What would English look like with only Germanic words, and none of the Latin words that came with the Norman French? Science fiction writer Poul Anderson wrote an essay called "Uncleftish Beholding" ("Atomic Theory"), where he lays out the basics of chemistry using only German-derived English words. It kinda makes my brain hurt, but it's pretty ( Read more... )

I got this link from Gautam Mukunda, who I know from the David Brin email list.

Farmer's daughter disarms terrorist and shoots him dead with AK47Apparently around the India/Pakistan border, militants are constantly demanding food and lodging from the nearby villages. They tried to demand it from one family, and the father said no. They thrashed ( Read more... )

Just stuff I had open, mostly from the Larry Niven email list...

Jedi religion founder accuses Tesco [grocery store] of discrimination over rules on hoods Amazingly and amusingly, the store didn't immediately whip out the lawyers, but instead used examples from the Star Wars movies to show Jedi not wearing hoods.

Philip K. Dick letter praising " ( Read more... )

I'm back from Con†Stellation, not that I went far, and I had a blast! Granted, I was a little bummed that it was on the same weekend as Anime Weekend Atlanta, but Con†Stellation gets my first loyalty. This year, I served as assistant guest liaison, helping take pressure off of Sue as she handled both guest liaison and dealer liaison duties ( Read more... )

I know a lot of my friends list will be at AWA this weekend, but in case you aren't, I'm inviting you to the local science fiction convention this weekend. This year's constellation is the fox. I'm looking forward to it.

( T-shirt art )

Wow, it figures that the one time I manage to get to HAAS in about a month, it's not actually happening. Oh well, back to the house...

While on the subject of enormous artificial worlds, here's an excellent visualization of Larry Niven's Ringworld. This is something I really wanted to do back before I got too busy. I got as far as making model sketches on graph paper before I konked out.

( Ringworld movie )

( Here's someone's short film inspired by Arthur C. Clarke's novel Rendezvous With Rama, about exploring a large alien spacecraft from outside the solar system. )

Click to view

Believe it or not, well-known science fiction author Ray Bradbury was in a cheesily futuristic prune commercial in 1968. It actually has better production values than some of the original Star Trek... ;-)