Thankfully, someone has looked into this issue.
And I admit it – I read a lot on the toilet. I finished Norman Spinrad’s Agent of Chaos on the toilet. That is where I have almost finished Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. So I’m glad that this habit won’t cause untold destruction on my household.
If my local course had sharks in the water hazard, I would be willing to spoil a good walk long enough to take up golfing.
An ancient manuscript by the Greek mathematician Archimedes (the one who saw water spilling out of his bathtub and leaped out and ran naked through the streets, yelling eureka, having realized that he’d figured out that whole mass displacement thing) was decoded or deciphered or whatever you want to call it after years and years or work.
The original writing had been scraped off by a medieval monk who was short on paper, so the challenge was determining the writing beneath and generally putting together a jigsaw puzzle.
You can see it at the Walters Museum of Art in Baltimore.
This article by science fiction writer Neal Stephenson focuses on how science fiction has/can/should influence and drive innovation in America.
Stephenson is one of those science fiction writers who has been able to expand beyond just genre readers and become respected by what you might call the critical establishment. Caveat lector – he’s on my list, but I have never read him. But, it appears as if he’s on a level with a writer like China Miéville, though perhaps not up to Margaret Atwood heights.
Much of it is a cri de couer regarding the failure of the current age to follow up on the dreams of a previous age, but I mostly wanted to point how two ways, mentioned in the article, that sci fi can push scientific achievment.
Scientists at the CERN facility in Switzerland think they’ve detected a sub-atomic particle that moves faster than light.
Not only is this super cool for fans of science fiction, looking for a decent basis for ‘hyperdrives,’ ‘jump drives,’ ‘FTL drives,’ and ‘Heisenberg compensators,’ but it would overturn the Special Theory of Relativity which is kind of a building block for our understanding of the universe so, you know, that might be important even for people who don’t read science fiction. But I don’t know for sure, I don’t hang around people who don’t read sci fi so I won’t pretend to know what weird, kinky things they think are important. Probably place settings or coupons. I don’t know.
So anyway, some neutrinos appear to have covered a distance of 730 km 60 nanoseconds faster than light.
Yeah.
Consider my posting of this article to be a little shout out to my friend Ryan, who introduced me to the writing of the Churchlands, the reigning power couple in the field of ‘neurophilosophy.’
the coffee philosopher 