While travelling through Tanzania in November last year, several times I found buffalo horns and skulls lying around in the national parks. This is of course not surprising, what with the large African buffalo population in those parts of Tanzania (in this case, up around the Serengeti). However, there was a big question; on quite a few of the horns, there were insect egg cases, and usually only on the horn and not on the bone of the skull - though I came across one exception, of which the photograph...

The Women In Secularism conference (#wiscfi) opened in Washington, DC, on Friday, and continues till Sunday. The full conference schedule and speaker list can be seen here. It was an event largely funded by the Center For Inquiry (CFI). Apparently the conference was planned and executed by the DC chapter of CFI - a siginificant fact - however it is largely funded by the national CFI. So the speaker list and schedule looks to have been set by the DC group. Ron Lindsay (@RALindsay), president and...

Game of Thrones is a very readable series of books by George R. R. Martin, and has also been filmed as a series by HBO, now into Season 3. The book series is more correctly known as "A Song Of Ice And Fire", but after the HBO series more commonly known as Game of Thrones (GoT). In the fantasy, the land of Westeros has been thoroughly settled for over 5,000 years - a significantly long time, which gives emphasis to the omissions in it I wish to point out. Iron and steel seem to have been in manufacture...

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

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As usual, I am chaotic and random. Having had over a month of severe illness just behind me, I have a huge backlog of work, and part of all that is books I wish to review. These are a mixture of very new and very old books; I make no distinction on that score. They're also what pique my personal interest; I tend to only review books if I find them interesting myself. You might like a look at my "Most Urgent" stack of books to do; here it is, in descriptions and, below those, photos. The descriptions...