zompist bboard

Drat! Okay then... how about the little island roughly at J -7? I only need a smallish place isolated by water. A single subtropical island would do nicely.

If that's not suitable (too close to existing civs) the very little island at A -3 would be fine.

Has anyone taken the island primarily in the X 7 square yet?

I'd like to claim it, if possible. I have a little surprise in mind for the surrounding cultures. (A pleasant one, I hope.)

We had a very long winter here, to the point that roughly a week ago we still had below-freezing weather. Not frost, mind you, but round-the-clock weather. Then, suddenly, the winds became warm and the sun came out to stay. It's been bizarre, but pleasant. Tomorrow I brave the chilly winds of Spring...

Soon it'll be time to plant indoors the seeds that benefit from an early start.

Her family was Catholic. But after a nun told her that the prayers of her Jewish friends were not heard by God - and that they didn't make it more than knee-high from the ground - she began to look critically at the faith. She's not a Christian now. Her fictional theology (for lack of a better term)...

Diane Duane has clarified this - she is not a Christian. Her works have a few things which seem to be clear references to Christianity - I'm thinking particularly of the ceremony in Deep Wizardry - a much larger number of references to various real-world religions, and then a whole lot of reality-tr...

Or the connection between Almea and Earth isn't time-stable.

Xephyr wrote:This seems a decent place to ask: what's the best place to start into Dunsany?

Project Gutenberg. If it's old enough to no longer fall under copyright, there's a good chance PG has it.

I thought reliable contact had been established between Europe and Almea. No?

If Almea and Earth interact, then even if we don't assume that the Almeans will initiate any social or technological change at all (which is certainly unlikely) things will end up transferring over. I would be surprised if the developments which lead to modern archaeology on Earth didn't end up leak...

Thry wrote:Jugar a la wii Play wii

Seriously? Oh dear.

Does the phrase "the left-handed samba" mean anything?

That seems very appropriate. I wonder if mice/rats can make clicking sounds? If so, they still couldn't do so while eating, which their language might find a desirable feature. Before this thread, I'd never even considered what sounds mice were capable of making. This would be a fairly plausible(ish...

Can't yogurt be used as a substitute for buttermilk?

I can't even test it myself, I'm a vegetarian. Irony.

What are some of the customary cooking styles and dishes of your country? Have you been invaded by McDonalds yet?

Where did you learn to speak and write English so fluently? (I am ashamed of my own ignorance.)

Almost anything is delicious deep-fried. If the best encomium you can offer for chicken is "it's fantastic when it's fried", people are right to reject your evaluation of it. Some foods are just inherently blander than others, and chicken is one of them. It can be very tasty when prepared properly -...

Maybe next he'll design a phonology for octopi: p t k b d g ...

Perhaps I missed it, but I don't see that article saying that mice can articulate consonants - only that they can modulate the sounds they make. It's entirely possible that mice can sing but not 'speak', being unable to produce anything we would recognize as a vowel or consonant You may want to look...

Since consonants are made by changing the way the oral cavity is shaped, I don't think mice will be able to produce any.

Perhaps they would have an hummed language, entirely tonal.

Mice are obligatory nasal breathers - they don't breathe through their mouths, although I suspect that like many similar animals they can do so if truly necessary. Their language would probably sound very nasal, and might involve changing the shape of the nasal cavity rather than the oral. Whether t...

D'ni is very loosely based on Hebrew. It's not surprising that a Semetic script would remind someone of it. But the script is CLEARLY not D'ni. I've examined some examples of Hebrew-related scripts online, and none of them quite match. Is it possible that it's the scriptual equivalent of "Loren Ipsu...

There's also the Mouse Guard, which is both a comic series and tabletop roleplaying game.

Great minds think alike, eh?

Quite right, Torque. But before we can work out how an organism that lives at the center core of a Jovian world can live, we need to (hypothetically) accept that it does. Putting Earth-standard life within Jupiter is ridiculous. We'd need to imagine a type of life that could exist in those condition...

One last note from me: Greg Egan has written a SF novel founded on a simple change: he went to the equations describing some fundamental physics and reversed a single sign. The world that follows from this change, in which his story is set, has 'plants' radiating light into the dark sky in order to ...

No, not all life we know of requires water. But all life, even theoretical forms of life, require a basic, pervasive element to be used as a building block for amino acids and cellular structures. Theoretically, life does not require amino acids. Nor does it require cells. I think we're done here.

You don't need to be silicon or unobtanium based to die from being exposed to water: if you evolved in low enough moisture environments, but still having *some* water, it may well be the case that water harms its skin, or too much water at one time harms its skin or entrails: like, if I were to dri...