It's offical, since scientists finally agree: Voyager 1 is at the edge of our solar system.

Via National Geographic News: The "Star Wars" Worlds: More Science Than Fiction?

Everyone knows the Star Wars galaxy is located "far, far away." But how realistic are the alien worlds (see pictures) described in the science fiction saga?

To find out, National Geographic News checked in with two experts on everything extraterrestrial: Bruce Betts, a planetary scientist at the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, California.

Let me just add that Jeff and I saw the final installment of the Star Wars saga, Revenge of the Sith, this past Saturday. And ... well ... the first third of it was bad enough that had I been on the couch watching it on the Sci-Fi channel I would have turned it off.

No kidding. The romance dialog was more painful than reading a 14 year old girl's diary. Count Dooku and Skeletor, I mean General Grievous, seemed right out of the Power Rangers. It was squirm-in-my-seat bad.

But It did get better towards the middle of the film. Mind you, it was still very much over-the-top, but in a sort of Shakespearean tragedy way. We both came to the conclusion that it got better because it started to really tie into familiar fairy-tale-in-space themes and familiar faces (Chewbacca!) of the very first movie.

But. Oy. That first third...

Via WIRED: Speed Cubing at Caltech:

[...] At the fad's height, a high school student named Jessica Fridrich quietly invented a way to crack the puzzle in under 20 seconds. The key is memorizing some 100 algorithms. Then, after arranging a cross-shaped pattern on one side of the cube, a player can quickly solve a column at a time by applying the right algorithm. In 1997, Fridrich - by then a professor at Binghamton University - published her method on the Web, where it found an enthusiastic audience. A Hewlett-Packard employee named Dan Gosbee organized a tournament in Toronto in 2003 - the first in 21 years - and the cube's unlikely comeback was on. [...]

It's been a while since I've written here, I know. In lieu of writing anything of substance for the time being I offer this nifty article: Research to investigate links between Ancient Greeks and modern science fiction.

New research into the Ancient Greeks shows their knowledge of travel inspired early forms of fantasy and science fiction writing.

There is a long tradition of fantasy in Greek literature that begins with Odysseus' fantastic travels in Homer's Odyssey. Dr Karen Ni-Mheallaigh, at the University of Liverpool's School of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology, is exploring fantasy in ancient literature, examining theories of modern science fiction writing and how these can be applied to texts from the ancient world.

Dr Ni-Mheallaigh is looking at the work of 2nd century AD writer, Lucian of Samosata, who wrote True Histories, a travel narrative that includes an account of a trip to the moon and interstellar warfare. Antihanes of Berge - who wrote about his travels in the far north of Europe, where it was so cold that conversations 'froze in the air,' - will also be examined, as well as the writer Herodotus who wrote about 'flying snakes; and 'giant gold-digging ants' in India.

[...]

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