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Travel Distant Worlds
Dark Roasted Blend has posted a roundup of art depicting science fiction tourism, including a bunch of wonderful art deco-esque travel posters by artist Steven Thomas. I just love these; they’re the sort of thing you’d expect in an alternate universe where steampunk had really gotten off the ground. I’m particularly taken with the Yellow…
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Genome Quilts
Quilter Beverly St. Clair attended a lecture on the Human Genome Project and was inspired to translate the DNA base molecules into quilt blocks. (That’s the sequence GATCGCCCTT up above.) She’s created several quilts based on various gene sequences; her interpretation of one of the genes in Hepatitis C is particularly lovely. She’s also done…
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How to Cook an Alien
Remember what I’ve said before, about Websites that make you go, “Wait…what?” Here’s another one. Greys are, naturally grey in colour, though they are as tall as blues. It is thought that they come from a colder planet than the blues. Their meat is generally tougher than blues, and also higher in cholesterol. Good for…
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A Brief History of the 21st Century
Esquire has predicted the next 100 years for us. A few of these sound rather uncomfortably plausible. JUNE 11, 2041: In a matter of weeks, the entire Internet is replaced by “news blow,” a granular microbe that allows information to be snorted, injected, or smoked. Data can now be synthesized into a water-soluble powder and…
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Even Lamer Than Princess Python
The International Society of Supervillains blog (whose authors include King Oblivion, Ph.D., MW’s Head on a Robot Body, and Doktor Maxwell von Puppykicker the Third) have plumbed the depths of comics fandom to bring you the very worst supervillains of all time. Ten-Eyed Man History: Philip Reardon, a Vietnam vet who was partially blinded when…
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My Kind of Fossil Fuel
California Polytechnic State University scientist Raul Cano drilled into a 45-million-year-old weevil trapped in ancient amber and extracted more than 2,000 different kinds of microscopic organisms. One of the things he dug out was ancient yeast, which he managed to reactivate. And now he uses it to brew beer. The beer has received good reviews…
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Teach the Controversy
The theory of childhood, also known as child origin, is a damnable, loathsome and indefensible lie. How can any thinking person suppose all humans used to be babies once? There is no development path from babies to adults, no transitional forms between these two species. Show me even one baby with the head of a…
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Fannish Vacation Destinations
Now that Las Vegas’ Star Trek: The Experience is closing, what’s an SF fan to do? Actual space tourism is beyond the pocketbook of most of us geeks, but fortunately there are plenty of other options. Besides the Atomic Tourism we’ve mentioned previously, there’s the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, dozens of observatories, Space Camp,…
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This Makes Me Oddly Happy
The McFarland Memorial bell tower on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus has a rather arresting shape, which apparently put somebody in a Tolkienesque frame of mind. Last Sunday it was surreptitiously “enhanced.” Link (via Museum of Hoaxes)
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What Geeks Do When They’re Rich
They build their own landspeeders. We built this fiberglass replica landspeeder from the ground up on a custom aluminum chassis. The electric drive system is capable of a top speed around 25 mph. The speeder is the same size as the original, and can travel several miles on a single battery charge. From some of…