When we saw Kilauea in October, on our honey moon to Hawai’i, my wife and I were a bit disappointed to have missed seeing any lava or eruptions. Well, I guess we only missed it by 5 months or so–a blink of the eye on the geological scale. So here...
“I for one welcome our new computer overlords,” wrote former Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings on the answer to his Final Jeopardy question as he conceded his defeat to the IBM supercomputer Watson. No matter who you were rooting for, it was indeed an historic day: February 16, 2011 will mark...
Today (February 8th, 2011) is Jules Verne’s 183th birthday. I think it should be a national holiday. Although since he’s French, I suppose it would just be a French national holiday. Regardless, today is most certainly a day for all steampunk and neo-Victorian enthusiasts, as well anyone who considers themselves...
Big news in science and astronomy, so I can’t pass it up. The Keplar space telescope has recently discovered its first small, rocky exoplanet, designated Kepler-10b, located some 560 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus. The host star is about 11 billion years old, and unfortunately the planet is...
Happy 2011! Gosh, I’m feeling old. Hopefully, I’ll still make it to the 2060s and beyond, at which point we might… just might… be nearing the technological singularity and develop new bio- and nano-technologies enabling a rapid rise in health and over-all life expectancy. That’s my hope, anyway. To that...
