It was early when I arrived, just opened, and empty. I had the choice of any table, so I took a large one and made it mine - set the other chairs aside and so on, made room for myself. I ate in quiet in a wide open space, to the distant chatter of the waiters. As I finished eating and got ready to work, the first guests started to trickle in. By ( Read more... )

“It all sounds a bit ... I don’t know. Improbable?”
“Doesn’t it? One might think it’s the stuff of a spy novel.”
-The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest

How does an author feel in that moment when his pen has one of the police officers in his spy novel concede to another that the goings-on sound so improbable you’d… think them the stuff of a spy ( Read more... )

Drill me,
kill me;
fill me,
bill me.

(And to the painkillers -
I shall christen thee,
Weapons Grade.)

Even noisy cities, if they’re small enough, do sleep. There are times in the day, deep in the night before the time before dawn, when you can walk leisurely across the deserted otherwise-busiest intersection in downtown. I love those moments when it’s only the tarmac and me sharing our secret, while the bricks and concrete around us cradle the ( Read more... )

When we got our first snow this winter, it was really only a hint: a wispy haze of surprisingly crunchy stuff being blown across the ground. It looked as if someone had wrapped the Earth in gauze. I watched its waves while I walked in biting air throwing itself against me, and as I felt the heat drain from my body, it struck me that I am nothing ( Read more... )

Greg Laughlin:

[The recently discovered star] VB 10 contains about 78 Jupiter masses, just barely lifting it above the minimum mass required to qualify as a bona-fide hydrogen-burning main sequence star. It’s got roughly 10× the mass and 10× the density of [VB 10b,] its companion. […]

The VB 10 system is built to last. The primary will enjoy a ( Read more... )

Sometimes, death is conceptualised as blissful peace.

But it is not blissful, nor peace. It’s just nothing. Simply nothing.

When you die, you aren’t resting. When you die, you aren’t.

I saw someone bemoan loss of awareness with progressing age. Life, they said, was so real as a child. Now it’s like a dream. It’s getting blurred more and more. They wondered why.

It is because everything is new when you’re a child. All the time, you experience something unlike anything you’d known before, or just a little different than before. ( Read more... )

I wondered for a long time why it feels like my my self/mind - my “I” - is inside my head. I realised this suddenly one day and thereafter spent quite some time contemplating the question on and off, trying to understand how this works. I was fascinated by the idea that this might mean there might be a way in which the brain’s activity could be ( Read more... )

2001 US death toll † CauseToll Passenger car accidents…20,320 …or all motor vehicle related accidents42,196 Suicides30,622 Gunshots…11,671 …or all assaults20,704 Drownings3,281 Poisoning/overdoses14,078 Fallings15,019 Burns3,423
Noone is talking about them. And why would anyone?

These deaths do not make for a story. No enemies are involved ( Read more... )