By presenting these materials first, before the reader engages with the story on the story’s own terms, and not those provided by the foreword, the reader’s entire experience with and expectations of the story are distorted.
Poetry Practice, Exercise 4
This fourth exercise calls for 16 unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter. They should use pyrrhic and trochaic substitutions, weak endings, and enjambments.
Announcing: Weekly Science and Technology Newsletter
I am announcing a weekly update post/newsletter, primarily focused on science and technology, but with flexibility for me to include other content if I come across something interesting.
Counting Languages
Far from being a modern phenomenon, the declining diversity of language owes more to broad, civilizational factors, like the onset of agriculture and settlement of large city-states, than it does to the dominance of English in the current international system.
Poetry Practice, Exercise 3
This exercise has two parts: five pairs of unrhymed iambic pentameter, with the first line being end-stopped and without caesuras, and another five pairs with enjambment and caesuras.
Tracing 3I/ATLAS’ Formation
The authors were able to determine what the ancient solar system from which the comet originated might have been like.
Impact Enclaves
This was no secret cavern full of dinosaurs lasting long past the demise of the rest of their kind. Rather, the paper explores how the energy associated with asteroid impacts generates hydrothermal environments which are ideal for the sustainment of life.
An Update on Fusion Challenges
The timing of the release is deliberately designed to build excitement and a surge in momentum for a project. It goes hand-in-hand with what is probably an unrealistic timeline.
Acute Observation and Attention to Detail
There is merit in merely lingering, but more than a commitment of time, what this requires is a commitment of attention and focus. It is both something which requires practice and which is required for practice
Zeroing Infinity
I’m certainly not mathematician enough to approach the problem in a mathematically rigorous way – then again, most of the arguments cited in Quanta’s article are more philosophical or metaphysical than mathematical.
IGC Publishing 