Anyone got any theories on where this trope comes from? Humans born and raised in low gravity are TALL.I get why low gravity humans are SKINNY. Muscles doing less work, square cube law, force output of a muscle proportional to its cross-sectional area, and so on. I have no problems with Mr & Mrs Low-G having smaller muscles than Mr & Mrs Earth-G, ( Read more... )

A deliberate attempt to get some crystal climbing this time, by gluing a spent match and some totally charcoaled bits of match into the jar. Reasonably successful. ( Read the details here )

I bought a crystal growing kit on a visit to @Bristol (monoammonium phosphate) and also decided to have a go with some plain old sodium chloride. The kit warned not to let crystals grow on the sides of the jar, because capillary action would cause them to grow out of the container - a phenomenon called crystal climbing ( Read more... )

Had a bit of an attack of Real Life, so here is a belated report on Mancunicon 2016. I’m sure the lifts have been moaned about much elsewhere, so the only thing I’m going to add to that is that Ming and I had a 5-10 minute period of alarm when we thought that Smitty might be stuck in a broken lift! For stuff about programme and food, read on.

( ”Read )

Saw lots of people, did lots of things, bought my own body weight in books.
( Read the details here )

Happy New Year to one and all! Been a bit remiss at posting of late, but at least I kept the book list updated and only had December's volumes to add to it, so here it is.

Here are the books I ( read in 2014 )

Anyone know anything about botany? I'm running an RPG that features Dyson Trees as space habitats, and my google-fu has failed to find anything remaotely scientific about the concept on the web. But even as a mere zoologist, I can see a lot of problems inherent in the idea. So I want to think of ways of keeping them in the game, but making them ' ( Read more... )

Got back from Worldcon late last night and my brain is still in science fiction mode. I had a terrific time, and have signed by to pre-support Dublin so that I can (hopefully) repeat the experience in 2019.

( Things done and seen at Loncon 3 )

Better late than never… now that I’m back in the land of the internet, here’s my take on Eastercon.( Read the details here )

There were minor panics here and there (e.g. we discovered we had no string for hanging up the banner, so used spare badge lanyards instead), but otherwise all went well. All the attendees I talked to seemed to be having a good time, and we've already had about a dozen people sign up for next year ( Read more... )