Awesome! I want a higher resolution cube as a paper weight. Or how about programmable wall paper?

I second the recommendation in comment #10. Life32 is a powerful CA program, and many hours can be lost playing around with different patterns.

People are still discovering new patterns all the time, such as new space ships or space filling breeders. You can even make logic circuits out of glider streams.

The names of various Game of Life patterns are very colorful: puffership, gosper gun, pulsar garden of eden, etc.

What? No one mentioned Leo Frankowski's Cross Time Engineer series of books! It ain't great literature, but heaps of fun when I read it in Jr. High School.

"Conrad Stargard is the protagonist and title character in a series of time travel novels written by Leo Frankowski. In them, a Polish engineer named Conrad Schwartz is sent back in time to the 13th Century where he has to establish himself and cope with various crises including the eventual Mongol invasion of Eastern Europe in 1241."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conrad_Stargard

Good luck finding them in libraries or used book stores!

I remember seeing a bartender in Japan spending a long time chipping blocks of ice into spheres. It seemed pretty labor intensive so I guess he would have liked this gadget. Does this desire for spherical ice only exist in Japan? Do they do this in high end bars in the states?

I want a gold plated tungsten paper weight. If I can't have that, just a tungsten paper weight would be cool. I've never felt the heft of a large chunk of gold so plain old tungsten would be satisfying enough.

Anyone know where you can buy a large chunk of tungsten?

Yes! #36 and #37 (Bill and 5MeoCMP) describe it so well. I got it all the time when I was a little kid, especially when I was having a fever. There was always this big thing. Something vast like a shape you see underwater or something that could smother me. Then the little thing which was like a tiny point or drill. Yeesh, even the faded memory gives me the willies.

But besides that, I would also get a related feeling even as an adult, usually when I was feeling tired. This one usually happened while I was looking at someone's head. I would get the sensation like their head was really big or far away. It is hard to describe. Maybe like that zoom in camera effect that I don't know the name for where the background kind of drops away as you focus in on the subject.

@#23 cool! Thanks for sharing this trick.

Cool, I didn't know this was so common. I just had it recently after many years of its absence. I also drank a lot of coffee that day. I wonder if that could be a connection?

So just wear them in bed!

Joflow is correct. The middle is the best.

Is that healthy? Who knows what the Chinese factories are putting in marker ink these days.

Put me in the column that agrees with your wife.

So that's what was chewing on Roland's hand.

"But last week, Mayfair Games, creators of the popular board game Settlers of Catan as well as other games..."

I think it's better to say "US publisher" not "creator", since the original designer was Klaus Teuber and the original publisher was Kosmos in Germany.

I love short SF. I have subscribed to Asimov's twice in the past. Why didn't I renew either time?

1. Although I do love short SF, I don't love it all the time. I like to read other things, both fiction and non. And getting the magazine every month was just too much for me to keep up with. It became a reading burden. I only have so much reading time, and I'm not always in the mood for short SF.

2. I buy the Dozois yearly collection religiously. I have almost all the volumes up to this years 24. To be honest I got annoyed when there were so many repeats from the year I subscribed. I rather just read the cream up the crop by getting a yearly anthology, instead of the entire year of stories. (I realize by not supporting the magazine I might not have any crop to get the cream out of, but what can I do?)