A Commonplace Book

“The important thing is that we increased participation” said the arsonist as the last volunteer fire company pulled away from the extingui...

At top is one of the toggles on my pavilion. They started as commercial 1.5” toggles, with a central groove for the tie that attaches ...

Mallomar SF has a superficial shell of crunchy hard science, but when you bite into it’s full of fluffy, gooey magical science and bad scien...

A clearer image of the illustration is reproduced here . The English Game There are many games of tables with dic...

In Neal Stephenson’s 2015 novel, the Human Race does its best to deal with an oncoming planetary catastrophe, a 5,000 year bombardment of Ea...

Because the science is rubbish , and we know it. This is a real problem for contemporary hard SF: the universe is not nearly as hospitable t...

In the Company's records this oath occurs immediately after a curious calendar, written in 15th century hand, and before a list of ...

Inventories of Henry VIII's tents reveal some of the details of their construction. In the 1547 inventory descriptions of "round ho...

Athena, Apollo, time travel, Socrates, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Marsilio Ficino and robot ethics.

New Horizons is often described as the size of a grand piano. Somehow it pleases me to come from a culture that calibrates the size of spac...