My body has been invaded by strep-bearing nanites that are sapping my ability to type coherently and without hallucinating. So I will transmit this post in compressed bullet-point form (I wanted to use the phrase “stuttered tight-point” right there, but I don’t think that actually means anything outside the Culture novels of Iain Banks).

My colleague Jeff Kluger notes that a team of European planet-hunters have found a promisingly Earth-like specimen, which they’ve named Gliese 581c. The money shot is as follows:

I guess I always did kind of wonder why Picard had a French name but an English accent. Now it can be told: they were supposed to cast a French guy, but couldn’t find one with the proper chops. Roddenberry was dead set against casting Patrick Stewart at all — thus TNG producer Robert Justman:

A quick note to plug nerdcore icon MC Frontalot’s new album Secrets from the Future. If you require background on the whole nerdcore phenomenon, I’ve blogged about it here and here. Frontalot was the first artist who got me into nerdcore hip-hop, and he’s fast becoming it’s most visible spokesperson – cf. the upcoming documentary [...]

I was tired. It was a long flight. The woman next to me was watching a romantic comedy starring Minnie Driver and David Duchovny. Plus I’d already ready the Tolkien book, and it was all I had left in my bag. This is how I came to read All Those Moments, the memoir of Rutger [...]

As a very peripheral side-note to the still-unfolding story of the Virginia Tech tragedy, I can’t help keeping a weather eye out for the return of the killer nerd meme that got loose in the wake of the Columbine killings: the anti-social, trench-coated video game freak who finally snaps. So far sightings of the meme [...]