2008-05-27

Stairwells

When I was a kid, there was a Gifted And Talented Children program (or something like that) and a bunch of smart kids were invited to come to the Museum of Science on a day when it was closed so that we could listen to lectures about being smart and eat crappy box lunches. I brought my best friend along.

We skipped out of the lectures and went nuts in the empty Museum of Science. It was ours, all ours. We went down back stairwells and found empty corridors and saw disused corners with forgotten display cases that no one had looked at in years. We got to peek into the box rooms and junk drawers of the house of knowledge. Delight! And we didn't get caught!

I wanted to see places I'd never seen before. I wanted to learn secrets.

My friend just wanted to go to the tops of the stairwells and spit down the middle.

2008-05-20

Viable Paradise!

Hey, look, Pam's unofficial index of Viable Paradise info is up! And she linked to Salt Trick! Yay!

Viable Paradise is an SF writers' workshop that happens every fall on Martha's Vineyard. I attended VP XI in 2007.

More Neutrinos!

Scientists are already building an interstellar Schrödinger gun. And they don't even know it. Super-sensitive neutrino detectors are the death of reason, I tell you.

This is the Great Filter, isn't it? Civilizations get just smart enough to disrupt cognition throughout the galaxy.

(via Slashdot)

Hey, it looks like they're making beams of antineutrinos. What happens when a beam of antineutrinos intersects with a beam of neutrinos? Do they annihilate, and release energy? That'd be neat, since they don't interact with anything on the way there. It'd be a way to deliver energy to an arbitrary point in space.