I expect that most of our readers are familiar with TEDTalks. The TED Conferences takes place annually and “bring together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).” Their talks are then published on their website, so that we mere mortals can experience

I find the amount of control that these people have over their bodies amazing: You can hear a bit more about acroyoga in this video (but the demonstrations aren’t as impressive): Jason and Jenny, who you see in the embedded video here, invented the sport about five years ago in Berkeley, CA. I’ve heard of

Because, well, why not? Personally, I am a proper Dune fanatic. Dune is the War and Peace of speculative fiction, and, yes, I say that believing War and Peace is the greatest novel yet written. Dune, too, encompasses everything: War Peace Guerrilla tactics Religion Fanaticism Time Space (tesseracts) Love Death Psychology Compromise Ecology Legend &c…

Who doesn’t love science of the future? Today I’m linking to 7 Man-Made Substances that Laugh in the Face of Physics, which mentions several things which we are now able to create. Granted, most of them are still only produced in limited quantity rather than being ready for mass-market. And at least one (non-Newtonian fluids)

The _New Yorker_ mentions Assassins! HRSFA still has much history to record...

Sense About Science, a UK-based science outreach organization, has launched a campaign to prevent British libel law from being used to stifle scientific debate. The direct motivation for this campaign was a lawsuit brought against Simon Singh by the British Chiropractic Association. Singh holds a PhD in physics and has written bestselling popular science books

Appreciations of two great sets of stories/sketches: especially elegant metaphors for the tiny but devastatingly important processes driving the human mind.

Bits of thoughts on religious systems, created (SF/F) worlds, and their interactions.

On the opening of the new Star Trek movie, I had to make sure you got your dose of Klingons. So here it is: Floris Schönfeld has written a Klingon Opera, which was performed at the Water Mill in New York. NPR did a story on it today and provided a link to the Klingon-Terran

Students from the Cornell Summer Animation Workshop have produced a fantastic and suitably quirky animation for Jonathan Coulton’s “Mandelbrot Set”: You can find out more about Jonathan Coulton on his website. I actually don’t know much apart from his most popular songs, but perhaps someone will enlighten us (with further song recommendations, for example) in