Ken's blog

Prey (2022) presented a neat concept.  fanfic, attempting to improve (despite not having watched the movie): backstories, not sure what or...

the weekday commute of humans on earth is a large movement of mass.  this movement, because it is not spherically symmetric, generates gravi...

the Galileo probe flew by earth on its way to Jupiter and detected in our atmosphere both oxygen and methane, thereby "proving" th...

old and busted: pulsars are Little Green Men. new hotness: pulsar glitches are Little Green Men.  a Kardashev Type II civilization shows o...

it's a shame that astronomers settled on "PSR + celestial coordinates" as their systematic way of naming pulsars in the sky.  ...

lanternfish exist in extremely large numbers and communicate with each other via bioluminescence.  this seems enough components for a brain....

define intelligence as the combination of the ability to simulate a Turing machine (or equivalent) and the regular use of that ability. th...

suppose humans go extinct and nature inherits the earth.  but nature does not inherit a natural earth; it inherits an earth littered with th...

the pronunciation of vegan as "vee-gan" not "vay-gan" is peculiar, as the pronunciation of e in vegetable and vegetarian...

the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park escape confinement, kill all humans, and establish a second great age of dinosaurs. many years later, the d...

preserve the illusion of free will. why?  how? perhaps we live in a simulation.

alien astronomers would have been able to detect the Great Oxidation Event on earth spectroscopically, determine the planet is hospitable to...

Ancient philosophy posited that the planets were embedded in crystal spheres which made music as they moved.  Gravitational waves are exactl...

The distance between galaxies seems not that much greater than the size of galaxies.  Milky Way diameter 100,000 ly.  Distance to Andromeda ...

Black holes emit jets (through an as yet poorly understood mechanism) as seen in active galactic nuclei, e.g. Hercules A.  From this, it see...

In a Star Wars-like universe in which planet-killing weapons are being frequently used, at first it doesn't seem so bad that the worst ...

It's probably not too difficult to use parallax to determine that meteors are atmospheric phenomena (actually to verify, since they had ...

It's a weird coincidence that we not only have water on earth (hypothesized to have been delivered by many comet impacts), but also not ...

The moon has much more maria on its near side, e.g., Oceanus Procellarum, than on its far side.  Explain this with a story that ancient tech...

Give a man a nuclear arsenal and he'll annihilate civilization for a day.  Teach a man how to build nuclear weapons and... something som...