The latest fire in the Santa Cruz Mountains recalls an idea of mine: import ice boulders from Saturn’s rings, put them in Earth orbit, and drop them on fires as needed. Is that crazy?

Misc links: a somewhat nerdy pun; a summary of Lost

A Martian year is 668.6 Martian days; that’s 3.4 less than 24×28. I asked myself, how should the short months be arranged for best ‘balance’? I ran all combinations and this is it:

The three big dots represent the missing days in short months; the smaller dot represents the sometimes-missing day in the variable month; and the diamond, slightly left of center, is the center of gravity of the dots.

Then I thought, what if I were designing a calendar for a world where the number of days in a year is 5¼ off from a multiple of 12?