Recently a friend said to me out of the blue, “Home is where you wear your hat!” I spun mental wheels for a moment and came back, “Character is who you are in the dark!”
You know what that means (skip down to March 06), or you don’t, and don’t sweat it. By the way, JL: he spells it Bigbouté.
Gary Farber observes that science reporters would benefit by exposure to some of the clichés of science fiction.
Awesome orbital simulations in Java, including an answer to “everyone’s favorite question about Klemperer Rosettes. Is Larry Niven’s Puppeteer solar system stable?”
Travis Corcoran reports:
With Lego on the brain, and Google on the fingertips, I’ve learned a few things. Like: the planet’s children spent 5 billion child-hours last year playing with Legos. And that when Lego, Inc. (or, perhaps GmbH . . . I don’t know) discards a set of moulds, they throw them into the concrete foundations of a new Lego, Inc. building. And that there are 102,981,500 different ways to combine six eight-stud Lego-blocks. And that a block’s height is 6/5 the length of a SLU (Standard Lego Unit). And that there’s a word “SLU”. And that some adults design new lego kits, buy the parts, print up instructions, then repackage and sell them to each other (no one-off artsy Lego deathcamps for these guys!). And that my kludgey looking design for a clock’s gear-train (60:1 stepdown, then a 12:1 stepdown) is in fact the best theoretically possible given the constraints of the gears available.
The ‘bioethicists’ seem to be worried that desirable diversity could be wiped out by fads, which would make sense if a majority of parents for thirty years were to fall for the same fad. Am I missing something?
(Where do ‘bioethicists’ come from, anyway? What are the roots of the discipline? Do bioethicists say anything falsifiable?)
Which side of the road do they drive on? With lots of history, theory and anecdotes.
DNA yields dodo family secrets. (Link from Vicki Rosenzweig.)