I first heard of this novel when it won a Hugo award in 2015. The unusual title intrigued me, as well as the fact that it was originally written in Chinese. Not knowing anything else about the book except that the translator was Ken Liu (one of the authors from Love, Death, and Robots; see […]
Nikola Tesla was born 162 years ago today in Smiljan, Croatia. Known as a pioneer of radio, the father of alternating current, and the archetypal “mad scientist” he was awarded at least 278 patents. A lifelong eccentric, he never married nor had any romantic relationships, though he’s rumored to have been infatuated with a pigeon. […]
We all love mashups – the combination of characters and elements that are not supposed to be together. They don’t happen often, outside of unofficial fan fiction, due to the logistics of copyrights and such. But sometimes there’s an idea that’s so cool it has to be made. One of those ideas was to combine […]
Sometimes problems that seem easy are actually difficult. A perfect example is the generation of random numbers. In the physical world, it’s easy – we can roll dice, draw a card from a deck, or spin a wheel. Electronic circuits play by different rules. We’ve spent decades developing devices that behave consistently, and software that […]
Technology fads come and go as they vie for the attention of our fickle media. One such fad was nanotechnology, the branch of engineering which operates at or near the molecular scale, around 1-100 nanometers in size. In the 1990’s it was the darling of the science media here in America. When the most outrageous […]
Spring has Sprung The grass has riz I wonder where the flowers is? – Anonymous This time of year is the Vernal Equinox, which is marked by the day when the sun is directly above the Earth’s equator. Officially that happened yesterday, as the darn thing moves forward and back from year to year, but […]
One hundred and six years ago today, Roald Amundsen’s expedition reached the South Pole, being the first humans to do so. The expedition went smoothly, though it was not without controversy. Amundsen had been planning to head for the North Pole, but hearing that Americans Frederick Cook and Robert Peary had gotten the jump on […]
