Speculative Nonfiction

Fleeting years have borne away The voice of Alfarata:

In the peri-marketing articles that appeared with the release of Fury Road, there was a lot of comparison to Westerns. This comparison is n...

A proposal discussed here . The full-on proposal is to eliminate any trace of the transit shadow, with a second less energy-intensive optio...

The more that our models (using only "dumb physics") are able to effectively model the universe, the less we should assume that th...

It's difficult to declare the start or end of an age when you're living in it, but I totally did it dude. In 2011 I looked back and...

Quite enjoyable, and as many people have said, on par with episodes III and IV. But most important: Abrams has developed a trick that avoi...

Fermilab tried to measure "quantum jitter", which would be expected if space and time are quantized, like energy. They did not fi...

As argued previously by other parties. From the abstract: Our model also shows that [the likelihood of the emergence of intelligence] is...

This was a great show. First of all it had Bill Katt ( who should've been Luke Skywalker instead of Mark Hammill, because Bill Katt c...

Yes, of course they can, because after all we create theories, and we're computers - but this is less trivial, because this is the fir...

There are a few comments online about Her that are fully on the mark about the content of the movie, yet miss the main goals I think Jonze ...

That probability is increasing. Scholz's Star passed well within the outer edge of the Oort Cloud a mere 70,000 years ago . It's i...

Similar to alkaline lakes on Earth; well within the pH range of extremophiles. Paper here . Above: geysers at the south pole of Encelad...

One of the explanations for the apparent rarity of life in the universe is the frightening gamma ray burst - perhaps life is astonishingly r...

Paper here . Hinges on the trapping of methane as clathrates, similar to subglacial lakes (i.e. Vostok) on Earth.

"Martyrs" is the first horror movie I've seen that I would put within hailing distance of Hellraiser. Here's a review ; I...

You know, prolific 90s death metal producer at Morrisound Studios? If you don't know, then you probably won't care about this aweso...

Overcoming Bias covers two papers on SETI; importantly, the papers distinguish between the search for artifacts (like Dyson spheres) and the...

Normally I care more about the ideas than how they're rendered, but this is outstanding enough that it made even my blunted retinas happ...