Heathen Blogs. The Great Panjandrum. The Mongolian Wizard by Michael Swanwick. Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Michael Swanwick launches a new fiction series at Tor.com of stand-alone stories all set in the same world.
We begin with “The Mongolian Wizard,” a story of a very unusual international conference in a fractured Europe that never was. This story was acquired and edited for Tor.com by Tor Books editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden. The wild griffins for which the region was famous were sporting in the sky above the snow-clad peaks of the Riphean Mountains when Sir Toby arrived at Schloss Greiffenhorst, late as usual.
The First Experimental Science? I have been reading through a large and interesting 10th century middles eastern cookbook.
Unlike most medieval European cookbooks, it gives, for many recipes, precise quantities of ingredients. Reading it, it occurred to me that cooking may have been the first experimental science and perhaps a stepping stone towards other sciences. Ideas. Phonics4free.org.