Speculative Nonfiction

I was lucky to attend a video lecture by James Miller, economist at Smith College, facilitated by Joshua Fox. Thanks for having this event!...

Previously I had advanced the idea that, if intelligence has arisen elsewhere in the galaxy, it is likely to have colonized the galaxy in so...

Here's the original for comparison. It's interesting how many really well put-together songs tolerate export to other genres,...

A 2015 paper by Landenmark et al estimates the total number of DNA bases in nature as 5.3x10^31 megabases. This of course leads to questio...

A summary: At a lower bound, it's estimated on average there is one 17,000 LY away. The number that is being reported is that this mea...

Hat tip Marginal Revolution for both of these. the nucleus of it is starting with this man, who as a labor of love is collecting/cataloging...

Initially I was excited to see this, not sure why it got so little fanfare, and now I know. Critics were surprisingly positive. I notice t...

This is George in Down Factor and From Hell . (Second from right - next to Paul Bostaph from Slayer.) I had the good fortune to know G...

There have been exogenous extinctions, ie not from an ecosystem's "internal contradictions." Examples are massive magma flows...

One answer to the Fermi paradox is that we are in fact alone, because life - at least intelligent life - is vanishingly rare or completely a...

Terraforming Venus would require taking almost all of the CO2 out of its atmosphere, so it becomes breathable, doesn't crush us (current...

It's the best of the three new ones, and I think the second best in the entire franchise after Empire. I'm lazy, so some of these t...

It has been estimated that a manned Mars mission would cost $100 billion. Compare this to the most recent unmanned lander, Insight, at $830...

Bruce Dickinson with flamethrowers. From Rolling Stone. I went to see Maiden in September in Sacramento (and thanks to Mr. Black for...

After the very cool news showing pretty solid evidence that an asteroid breakup and bolide shower was likely responsible for the mid-Ordovic...

This is not good news. We should expect that humans undergoing a Mars trip, with selectively vulnerable hippocampi and dependent on complex...

Imagine that due to some breakthrough in computer science, we can determine (with certainty) that for a certain architecture, there are some...

Wrll, it made me think of Motorhead, for a second, but no actual connection. The same cannot be said for this .