Though fantasy is one of my favorite genres, I haven’t read a lot of it, outside of Tolkien and Harry Potter. The City Stained Red is a 2015 epic fantasy novel by Sam Sykes (the pen name of Sam Watkins, son of Outlander author Diana Gabaldon.) As with most books of this type, it’s set […]
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 […]
Lots of folks like to mix up literary styles, such as horror and comedy, or mystery and romance. You all know I’m partial to both sci-fi and westerns. For the longest time, the big-city critics called this combination the lowest of the low. Yet when a fellow named Joss Whedon dreamed up a show called […]
Today is Easter in most of the world, celebrating the Resurrection of Jesus according to the Christian tradition. Even for those of us who aren’t particularly religious, Easter is an important American cultural tradition, a celebration of life and renewal. That’s why the holiday got melded with the ancient pagan fertility rituals associated with the […]
Monument to the Age of Steam: The Eiffel Tower Nothing says “Paris” like the Eiffel Tower. France’s most iconic landmark was officially opened on this day in 1889. The tower is named for Gustav Eiffel, the engineer whose firm designed it for the 1889 World’s Fair. At the time many artists and architects hated it, […]
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 […]
Anime by Mag Garden, Written by Kore Yamazuki and Aya Takaha, directed by Norihiro Naganuma. Being big fans of anime, Arlys and I are always looking for new shows to watch. Though there are dozens of new series every season, very few are serious shows aimed at adults. Last summer we were surprised to hear […]
