The Bad Astronomer (Phil Plait) likes to share optical illusions and explain how they work. The moral he draws is that our mere meat bodies can't tell us what's going on ( Read more... )

Some of my friends here were also participants in the science fiction newsgroups in the past, or possibly still are. You might recall some political fights there, some involving the affable David Friedman demanding "free market" approaches to almost everything (he did allow as how some things were "natural monopolies" but he didn't allow that any ( Read more... )

Spiritual Kvintet does a creditable Czech version of "Which Side Are You On?"

I'm just free-associating here, right, and I find myself clicking on every version of "MacPherson's Lament" that comes up in the list -- it takes four clicks to end up with a version in Czech and it's not the only one ( Read more... )

Frank took us to the Monastery beer garden at the base of Petrin Hill. Maybe not the base, maybe partway up. There's supposed to be an antenna on that r. We had beer and beer-based food. Emma and Frank adored ther goulash in bread bowls: I would have found it too salty to finish. Emma also ordered a beer cheese spread and potyato pancakes but ( Read more... )

Here we are. I'm posting from Emma's apple laptop, which is a bit annoying but less so than any other apple computer I have ever used. It's about eleven in the morning on Tuesday, and we went out to take care of a little business (metro tickets, cash, some toiletries, and a phone I don't quite understand) and now Emma's crashing and pretty soon I ( Read more... )

Semitic languages are written with the vowels as diacritical marks, if at all, because the word stem is the consonants and the vowels shift in more-or-less regular patterns as the word is declined. That's okay ( Read more... )