I heard that the tooth blackening was partly because dental hygiene was sort of iffy back in the day, and covering your teeth with black polish would pretty well disguise any discoloration or minor imperfections. (If it also promoted tooth health, well, so much the better.)

I'm so happy to see Kawashima on this list. She was trained in driving and horse-riding and a whole lot of other awesome "not-for-girls" skills. According to my historian friend, among the people taken in by Kawashima's male disguise was a gay official whom she was spying on. When she was captured (and her gender was…

I never realized it might be satirical, but that makes it infinitely better. (One review I read asserted that the entire budget might have been spent on drugs, which makes sense too.)

I was just watching Transcendence today and this article happens to come along. Somehow it feels like sci-fi of just a few decades ago was painting rosy pictures of mankind's techno-utopian destiny; now all we have are "cautionary tales" about how technology (AIs, robots, nanotech, genetic engineering, etc) will…

The deification of dead emperors (or, later, still-living ones) is only one of the many funny things about Ancient Roman religion. (They also could deify their children, wives, mistresses, male lovers, etc.) And there's plenty of examples of famous writers, doctors, philosophers, etc. being declared gods after their…

That was my impression too. I assumed they kept teleporting around like that because they had merged with all of their parallel selves and so become kind of "unstuck" in time and location, making them potentially everywhere and nowhere. Something like that should be by definition pretty impossible to kill.

I once heard a Chinese joke about a dude whose doctor prescribed him some tiger-penis wine (exactly what it sounds like, alcohol with a tiger's penis floating in it) for his sexual problems. The wine fixes his issues, but when he runs out of the wine and tries to eat the preserved penis itself (assume he is…

This is a minor point, but people with borderline personality disorder are almost never violent towards others, regardless what Hollywood says. (I'm diagnosed BPD and am one of the least violent people you might meet; besides, Wikipedia agrees with me.) I'm thinking antisocial personality disorder is far more likely —…

Christian Scientists are the ones who don't believe in medicine, mainly because they don't believe that anything unpleasant is really "real". Apparent sin and suffering are explained as perceptual errors on our parts. Medicine is proscribed because reliance on "material cures" supposedly retards your spiritual…

I don't trust "mind uploading" for the same reason I wouldn't trust a teleporter — the risk of becoming a philosophical zombie would be too great.

Oh ho, the simulation argument — I remember being completely blown away the first time I read it. Highly recommended.

As someone who just finished a nice plate of fried tofu, this makes me wish I had a waffle iron. I'll bet it's much faster than using a pan.

I've been reading all week about various interpretations of quantum mechanics and while I'm sure I don't understand it adequately, I thought the above was kind of implied by some researchers in that field. (Or maybe less "There is no real world" and more "The process of observation necessarily alters any data we can…

Reading about Chinese emperors in various dynasties, it's not unusual to hear that someone hacked his way through five or six of his brothers to obtain the throne. Tang Taizong is considered one of the greatest Chinese emperors of all time, and he killed no less than eight of his elder siblings in order to become the…

I was just sitting here listening to the soundtrack for The Wicker Man when I came across this. Fantastic.

There are already tons of people out there who can't distinguish reality from fantasy on some level. And if a little doublethink lets you believe yourself to be a glamorous rock-star as opposed to an aging gas-station cashier, which one would people really choose?

The walled-into-a-room monks and nuns were called anchorites and anchoresses, I believe. Did not realize Hildegard had been one though!

Some of the Innocents have been pretty bad too; plus it's always more ironic when they go south.

I must be one of the few people who actually read (and liked) Darwin's Radio. Not to be nitpicky, but the summary you included is perhaps better fitted to the sequel, Darwin's Children — Radio ends with the birth of the first superhuman kid, Children picks up from there.

Gradually picking up on the terminology as you go along is certainly what the author intended, and I can see how it works for certain readers. In a sense it mimics learning any language: the first time you encountered the word "quiche" in the real world, for example, there (probably) wasn't a person standing by ready…