account … Continue reading

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one hundred eighteen

Periodic Table of Science Fiction: Michael Swanwick is writing a short-short story for each of the elements, one a week.

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QotD

I am anticipating the day when the possession of Tibet and Afghanistan will be represented as vitally necessary to the security of Kansas and Nebraska. There is no logical end to this elastic conception of ‘security’ short of the conquest … Continue reading

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