Distractions

Etgar Ker(r)et has a book out in English, The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God : And Other Stories.
Here’s a nice review and here are the comments at Amazon.
Looking his up on Google, it’s remarkable in how many different languages he’s mentioned.

A Spanish study on social networks in the Marvel Universe reveals that:

1. Captain America is the most connected superhero in the Marvel Universe (considering that Spiderman met someone new in each issue of Marvel Team-up, Cap’s win is a triumph of comic-universe logic over commercial logic, I guess).
2. The social networks in the MU are less clustered then in the real world – people don’t hang out with their friends’ friends as much.

Anyway, it’s a joy to see science at work…

Greg Bear has problems with the Central Dogma of Biology (cool article about current life science). Also, he’s got a column about the difficulties of cloning.

Interview with James Wallis of Hogshead Games, where he mentions his school chum Alex Scott, who wrote the impressive Tudor era RPG Maelstorm way back. This was a very cool and quirky game that came out in Puffin books sometime in the depths of the Eighties, and I think the publisher probably thought it was some sort of Fighting Fantasy style thing. As it is, it remains an oddity, a case where a mainstream children’s publisher brought out an Indie RPG.

Renee looks at software for building conlangs (constructed languages), including a cool program that generates glyphs for an alphabet and some that make up words. I played around with some VB thingie called LangMaker a long while back.