Ud is the Sumerian word for "sun". When the Babylonians arrived, this became Utu. There are a number of different types of sign in Sumerian - they used logograms (a symbol that represents a word)

Now, the general belief is that the Sumerian writing system evolved from the above characters. The idea is that they turned them into crude outlines, which became simpler over time. There are some competing

The writing implement used in writing cuneiform was a reed that was cut at a slight angle so as to produce more of an arrow rather than a circle. The Sumerian word for this reed was, apparently, gi-dub-ba,

The first of these, I've plugged elsewhere but will put here as an actual posted idea for discussion - the multi-queue. The idea is very simple. You have a proto-story queue, which I am tempted to call

I include for your delight and/or memory exhaustion (it's a big file) and/or patience exhaustion (it's very hard to read) a scanned page from Caroline Duncan's handwritten recipe book from the 1800s. If

This post is inspired by the following culprits: These two links are also important. So, onto the problem. Based on calculations published in New Scientist in the 1980s, it would require an energy density

My previous post, way back in the mists of time, was a short specimin of fan fiction. Admittedly, not the best that is out there, but that is neither here nor there. Attempting to write in this art form

This was originally written for a Tomorrow People fan fiction website. When that was closed, I copied it over to FanFiction.net, where it resides in obscurity today. As, indeed, do the two series it is

This was the golden age for psychiatry, with children in their millions getting terrorised by perfectly reputable TV stations. I revisited my old haunts, to see if they were as good as I remembered. Children

Y'know, I learned French and German at school. I can even remember bits of it. Boring. I actually passed a French exam five years after my last French lesson - not by trying to remember any of it, but

Here are the basic ideas that we all know and love/hate (according to whether you belong to any three letter agency). A function can be symmetric (ie: applying it again reverses it), or it can be asymmetric

Derived from the better-known Eric Conspiracy, this does not attempt to prove the Eric-ness of the world, but rather to determine whether bearded Geeks (homo sapiens numerorum et barbam) are sufficiently

Derived from the better-known Eric Conspiracy, this does not attempt to prove the Eric-ness of the world, but rather to determine whether bearded Geeks (homo sapiens numerorum et barbam) are sufficiently

The Sopwith Camel, featured in so many of Snoopy's dreams in Peanuts, flying for real. Documentary on Thomas Sopwith On his hundredth birthday, a Sopwith Camel did a flyover of his house, along with many

I will run a brief extract from my series on aircraft that have achieved Fetish Gold Standard for extreme... well, almost everything. These are the aircraft you love to love or love to hate. Unless you're

Game shows. What on Earth could anyone find to write about gameshows? The skill and cunning of guessing what 100 people said might be found on a beach? Ok, below I've compiled a collection of videos of

Who, as well as annoyingly being unavailable, lives with her spouse and pet brain tumour. No word on whether the spouse has been taught to do any tricks. One of her amazing feats was to get a camera crew

Let's start you off on a short quiz. Is an Aspie: A fan of the Monty Asp Flying Circus tv series? A jovial asparagus? A person owning 76 metric tonnes of books, 144 science laboratories and a social life

That's not a rhetorical question. They have similar nutrients to regular food, but we've known for a long time that nutrients weren't simply absorbed. So, really, the first thing to ask is "what is

This story starts back in the 1990s, when I was a regular contributor to Freshmeat and Slashdot. I first got my fingers burned when I received hate-mail from a couple of scientists because I'd posted a