So the entries here should become more frequent this year as I start recording a new plot in my RPG campaign, Udra. About two or so years ago, my old plot thread, Circus of the Mighty, dissolved as two key players moved away–and four years before that, another dying. In the early days of the [...]
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Pace Arko
So, since many of my friends overseas or far away are there, I’m forced to use Facebook. I find Facebook objectionable for many reasons, most of which, most people don’t care about. Facebook has a lot of powerful functions and it’s mostly easy for the nontechnical to use. After that, once a significant mass of [...]
This was originally written as my response to this page. I felt I was eloquent enough to repeat my rant here. Since this is one the deepest parts of myself and my personality, I could rant on and on about why science is so important to me. I could name endless anecdotes where I had [...]
So over the last few months, I’ve been using VoIP to join in tabletop RPG sessions with friends around the world. With players in Bahrain, Thailand, NYC and San Diego, we’ve been running play sessions nearly every alternate Thursday for few months now. Now, this is probably old news to some of you meatspace gamers [...]
So I’m not as well read in biology news as I am in physics news but occasionally I read news in biological research that is just fascinating to me. Extremophile creatures, critters that live in very dry, very hot, very cold or very radioactive environments, fascinate me because they show us the limits of earthly [...]
This just in for news of big scary machines of physics–something called, innocently enough, the Extreme Light Infrastructure. The ELI is a very powerful laser array that will concentrate 200 petawatts of laser power into a very small space-time in hopes of distorting the vacuum on the quantum scale. Let me unpack this a bit [...]
Sometime this year Earth’s human population passed 7 billion people. Sometime this year, for the first time, more than 50% of humanity lived in cities and towns. The predictions are that humanity’s population will peak around 10 billion or so in 2050 and then go into a slow decline. Even in the poorest parts of [...]
Yes, I think it can. Some have argued no. They say you could use a time machine and take baby from ancient China and raise it in our modern world. This baby would adapt just perfectly fine or at least just as well as all the rest of us have. And this is true. But [...]
Looking back on my ancient past, there were a lot of alternatives I could have taken. For example at several points in my childhood I was quite serious about going into puppetry, going into animated film, going into cartooning, and even designing and building models and props for science fiction films. Those were all paths [...]
So I just learned that IBM has built a new kind of experimental silicon chip that more closely models how neurons process and communicate information. Now, as a hard science fiction nerd, I’ve talked about computational neurology and the Blue Brain Project before but, this recent news seems particularly exciting to me because building something [...]