Category: Uncategorized

Sentient robots show up frequently in science fiction. We all have this feeling the someday we will build such things, but how do we get there? Sometimes it happens by accident. Lightning hits the machine, or a screw goes in backwards at the factory. Whatever it is, magic happens and now the machine is special.…

Looks like our 4th wave is going out with a whimper, thanks to the vaccine. Other countries, like India, haven’t been so lucky. What I worry about now is if a new variant emerges that evades the current vaccines. We may end up in a situation like flu, where we need an updated vaccine each…

The books “SuSAn” and “Time of the Stones” describe a computer called the Stone, which stores the records of our civilization. It is placed on a remote hill high in the mountains at the headwaters of the Long River. Yesterday I went to the real-world place that inspired the setting. It was sort of a…

There was once a time when I was skeptical about radioactive dating. You can measure the level of a substance, but you can’t say anything about the age of an object unless you know how much was there to begin with! Then I read Hoyle’s cosomology book, and it all made sense. In at least…

Today I got my first negative book review on Amazon. In a way it’s kind of exciting, because it means someone beside a friend read the book! It is bad form to respond directly to a review, but I feel it is important to say something here, because I want to help set people’s expectations.…

For the sake of discussion, let me propose some highly oversimplified definitions: science – Knowledge you test for yourself. religion – Knowledge you get from someone else and take on faith. What does this imply? The practical everyday business of science requires us to take things on faith. We can’t possibly reproduce every experiment ourselves,…

For years I’ve used FatCow to host my web-site: rothganger.org. Turns out that there was nothing there but a parking page, complete with ads for stuff wholly unrelated to me. Seems I forgot to transfer my old site contents when I switched hosting services! Well, all that is about to change. Today I loaded up…