Noo Skientist

So, my first issue. Besides that news thing on synaesthesia there is a report on the monkey shortage*, a picture of They Might Be Giants about to be startled by a new Big Bang, an interview with a guy who was at Chernobyl (my gods), part of a transcript of the incredibly awful and unconvincing chatbot which nonetheless won the Loebner prize last year, and a piece about energy efficiency to reduce greenhouse, and why the Australian government is having another inquiry instead of actually implementing it. I love this magazine, love love love.







* Easily expained - they were needed to type the script of Zagreus

Universal Formula

All fan fiction can be boiled down to the question, "Do you love me?" Discuss.

More disease information

Put boiling water in a bowl, put a towel over your head to form a little tent, and inhale the steam for five minutes. This breaks up teh eval shit in your nose and chest, especially if you add Vicks Vaporub or your national equivalent. (It also makes me pleasantly drowsy.)

I'm a lot better than I was, but still having coughing fits, and the steam and expectorant cough syrup seem to be the only things which get it under control. Man this is tough. I keep expecting to wake up well, the way you do with an ordinary cold, and that's not how this works.

I've steamed my head so many times I feel like yum cha.

Bad Biology in Doctor Who

Right. I'm going to keep an eye out for bad biological science in Doctor Who and add it to this message. It'll be in the Memories. Contributions welcome.

I'd like to open with TIMEFLIGHT which we are, for some reason, revisiting. Dialogue establishes that Concorde has travelled to 140 million years ago, the Jurassic era, where it's getting cold because the Pleistocene Era ("the Ice Age!") is not far away. The Jurassic Era had been over for four million years and the Pleistocene wasn't due for another 138 million years. Doctor Who seems to really struggle with the timetable of geology, which makes you wonder whether encyclopaedias hadn't been invented when the show was being made.

I'd like to add THE CITY OF DEATH, in which our heroes take a comfortable stroll on the prebiotic Earth, well before there's any oxygen in the atmosphere to breathe. (To be fair, Adams dealt with this when he rewrote the story as one of the Dirk Gently novels.) We hear the figure "four hundred million years" repeatedly for the start of life on Earth, which is at least 100 million years after the earliest known fossils of living things, somewhere in the Devonian period.