Big Sole Blog (BSB)

Some students in a physics class in Chelyabinsk, Russia, thought war had broken out when this week's blasts from a meteor broke windows at their school. If such a cosmic event had happened here in the American South, I think our Fundamentalist Christians would have thought not war but the end of the world. Read more at CNN where a "witness says flash shone 'like 10 suns,' felt shock wave pass

My cousin. L.C. of Texas (pre-Katrina of New Orleans), shared this funny story on Facebook about a true experience she had in Target. I think her story comments on a technological divide between generations: The strangest thing happened to me this evening. . . . I went to Target to purchase a stationery set and had trouble finding any. So, I asked this twenty-something year-old for assistance.

When I first heard four hours ago that Steve Jobs died today, I couldn't take in the information. And I still can't take it in even though I knew about his battle against pancreatic cancer and his liver transplant. I figured when he resigned from Apple in August that his health was an issue. So, I'll just place a few links here.Steve Jobs's Stanford speechMy Neighbor, Steve JobsGoodnight, Steve

I'm on Oprah's mailing list. There. I've confessed. I keep an eye on Oprah. Anyway, today, the subject line of one of her emails intrigued me: "Fat that makes you thin." So, I opened it. I think I was hoping to discover some new oil that tasted like butter but worked in the body like fiber. I can dream, can't I? Instead, at Oprah.com, I found this tidbit:Fat to Make You ThinAfter Johns Hopkins

So, Japan has digitized commercial spokespeople and holographic rock stars.CreationBy Nordette N. AdamsThe new world comes at us fast:Unhuman creatures, made to last.Pretty zombies of our minds—not of flesh, born of time—will count our days and nightsas we inject nanobots to spiteour blood. Desperate, we fight Deathor God to overcome the soiled breathwe have called life. Dust mocks us to the

I got this in email yesterday, video at TED of Malcolm Gladwell in his talk, filmed at TED2004, in which he explains what every business can learn from spaghetti sauce. Gladwell is a staff writer for The New Yorker, and best-selling author of the books The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers. LearnOutLoud.com has this accurate description of Gladwell's talk:... he explores how the food industry

Remember the old saying, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean nobody's following you"? Well, now, given the many security cameras in stores, RFID tags in clothing, trackers attached to shopping carts, the next time you get that creepy feeling that someone's watching, you'll probably be right.

What happens when a woman questions the status quo? Could it be that she can change the concept of life as we know it? It's possible. Recent NASA news shook the web with the announcement that lead scientist and geomicrobilogist Felisa Wolfe-Simon of NASA’s Astrobiology Program has made a discovery that will cause textbooks to be rewritten. She found an organism at California's Mono Lake Research

From Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Book III, written in the 1700s. Gulliver is speaking of the science-obsessed Laputians, the people on the flying island called Laputa. These people are under continual disquietudes, never enjoying a minutes peace of mind; and their disturbances proceed from causes which very little affect the rest of mortals. Their apprehensions arise from several

When I wrote The Cylons Cometh at BlogHer, I had not yet heard about the caravan of driverless vans (video below).Four driverless electric vans successfully ended a 8,000-mile (13,000-kilometer) test drive from Italy to China — a modern-day version of Marco Polo's journey around the world — with their arrival at the Shanghai Expo on Thursday.One of the engineers in the MSNBC video talks about how

Astronomers, have discovered an Earth-like planet, according to Yahoo! News via the AP. It's called a "Goldilocks" as an allusion to "The Three Bear" story when Goldilocks talks about porridge being not too cold, not to hot but "just right."My blogging buddy, Deborah White of From My Brown Eyed View, commented on Facebook:I hope that human kind leaves this planet alone. This one is already

I am trying to ignore all the doomsday scenarios arising as people project their fears onto the BP Deepwater Horizon leak in the Gulf of Mexico. I prefer to keep a positive mindset, as reflected in one of my poems about the disaster. However, I do read about the fear such as those Gena Haskett explored in her post about doomers and the BP oil spill. Last night, I saw the following in my mail, a

It's the precursor to better gifts for future Star Trek captains. "Dear Avery Brooks: Your Flying Car is Here!" has been syndicated at BlogHer.

Remember the old IBM commercial with Avery Brooks asking, "Where are the flying cars? I was promised flying cars."? And then he concludes, "You don't need flying cars" because you've got the Internet. Apparently the company Terrafugia disagrees, and so, it's offering a flying car for sale. According to the Huffington Post:The company Terrafugia, based in Woburn, Mass., says it plans to deliver

After writing "The Cylons Cometh," which is about changes in science and technology over my lifetime, it seems right that I share this James Powderly video from The Creators Project. Powderly is "an engineer and designer who co-founder of Graffiti Research Lab, and most recently worked on the award-winning Eyewriter project." In this video he talks about artist Toni Kwan, who's been paralyzed by

I learned reading GreenLAgirl's post, "How to Snap Out of Gulf Oil Spill-Induced Depression" that BP has nixed using the oil booms made from human and animal hair collected by eager volunteers. It will use petroleum based synthetic boom instead, reported the Good blog on June 5. I missed that news, and according to the DeepwaterHorizonResponse.com press release, this decision was made May 21. The

This post has been cross-published at at BlogHer.comIllustration: Bryan Christie designCalculating the rise and fall of science fiction books, television shows, and movies, I've determined the obvious. Science fiction is no longer dismissed easily as distractions for geeky misfits or as fanciful tales for children, and that may be because the world's observed science fiction over the years