Featured on numerous blogs, including BoingBoing and Slashdot, and now covered in the NY Times.
Law and the Multiverse | Superheroes, supervillains, and the law.
Never let it be said again that superheroes are above the law.
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All posts by LJM
Google Tool: Word Usage Trend Analysis
Google and Harvard have teamed up to provide access to over five million books–and a tool that enables you to track word usage over time.
With little fanfare, Google has made a mammoth database culled from nearly 5.2 million digitized books available to the public for free downloads and online searches, opening a new landscape of possibilities for research and education in the humanities….The intended audience is scholarly, but a simple online tool also allows anyone with a computer to plug in a string of up to five words and see a graph that charts the phrase’s use over time — a diversion that can quickly become as addictive as the habit-forming video game Angry Birds.
More here.
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World’s oldest computer recreated in Lego
Here’s something way cool, via SF writer Walter Jon Williams. Did you know that a mechanical computer was created 2,000 years ago in Greece (Antikythera, to be exact)? Now some folks have created a replica using Legos.
New Scientist TV: World’s oldest computer recreated in Lego.
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Vote for GoodReads 2010 Reader’s Choice Awards
GoodReads.com is holding their annual reader’s choice awards. There are some excellent books on the list (Who Fears Death? Cryoburn, and The Fuller Memorandum all excellent books), and some I haven’t read yet that I’m now intrigued by (Zero History, Surface Detail, Freedom(TM), The Evolutionary Void). Check them out: here are all the science fiction, fantasy, and paranormal fantasy candidates.
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Arsenic Eaters
NASA has a big announcement coming today: scientists have discovered a species of bacteria whose metabolism uses arsenic in lieu of phosphorus. Ecologist and writer Sarah Goslee has more info here.
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3 Dec 2010 Update: Great posts on the newly-created arsenic eating bacteria are popping up, now that Science has released the article. In addition to Sarah Goslee’s post, above, we now have Athena Andreadis, a biomedical researcher and blogger, on the science and what it all means, in her post “Arsenic and Odd Lace.”
Here is Peggy Kolm with “One creature’s poison is another one’s meat,” a post about arsenic and the assorted science fictional uses it’s been put to. (Did you know Klingons need a little arsenic in their diet? Makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?)
Sarah Goslee points us to a good writeup in Astrobiology Magazine about the search for alien life, on Earth.
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7 Dec 2010 Update: As scientists have begun evaluating the arsenic-eaters study, they are finding major flaws in the science and a firestorm of criticism is flaring up over it. Critiques from other researchers in the field are summarized in a Slate article, here.
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