Science. Reads like science fiction. Reminds me of same.

I would have been less surprised if someone had uncovered an alien.

Says Peter Brown, a palaeoanthropologist and one of the authors in the paper.

Giant rats, dwarf humans, and waist-high pygmy elephants. Darwin would have been proud.

Fallout (giant rats), Hominids (alternate anthropological history), Speaker for the Dead, Startide Rising & Uplift War (hidden species), Think Like a Dinosaur (smart dinos), the adventures of Miles Naismith Vorkosigan (smart cretin) come to mind. And whoa they released a port of Fallout 1 & 2 for OS X in 2002.

There and back again

OK, back where I started.. too concussed in Beijing to go hunt 4 an internet cafe. Shop, eat, sightsee, sleep.. that basically summarizes my last 5 daze. Found the food court here in HK airport this time.. had slightly better fare.. Alrite gotta run to catch my flight now, update again at home.

Greetings from Hong Kong

I stand typing this at a cafe in the airport transit hallways.. First thing I did was download and install firefox on this win 98 PC. Gives me a sense of security, but I guess some enterprising guy may have installed a keylogger on this machine anyway. Oh well.

The char siew noodles at the cafe weren't very good.. Anyway I dun think I shld keep my parents waiting.. Too bad can't access the usb drive otherwise could try uploading some pics of the airport, heh.

Btw JH, I guess I'll find out abt those 'dragon girls' soon enough :p

Clickfest. Linkmania. Take your pick.

It's award season. Not just Nobel Prizes, but also Hugo Awards (reader-voted) for science fiction & fantasy, as well as the Rolex awards for some very deserving people doing good stuff for the community, wildlife or the natural environment or a mix.

"Hurricane reveals message from above" - foobar.

Researchers use photoluminescence spectroscopy. Could be very useful for Singapore/DSO. From scienceblog.

Also from scienceblog, but slightly older news, though already slashdotted (3 days after appearing on scienceblog), tiny mechanical switches outstrip magnetic storage. Punch cards, Difference Engine, Victorian steampunk, what else is new?

Does the macroscopic 4-dimensional (3 space, 1 time) universe we observe necessarily result from the assumptions that 1) cause precedes effect and 2) Einstein's special relativity holds? Actually, they used 4-dimensional building blocks (!!!), but contrary to intuition the everyday world we observe does not necessarily result. Only when they put in those 2 assumptions above did it appear. From crumb trail. Will comment if I manage to get a copy of the paper.