What I Did On My Spring Vacation

Well, I may not have been writing in my own blog much recently, but I have been writing on other folks'... at least in the comments sections:

• I actually got a "letter" published at MSNBC.com's Altercation blog here (scroll down to Correspondence Corner), in response to this piece by regular Altercation contributor LTC Bob Bateman.
• I've been contributing to several comments threads at Pharyngula, including this one on whether the 2000 and/or 2004 election was stolen (my first comment here); this one on the disappearing chemistry set (me here); this one on the "Motie" baby born in China (me here); and, most recently, this one on George Will's prudishness about AIDS (me here).
• I've commented in a couple places (esp. at HobbySpace, here) about X-Prize founder Peter Diamandis winning the Heinlein Prize, and about his evocation of Robert Heinlein's The Man Who Sold the Moon as an influence in his space-related entrepreneurship.

Now that I'm back in business here, of course, I'll try to save some of these pearls of wisdom for y'all... but I encourage you to check out the blogs I link to (more coming soon); they, and their commenting communities, never fail to amuse and enlighten.

Unit of the Day: The perch, introduced in the 12th century by the Norman conquerors, is an alternate name for the rod (16.5 feet or 5.0292 meters) of England. Amusingly enough, the same term also denotes both a unit of area (equal to a square perch!) and one of volume (of masonry, a stone wall one perch long by 18 inches high by 12 inches thick). Perch also serves as a traditional unit of distance in Ireland, and (as an alternate spelling of perche) a unit of both distance and area in French North America. Or it might just be a fish President Bush claimed to have caught!