Category: Etc

Free of labels, which is also a good rule for living

Get Your Seats Now

SEVEN HUNDRED AND FIFTY METEORS an hour are predicted for next year’s Draconid shower, when the earth passes through a knot of Comet Giacobini-Zinner debris. (Note: it’s best observed from Europe, Africa and the Middle East.) Mark your calendars and…

World Space Week! With Balloons!

THE THINGS YOU LEARN WITH a computer: This is World Space Week, shining a pre-dawn beacon on the modern launchpad set, and in observational honor thereof I offer the Brooklyn Space Project: a father-and-son team who sent a HD-camera-and-GPS-equipped weather…

The Shape Of Time

WHEN I WAS YOUNGER THAN I am now, I used to think Time was arranged in neat little blocks as on the calendar. The “bottom of the month” felt like the bottom of the month, and I delighted in each…

Wrapping Round

EVER CATCH HOLD OF THE edge of a metaphor that no amount of teasing will out? That’s why I call the blog “The Metaphorager” in fact: I sometimes feel like Newton’s beachcomber looking for the one bit of sea-wrack which…

Night-time Toddy

A ZOROASTRIAN (BECAUSE HE WAS, and because sometimes it really does matter) once jumped the battery of my otherwise unbroken vehicle on an otherwise sad day and, because this is my life, we got into a discussion of God(1) and…

Come Out To Sonoma

HAVING MENTIONED THIS ON FACEBOOK yesterday in the wake of U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker’s 136-page ruling against Proposition 8, I’d better repeat it here: Neal Ross Attinson offers his services as secular ULC minister to marriage-seeking gay…

From the Ashes

AS DETAILED ELSEWHERE, I DID some freelance work in the early 1990s for an eccentric Northern California non-profit called Obscure Research Labs. Well… when the phone rings at 3 a.m. and the familiar metallic voice offers an occasional work-from-home project…

6,855,687,281 Minus 9

THAT’S THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE currently inhabiting the Earth’s surface (according to http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html at 19:11 UTC, July 13, 2010), less the nine currently orbiting it (according to http://www.howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com/). (Data maketh strange bedfellows. But at least we know how many.)