• Where have I been? Chasing eclipses and home improvement contractors, for the most part. We found that a lot of people will cut down ( Read more... )

• My old friend Lee Hart scratchbuilt a marvelous model of the Galileo spacecraft, including an operating COSMAC processor that blinks out the Arecibo message on an LED.
• The COSMAC 1802 was a good choice for spacecraft, because it drew almost no power and could be ( Read more... )

We domesticated dogs. And dogs, in return, made human civilization possible.

Work with me here. A lot of my recent reading has been about human origins, stemming from my fascination with Homo Neanderthalis and what became of him. Two books of note: The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond (1993) and Before the Dawn by Nicholas Wade (2007.) Jared ( Read more... )

I became fascinated with Neanderthal humans ten or twelve years ago, and was trying to concoct an SF story concept around them when I got the idea for The Cunning Blood-and that was the end of that. Recently, cavemen have returned to our cultural consciousness in a big way, thanks to a series ( Read more... )

• Sun is releasing Java under the same GPL V2 license that governs use and distribution of the Linux kernel. Tim Bray, director of Web technologies at Sun, fills in some of the details here. It's interesting how the three big players in this particular game ( Read more... )

• Slashdot aggregated an article about brain size and Neanderthal genes, with all the silly jokes and breathless recriminations that any such business now generates...but it also gave a name to the bump that I have on the back of my head: It's an occipital ( Read more... )