Hollywood ring-shaped explosions are totally real!!

Supernova 1987a lights up a ring of matter thrown off before the star exploded. It's pretty. Probably ten thousand civilizations were destroyed so that Arthur C. Clarke could write melancholy things about them.

Blog plug

Chris Mooney's science-and-politics blog has been on fire lately, and is all over the Bush administration's dismissive/manipulative attitude toward science, and the increasingly angry reaction thereto. There really is a pattern here (beyond the workings of normal politics), and the story is becoming huge.

Maxwell demons in the house

Issue 8 of Nth Degree is out, and with it my strange little story Demons, now also available for reading on their Web site.

American spring

Well, it appears that Barney Frank is worried for the same reason I was. But now the avalanche is starting. It isn't Boston and San Francisco now; this is all over the place.