Edinburgh, from the top of Arthur’s Seat.
Category: Research Material
Underground Cities
I’ve always been fascinated by the secret spaces in cities – the abandoned tube stations in London, or the catacombs in Paris which I wrote about in The Scar-Crow Men and Lord of Silence.
Here’s an interesting article about moves to use all those mysterious, lost spaces under our cities. Worth a read.
Who Is Watching You?
Think the scheming and deception of the spies at the court of Queen Elizabeth I in The Scar-Crow Men is some historical novelty? Much of what I write about in the Swords of Albion books is relevant today. In fact, that’s why I write it…
A two-year Washington Post investigation has revealed the true extent of the top secret world created by the US Government over the past few years.
* one and a half times the population of Washington DC now have top-secret security clearances.
*In the last ten years, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence have been, or are being, constructed in the Washington DC area alone covering 17 million square feet or the equivalent of three pentagons.
* Fifty thousand intelligence reports are published every year, so many that a good number are ignored by time-pressed chiefs.
This hidden world has become so pervasive, so secretive and so unwieldy that “no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.”
Eight Unbroken Codes
Anyone who’s read The Scar-Crow Men knows that codes play an important part in the story, as they did for real spies in the sixteenth century…and today.
New Scientist has a great article this week on eight codes that still remain unbroken, from the famous Voynich Manuscript to the CIA’s Kryptos monument to one of the final messages from the Zodiac serial killer.
Worth a read. You’ll have to sign up, for free, but you only get a window of a couple of days to check it out.
No Hiding Place
No hiding from those drunken tweets or FB status updates. On the other hand, you may know who to avoid in the bar…
Mushrooms That Make Zombie Ants
The fungus can destroy entire colonies and leave behind gruseome ant graveyards, where twisted, dark corpses rest with their mandibles locked around leaf veins, a final act that secures the creature’s host in position before it releases spores to infect others.”
On the bright side, they go very nice in an omelette.
Scientists Conduct First Successful Time Travel Experiment
Turns out it wasn’t 88mph after all. A team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has completed a successful experiment with quantum time travel.
Seth Lloyd and his collaborators “have identified a new approach to the problem that opens up the strange world of time travel to experiments,” according to a report in New Scientist magazine.
Even more fascinating, the MiT team sent a photon back to “kill” itself.
The magazine says, ‘When this experiment is done, something interesting happens: every single time the time travel works, the gun fails to go off. And when time travel fails, the gun works. To put this in the language of the grandfather paradox, as long as there is some chance of your gun misfiring and the assassination failing, time travel may work. “You can point the gun but you can’t pull the trigger,” says Lloyd.’
London’s Secret Cemetery
In Southwark, not far from the resurrected Globe Theatre, the BFI and many of London’s arts establishments, lies Cross Bones cemetery. The graveyard is set aside for “outcasts” – prostitutes and paupers – and was in use for hundreds of years from Medieval times.
It was original the burial place for the Winchester Geese, the London prostitutes licenced by the Bishop of Winchester mentioned in The Sword of Albion.
Invasion Of The Zombie Ants
“The parasite, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, appears to take over the minds of infected ants.
The insects are forced to leave their nests and head for a leaf that provides ideal conditions for the fungus to reproduce.
On arrival the ants are compelled to bite hard on a major vein of the leaf before dying. The “death grip” leaves the ant in a perfect position for the fungus to grow and release its infectious spores.”
A thousand authors begin a new story…
Earth Calling All Aliens
After futile decades of listening for any signs of a civilisation beyond Earth, SETI – the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence – is considering broadcasting our own message to the stars.
New Scientist reports that a meeting will be held in Texas in June to discuss if, and how, and in what form, such an attempt at communication should be made.
There is opposition. Our oldest stories tell us that it’s not always wise to let the gods notice you, which is what’s on the mind of SF author David Brin. He resigned from a SETI panel because he felt there wasn’t enough discussion of the potential repercussions from such a broadcast. He says: “I dislike seeing my children’s destiny being gambled with by a couple of dozen arrogant people who cling to one image of the alien”