Best-Sellers of a Bygone Era In times gone by, if a book sold fifty copies, the author was celebrated as a 'best-seller'. Some of the best-selling authors of that era led their readers to the…

In Sierra Leone mothers use caustic soda to home-make soap, and children often exchange it for water and drink it. During 2008 alone, 249 children have been admitted in the surgical pediatric unit of…

See this on Earth Day! Credit: Timothy Newhouse, Chad A. Lewis and Phil S. Baran.[1] And see it any day on Earth. Kapakahines B and F are both awesome in the eye of some of us. They are…

Scientists have developed new technology connecting social media and the hydration needs of plants. Miracle grow, rocks - a message from your plant direct to your social media reader. Who knew? Now…

If Van Helsing were poking around Transylvania these days, chances are he'd be more likely to be looking for the decaying remains of 35,000 year old humans than blood drinking vampires.  Romania…

My mailbox has an automated spam filter, but often some smarter messages seep through and end in there; since, however, I already receive hundreds of emails a day, I am not too happy to entertain…

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal. On the day that Martin…

this is a test of autosave functionality. I have to wait a minute so a new one can be saved. Okay, this was saved and now I will type for a minute or so and see if autosave works. I'll wait for the…

Alterted by a British blog, I read the following in the New York Post. A New Frontier for Title IX: Science Is this for real?

There's an interesting discussion over on the Wikipedia boards about the topic of "popular misconceptions" that has all sorts of interesting linguistic and informational aspects to it (http://en.…

Human alcoholic tendencies go way back, as described in one of the most interesting paragraphs I've ever read in a scientific paper: In the warm tropical climate of sub-Saharan Africa, where the…

afsd asdf ddf df dfsaf adfsffd asfdsa

I had a nice essay going about information and sources, and a whack of the keyboard sent me off to a site I hadn't intended to visit and the post (all 400 words of it) off into bit-dust.  You'd…

In 1930, in the Highlands of New Guinea, a group of Australian brothers looking for gold stumbled across thousands of Stone Age people who had no concept of the outside world. They happened to bring…

How meta!   A poll to ask if we need polling.    We could always do polls, of course, but they were stand-along things that would be in a block somewhere and I haven't seen much value…

This next in my series on Brain donation is of necessity going to seem partisan as the principal objection to this particular programme cannot help but be critical of the organization that is…

Is it a weapon? Is it a tool? Is it a form of protest? Can it make your city pretty? Then it must be a seed ball! Screening criteria for use: are you able to throw, drop, give to someone else to…

If you happened to visit this site earlier today, you may have found it devoid of a suitable banner. That is because I took some time pondering on that design detail for this new site. I wanted…

Part 1, which begins our examination of the question 'what is time?' can be viewed here.Part 2 Some travels through time can be viewed  here.Part 3 discussing language, sequence and order, can…