1925-2012

From beamjockey

How Likely Is It That You’ll Die?

Reporting on Matt Bailey's Analytics According to Captain Kirk, which begins with a quantitative summary of what all Star Trek fans know: "red-shirted crewmembers died more than any other crewmembers on the original Star Trek series." - 73% of crew deaths.

However, Bailey does not stop there. The rate of red- ( Read more... )

Why we can't blow up a planet sci-fi style

( Read more... )

Monomaniacal
The newest George Lucas production, Red Tails, forces a Star Wars nerd to come to terms with a troubling philosophy

From faith stems nuance. From myth, generalities. And, sadly for us, the spirit of myth is winning: We revere Star Wars because to our minds-modern machines that equate religion with superstition and are willing to ( Read more... )

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By way of Ann Althouse.

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From Bad Astronomy

Windycon 2011
We spent this past weekend in Chicagoland, at Windycon, as we did in 2008 and 2009 (Also see these posts). Our old friend Frank Hayes was Music GOH and Christian Ready was Toastmaster, so we had been looking forward to this. We were not disappointed.( Read more... )

The First Heroes
The First Heroes: New Tales of the Bronze Age. The stories are a mix of Historical Fiction, SF, Fantasy, and one of Altenate History. Fantasy comes ( Read more... )

I was cleaning out a closet this afternoon and came across the center pages of the program for Minicon 12, which I attended back in 1977. At 2:30 PM, on Saturday, April 9, there was this event:
Debate: "Resolved: Science Fiction Should Get Out of the Classroom and Back into the Gutter Where It Belongs" with Lester del Rey and Ivor Rogers

I must ( Read more... )