what Dave thinks about movies, books and everything
There has been a renaissance in board games in the last 15 years or so. Most of the newer games are made in Germany, for some reason. What’s different about the newer games is that they rely on more strategy and less luck. Many of the games give you different ways of getting points, so […]
Here are my favourite 20 albums in three categories. There are lots of great individual songs but these are great albums to listen to as a whole. Soundtracks Klaus Badelt — Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl John Barry — Dances With Wolves Christophe Beck — Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The […]
One million years ago. New research says that the earliest firm evidence is from a cave in South Africa where fires burned more than once in the same spot. Our ancestors used fire a million years ago, study says At that point they weren’t yet using fire on a regular basis — that came around […]
{4.5/5} “They came here because they had been denied religious experience elsewhere, had been read out of that part of human life that had a strong appeal to them. You have to know a robot well to understand his instinctive drive toward religious experience.” Project Pope by Clifford D. Simak, published in 1981 The planet […]
I would be happy if aliens visited Earth, but I don’t believe they have as of yet. Although there are many reports of UFOs and alien abductions, somehow I think if aliens were really here we would know it. As the FAQ on the SETI Institute web site puts it: “if there were interesting, verifiable […]
That’s a new estimate from astronomers, who have calculated that 40% of red dwarf stars (the most common type of star in our galaxy) “have a so-called ‘super-Earth’ planet orbiting in a habitable zone that would allow water to flow on the surface.” More details here… Billions of habitable worlds in Milky Way And that’s […]
The classification “great ape” consists of bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas, humans, and orangutans. These are our closest relatives in the animal kingdom — we share 99% of our DNA with chimpanzees and bonobos. Bonobos were only identified as a species distinct from chimpanzees in 1933. Louis Leakey sent three women into the field to learn about […]
{4.5/5} “He’d had a two-way conversation with great apes. He’d spoken to them in English, and they’d responded using American Sign Language… He’d looked into their eyes and recognized without a shadow of a doubt that sentient, intelligent beings were looking back.” Ape House by Sara Gruen, published in 2010 This novel tells the story […]
Why our ancestors started walking upright has been one of the big mysteries in human evolution. There have been various theories but we didn’t know for sure. Now researchers have studied chimpanzees — who are relatively similar to our ancestors from 6 million years ago — and discovered that they will walk upright more when […]
I started reading Redwall by Brian Jacques because it was on the list. But I’m not going to finish it — it’s not doing it for me, so I’m moving on. There are a number of books marketed to younger readers on the fantasy list. Some of them, like The Golden Compass and Artemis Fowl, […]