Cixin Liu’s work is among that I am avoiding, in this case because of his support for the Chinese Communist Party’s crimes against humanity, arguably attempted genocide, against the Uyghurs.

hear you making vacation plans

I suggest that the headline may be indicating that there is not, in fact, a problem. What the (legitimate) criticisms of the paper are saying is not that there is not a problem outside the main areas surveyed by the authors of the paper, but that the conclusions are not proven. We can be fairly sure that there is a…

You know what most people are going to be eating in Westeros when Game of Thrones returns on on April 14? Gruel. They’re shoveling down gruel and vermin

Readers may be interested to learn that the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh are currently showcasing an exhibition of key alchemical texts dating to the 17th century, including Scotland’s only copy of the Ripley Scroll: https://www.rcpe.ac.uk/heritage/searching-elixir-life 

Readers may also be interested to learn about the methods of discouraging (or at least detecting) interference with messages in the days before the modern envelope, a process known as letterlocking. This usually used the manuscript itself, which would be sealed, sometimes elaborately. If the letter was opened by…

It’s a term used to describe the florid/edge of a heart attack complexion of the kind of middle aged racist who you see ranting on about “PC gone mad” and Polish plumbers on BBC Question Time, or populating both the seats at a UKIP conference.

I’m sitting in Scotland, where back in 2014 we were assured that the only way to stay in the EU was to vote against Independence. I wasn’t fooled, but many were. You are pretty much correct. It’s not fair to say that everyone who voted for Brexit was a white nativist, but you can be sure that all the racists voted for…

The problem being that there is nothing of Smeagol left in Theresa May.

I have two cautionary tales about this plant.

Indeed. I’m not queer in the sexual sense (well, certain aspects of my masculine expression are a bit of a grey area, but not in the same way that those people I know who do identify as queer are). I am autistic, and I related very strongly to this show for two reasons.

I just can’t find it in myself to care. I’ve had enough of getting emotionally invested in a TV show only for some bean counter to decide that the numbers are more important than telling a story to completion, especially when the mediocre tends to end up running much longer than the genuinely engaging.

So many clickbait articles on this subject.

I abandoned reading this because of all those endlessly flickering gifs. My mind couldn’t focus on the text. Do you require an epilepsy warning on this article?

The station, as Stre correctly points out, malfunctioned. This is in contrast to the Mars Climate Orbiter, which failed because Lockheed, like most Americans, hadn’t learned to use SI units like the civilised (i.e. all of it, these days) world.

I disagree. I would give this a negative rating if I could. Trashed every ecosystem I can think of. Invasive. Destructive. Definitely not as advertised. This product should be discontinued immediately.

Old-timey pirates are typically portrayed as stupid, unrefined thugs whose only interests involved plundering captured ships and forcing enemies to walk the plank.

I decided some time ago that I was going to actively pursue the works of writers who are not cishet white blokes. In that, I think I’ve had some success, reading more books by women, discovering Afrofuturism and reading a lot more work in translation (mainly, it must be admitted, from Mandarin: the science fiction…

I’m finding the use of American rap for this film leaves me deeply uncomfortable. This film is set in a proud African society, one that has held off Western looting of the continent and that presumably has its own artistic traditions, and yet we’re expected to accept that they’re listening to American rap.

Well, for a start it’s outside the scope of the book. It’s about how cities adapt.