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Why Are You Here? A New Theory May Hold the Missing Piece
via The Huffington Post: Living by Robert Lanza, M.D. 2010.11.12 Why do you happen to be alive on this lush little planet with its warm sun and coconut trees? And at just the right time in the history of the universe? The surface of the molten earth has cooled, but it’s not too cold. And…
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Grandma’s Superhero Therapy
via My Modern Met A few years ago, French photographer Sacha Goldberger found his 91-year-old Hungarian grandmother Frederika feeling lonely and depressed. To cheer her up, he suggested that they shoot a series of outrageous photographs in unusual costumes, poses, and locations. Grandma reluctantly agreed, but once they got rolling, she couldn’t stop smiling. SEE…
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Trivia Thursday
In Michael Moorcock’s “Behold the Man,” time-traveller Karl Glogauer takes the place of what legendary character? This Catharine Asaro story of a ballerina and her future stepson’s trials in a virtual reality mansion appeared in the SF collection Christmas Forever. What is its colorful title? In “The War Beneath the Tree,” sentient toys overthrow their…
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Institute for the Future: Map of the Robot Renaissance
via Boing Boing Last week, my colleagues and I at Institute for the Future held our Robot Renaissance conference, where we presented our research on the future of robotics. As part of this year-long project, we developed the above map to summarize our big forecasts and present some striking signals, present-day examples of technologies that…
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Heroes of Science
Etsy seller Eavesmade specializes in “lasercut science goodness,” and creates wonderful Heroes of Science wooden Christmas ornaments. The scientists offered are: Alfred Russel Wallace (evolution) Stephen Hawking (theoretical physics/cosmology) Rosalind Franklin (genetics) Johannes Kepler (mathematics/astronomy) Marie Curie (radiation/chemistry) Nicolaus Copernicus (astronomy) Jane Goodall (primatology) William Harvey (medicine/anatomy) Carl Sagan (astronomy/cosmology) Rachel Carson (ecology) Carl Linnaeus…
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Santa Claus is Real
Explained…with science! You can’t argue with science. See the proof at Surviving the World.
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Trivia Thursday
In Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, what region is Perrin from? A) Two Rivers B) Lone Pine C) Spring Valley D) Fern Hamlet E) Three Streams Who was the commander of the Gammilons? What do the authors James Tiptree Jr., H. Beam Piper, Peter George, and Robert E. Howard have in common? In Nancy…
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Pretend to Be a Time Traveler Day
It’s today! As Dresden Codak described: You must spend the entire day in costume and character. The only rule is that you cannot actually tell anyone that you are a time traveler. Other than that, anything’s game. There are three possible options: 1) Utopian/cliché Future – “If the Future did a documentary of the last…
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Future Potter
In yet another example of a spinoff being cooler than the actual franchise, DeviantArt member spicysteweddemon has created a whole set of space opera-esque Harry Potter characters, including Overlord Voldemort, General Lucius Malfoy of the Slytherin Alliance, and Captain Harold J. Potter of the ISS Griffin. The various characters’ costumes and titles hint at an…
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Trivia Thursday
This planet was home of House Corrino and Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV. In the Twilight Zone episode “The Howling Man,” who is imprisoned in the monastery? For lack of a better word, the builders of the Riverworld were called this. What actor played Starman, in the movie by that title? You’d better have a glitter…