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If you love reading about the history of science fiction, you should love reading Jim Emerson’s series Futures Past. I’ve previously reviewed the volumes for 1926 & 1927, and 1928. In the early 1990s Emerson started this project as a fanzine focusing on the history of science fiction, and published four issues: 1926, 1927, 1928, and 1929 before he had to stop. Then a few years ago when he retired …

Almost three weeks ago, I proposed a collaborative project, combining the efforts of professional and amateur mathematicians, automatic theorem provers, AI tools, and the proof assistant language Lean, to describe the implication graph relating the 4694 equational laws for magmas that can be expressed using up to four invocations of the magma operation. That is to say, one needs to determine the truth or falsity of the possible implications between …

We made one stop in the Grand Canyon that I’d never visited before, or even heard of. Some of our group had found it on a previous trip, a short scramble up a small side drainage flowing with a tiny stream of salt water. All around the edges of the trickling flow, the stones were encased in salt, gleaming white under the sun. And not just stones: There’s so much …

I hadn't been to a poetry event in a little while, so when I saw Milk Poetry were doing a special horror themed slam I signed up immediately. My work has often traded in the bizarre and surreal, mixing elements of horror in with poetry so it seemed a good fit. I performed G-Man which has become a favourite of mine. I didn't win, but that's not really the point …

The older sister of Bao-yu, the boy, now a young teen, who was born with the jade stone in his mouth, is an Imperial Concubine, a high prestige slave of the Emperor. She is likely herself still a teen when we learn, in Chapter 16 of The Story of the Stone, that she has been given permission to visit her family. The family responds by planning an enormous party, thus …

via NASAZoeA placid, mid-sized gas giant orbiting just beyond the frost line of a K-class star. Blueish-purple atmosphere. Ring system. Typical collection of rocky and icy moons. Magnetosphere within typical range for a body of this size and composition. No major hurdles to colonization, and no real reason to go out of your way to do it either.Enter MUIR.MUIR began as an overseer during the post-Collapse ecological recovery of Earth. …

I've been overthinking while trying to remember something I read or watched a few years ago that explained fourth-dimensional thinking and time travel. It involved looking directly at the tip of a pencil rather than seeing the entire pencil itself and I found it was a perfect analogy for how to think about "time."Films such as 1997's Event Horizon and 2014's Interstellar have also explored a similar concept when they …

“In ‘The Working Day’, Marx reports that the appointment of Mr. H. S. Tremenheere as Commissioner of Inquiry coincides with the occurrence of “several public meetings and … petitions to Parliament [whence] arose the cry of the London journeymen bakers against their over-work … [appealing] not [to] the heart of the public but its stomach” (Marx [1867–1887] 1990, 215). And what was it that turned the stomachs of this public …

Change the cost of Disarm to be “one Lemons, Oranges, Kiwis, Grape, or Cherry” and change its effect to be “Choose a Trap Cell whose Content is the same as the resource spent for this action and make it a Plain Cell.”

Album of the Week, October 12, 2024 Wayne Shorter as a composer in the 1960s was stretching his wings. Over the course of a few albums for Blue Note, he went from the Trane-inspired writings of JuJu to the incredible cool of Speak No Evil to the avant-garde leanings of The All Seeing Eye. For those who might have been expecting more of that latter album, recorded in late 1965, …

There have been increasingly clamorous calls for the banning, removal, or controlling, or censoring of ‘misinformation’ as an enforced general policy. This may be through law backed by punishment. But what does this mean? The calls seem also to be suggesting that something new and perilous is happening in human life that was not there before. That now, because of misinformation, something especially harmful is occurring. The fashionable word ‘misinformation’ …

Finally managed to (re)watch the film Love and Human Remains on DVD, a favourite of mine since 1993 that I haven't seen in a very long time. Eager to compare my memories of it with the real thing, it didn't disappoint. I absolutely love the story, the characters, the dialogues, the music. Surprising how I never knew it was set in Edmonton, Canada — I guess when watching films that …

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"Dear graphics department: Not that kind of serpent." Swords and Serpents United StatesInterplay (developer); Acclaim (publisher)Released 1990 for NES Date Started: 8 October 2024 Commenters have been on me to try this one for years. It is a rare console game, and even rarer NES game, from a western developer. It clearly draws upon Interplay's experience with The Bard's Tale and other games of its ilk; indeed, its original lead …

We're in the year 3024. Earth is a wasteland. Space has been occupied, but humanity is blocked by the ‘X Ecliptic’, which hems them in to the solar system and some light years around it. Our hero, dashing, handsome Cragin, lost his mother in childbirth: she died of thirst on the desert-Earth literally whilst giving birth to him—how he survived, how he was breast-fed, why the people around didn’t give …