I started watching Star Trek: The Next Generation recently — starting at season three, of course, as i was repeatedly advised — and i’m positively kicking myself for not doing it earlier. This is bloody good television (except Wesley, but i imagine they give up and throw him out the airlock at some point), and only now do i realise how often i have stood on the shoulders of giants without even knowing it…

(Data’s the best character. Obviously. He’s literally me™.)

• Anyway: holy shit, someone won the Vesuvius Challenge! A library of hundreds of ancient scrolls was turned into charcoal by the Pompeii eruption, dug up in the Victorian age, and now, with the advent of machine learning, we can finally find out what’s in them. Glimpses at life? Religious texts? The rest of the Epic Cycle? First up in the pile, it seems, is a newfound treatise on Epicurean philosophy.
• What would actually happen if you took your space helmet off in a vacuum? Geoffrey Landis, a Nasa scientist and sci-fi writer, answers. Spoilers: 2001 was right, you wouldn’t explode, and you could stay alive for around ninety seconds.
• Robert Martiensen, a retired rural Australian maths teacher, created thousands of artworks in secret
• The Hanging Stone is my Betelgeuse. Come on, tip over already…
• It’s kind of sad how short the TV Tropes page on works where “The Future Will Be Better” is.