My favourite wikipedia article is called List of Missions to Venus.

Nowadays we're all amazed that astronomers can send a rocket out, and expect it to fly around the planet three times, nip round the moon, change trajectory while passing Jupiter, and land on some asteroid like a cautious butterfly, so it can send …

Deep Space 9, Season 6, Episode 9 - 'Statistical Probabilities'

This episode introduces the ridiculous notion that clever people can predict the future with clever Maths, and it's very special.

Most sci-fi relies on now-but-later ideas of how the world works, and fancy special effects, to entertain. This episode didn't …

I imagine the conversation between a University and potential student going like this:

1    I'd like to get qualified in a subject.

Four years.

1    Woah there, I haven't told you what I want to learn yet.

Doesn't matter. Everything takes four years to learn.

1    Really?  *Everything*? Art and medicine? …

"News sources are biased", and "everyone lives in a bubble", we all hear constantly (or perhaps that's just my bubble). But what would a non-biased news source look like?

Taking a strict middle-ground gives immediately ridiculous conclusions. Perhaps the UK's food banks suggest some problem, but not …

I'll miss pens when they go. I like how they feel. I like that handwriting is almost impossible to fake. I like that when I receive a letter, I can tell who sent it just from how they write the address. But it all has to go.

Pens have some advantages over computers. One can generally access a pen-record faster - just …

I wake, and enter my algorithm-free RSS feed. It is perfect and pure.

I see a list (in the order I select) of everyone I want to follow. YouTube channels show up just like everything else, and I see only the name. With a quick shortcut-key, I tell the computer I want to watch the video later.

Onto the next feed, I find …

I felt so very bored with learning in high school that WWII was bad.

The lesson plan, as far as I remember, was this:

• War happened, it was bad.
• It was bad the war happened.
• Nazis did a war, which was bad.
• Nazis did it because of racism, which is also bad.
• (English class) Poetry about how the war was bad
• 11 Million …

About a quarter of the time I say I'm Scottish, someone mentions how beautiful the nature there is, and how much they'd like to visit.

Putting aside that they might just be saying this as a conversation piece, and putting our 'autistic caps' on, the idea's baffling.

I've travelled a reasonable chunk of the planet, and …

Reading Plato's various Dialogues, I've come across a few very strange choices from the translators.

Firstly, a pig could be dedicated as a 'sacrifice' to a god. I've read that people would then eat the 'sacrifice', and initially thought this was a cop-out - if you eat the meal, then you're not really sacrificing …