Queuing
This morning I went to sign off for the month as an self employed. I tried to do it on Friday, but Social Security said I needed to sign off at the tax office first, and they said I needed to make an appointment, which I couldn’t get until today. When I got there at 9:10 I had to queue while another lady got a huge pile of papers rubber…
Squee Sunday: hamsters
My story “Agent Hammer: Licensed to Kibble” was in On The Premises issue 17. Agent Hammer is a genetically modified hamster and a secret agent who does things like jumping out of burning buildings using a lady’s frilly knickers as a parachute. I keep thinking I ought to do another Agent Hammer story because it was such fun to write.
Trappist-1 and it’s 7 dwarves
Well squee! NASA announced that the little star TRAPPIST-1 has 7 rocky planets, ranging in size from 40% to 140% of Earth’s mass. They’re all very close to the star, closer than Mercury is to our own Sun, but TRAPPIST-1 is an ultracool dwarf star, with a surface temperature of perhaps 2,500 ºC. Our sun is about 5,500 ºC. This means that several of the planets are in the Goldilocks…
A podcast about me!
For some time I’ve been a fan of Chris Guillebeau, who blogs about unconventional careers. He’s now doing a daily podcast called Side Hustle School. He believes it’¡s a really good idea to have a side line, both for the obvious extra income, but also fun, new skills, and to be less dependant on your employer. The episode with me is at https://sidehustleschool.com/episode/38 It’s 8 min 21 sec.
Squee Sunday. Lynx
Lynx are big cats. The adults are about a metre long. There are four surviving species: the Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx, the largest), the Iberian lynx (Lynx pardinus), the Canada lynx (Lynx canadensis), and the bobcat (Lynx rufus). Lynx issiodorensis is extinct, and probably the ancestor of the four modern species. The Iberian lynx, (Lynx pardinus) is on the verge of extinction. They mostly eat rabbits, so the myxomatosis outbreak…