Today is the 83rd anniversary of the Japanese attack on the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, which marked the entry of the US into World War II (and ultimately sealed the fate of the Axis, since they simply were no match for US industrial might ( Read more... )

The US Capitol building is full of incredible historical art, including a number of brilliant frescoes painted by Italian artist Constantino Brumidi. Fresco, generally associated with Michelangelo's famous Sistine Chapel ceiling, is an art form in which dry pigments are worked into wet plaster. It is a very demanding artform because the artist must ( Read more... )

We're growing familiar with the problem of how Big Data (the compilation of enormous amounts of statistical information) can erode privacy, often by correlating information in ways that enable to identify individuals in unexpected ways. I've often compared it to Lovecraft's famous quote about correlating the contents of our mind -- sometimes it's ( Read more... )

I had been planning to post some reflections on the repeated use of the "Nazi" card in relation to Trump backfiring on the Harris campaign and the Democrats in general. And then I read several news reports on the outbreak of violent Jew-hate in Amsterdam, as thugs of Arab Muslim origin attacked fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv, an Israeli soccer team, ( Read more... )

Today is Trafalgar Day, when the Royal Navy remembers the decisive victory over the combined French and Spanish fleets in the Napoleonic Wars. From that point onward, France never posed a serious threat to the British Isles ( Read more... )

I was in high school when the truck bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut happened. I still remember the shock, the horror- and the frustration that there was no one to punish for this, just shadowy terrorist organizations that disappeared into the population after striking, as if daring us to make mass reprisals ( Read more... )

Twenty-two years ago today, terrorists hijacked four airliners and used them as cruise missiles, flying one each into the north and south towers of the World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon. The destination of the fourth is unknown, since a group of brave passengers fought back, albeit at the cost of their lives, taking the plane down in an ( Read more... )

One last panel discussion from GenCon.

One thing that's obvious when re-reading the seminal works of cyberpunk is how Zeerusty any specifics of the technology have become. The "three megabytes of hot RAM" in Neuromancer seems laughable now, when a small cellphone has 128 gigabytes -- but in 1982, when the book came out, DOS was still built to take ( Read more... )

Here's another panel discussion from GenCon: The 75th Anniversary of the First Soviet Nuclear Test ( Read more... )

Today is the fifty-fifth anniversary of the Apollo XI lunar landing, in which human beings first set foot on another world. We can only hope that in time it will be celebrated on the Moon as well as Earth, as I portray in the Grissom timeline storiesOn a more somber note, it is also the eightieth anniversary of Operation Valkyrie, the famous ( Read more... )