Category: The Universe

Happy Presumed Birthday, Will Shakespeare!

We don’t know that you were born on April 23, 1564, just that you were baptized a few days later. And there’s no evidence that you ever spelled your name “Shakespeare” when you signed it. But never mind. You gave us lines like these:

How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here will we sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:
There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

North Carolina Kokonvention, 2012

Last summer, Randomosity101, Agent Lightning, Tesseract, Kiwimuncher, Koppar, Lady Bunniful, and assorted parents Kokonvened at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Stories. We have pictures to prove it, but they’ll have to supply the stories behind them:
Continue reading “North Carolina Kokonvention, 2012”

Attention, Oceanography Fans!

Those of you with online access to Science magazine should definitely check out this week’s news feature “A Sea Change for U.S. Oceanography” at www . sciencemag . org/content/339/6124/1138 .

Short version: As research budgets shrink and technology improves, oceanographers are spending less time at sea and relying more on data from remote sensing.

Coy Woodnesse, v. 2013

By popular request (well, Piggy’s request, and he’s certainly popular), here’s a new edition of the thread for practicing foreign and/or archaic forms of communication.

The 2012 thread included some possibly useful letters decorated with diacritical marks.

The original Coy Woodnesse thread, launched in 2005, explains the name, sort of.

Just for Fun

Robert writes:

While reading old newspapers online for a personal project I’m working on, I ran across this ad in the San Francisco Daily Alta (April 20, 1871). I’m posting it just because I love it:

The amazing Professor Hazelmayer

Twenty performing birds and mice! Many incomprehensible things! And the world’s only Stylocarfe! You can’t see shows like that anymore. It would definitely be worth a dollar (and some of you would be eligible to get in for 50 cents).

Back to School, 2012

It’s that time again (at least in the Northern Hemisphere), and you must want to talk about. So here’s a place to do it, courtesy of your ever-obliging GAPAs.

Actually, Jadestone reminded us with this helpful offer:

Think it’s time for another back to school thread? Since many musers are heading off to college for the first time I’ve been thinking about making a list of less-thought of items I found really useful to have freshman year.

Mus, Anyone?

Unfortunately for its many aficionados, the Muse Academy card game Paker doesn’t work very well outside the Oasis. But we’ve found something almost as good: a Basque card game called Mus. Check it out on Wikipedia (http: // en.wikipedia . org/wiki/Mus_%28card_game%29). We’re sure you’ll want to learn to play it and teach your families and friends, too.