Spec Tech: Of Mucus, Bile, and the Indigestibility of Wood (or What We Talk About When We Talk About the Digestive System)

There’s the old saying: you are what you eat. Part of this guilt-inducing suggestion is that you should pay attention to what you ingest, eat more healthily, because your food will become part of you. But hidden within this message is something much more basic, ancient, and largely unacknowledged, namely that all life is made……

Spec Tech: Conlanging 7 — Who’s what?

This is the seventh in a series of posts “live-blogging” the creation of a fictional language from scratch, with the help of our readers.  We plan to construct a functional language one piece at a time, incorporating suggestions and preferences from our audience along the way.  You can find a listing of our previous installments……

Spec Tech: The Habitable Zone

Recent astronomy news gave us word of a planet around a double star system. This is the first ever planet around a binary star that has been positively identified (outside of tataouine – but that was in a galaxy far, far away). This is encouraging both because it looks like a habitable location, but also……

Spec Tech: Conlanging 6 — In which we review

This is the fifth in a series of posts “live-blogging” the creation of a fictional language from scratch, with the help of our readers.  We plan to construct a functional language one piece at a time, incorporating suggestions and preferences from our audience along the way.  If you’ve missed some of our previous posts in……

Spec Tech: Learning the Drill

I know I’ve got a request for a topic (don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about building things with sandstone!) but this last month I spent a week on drilling rig in the wilds of Wyoming, so I thought I’d write about that experience while it was still fresh in my mind. Other than looking at……