Wes Phillips

I've been spending the last few days exploring <I>Riley Rock Index</I>, billed as music's megaportal&mdash;justifiably, I believe.

Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy gives us a fascinating overview of Islam's long and variable engagement with science. "The question I want to pose—perhaps as much to myself as to anyone else—is this: With well over a billion Muslims and extensive material resources, why is the Islamic world disengaged from science and the process of creating new knowledge?"

Tom Mitchelson spent a week, guided by a small bunch of female friends, attempting to experience "the thoughts, anxieties and simple daily tasks of a 21<SUP>st</SUP>-century woman."

Or up&mdash;a timeline portraying various "future history" events depicted in SF novels and films.

The Beeb has an animated "front line" Western Front feature. Its only weakness is that it is antiseptic, which <I>that</I> war was definitely not.

Gareth Rees calculates that the British archers at Agincourt might have rained 50,000 arrows a minute for a solid eight minutes onto the French. So if you were snorting derisively at the title's combination of "medieval" and "physics," consider this: Agincourt was, essentially, the first battle where conventional cavalry tactics met the equivalent of the machine gun.

Silicon Valley's culture didn't begin with Hewlett and Packard's garage or, for that matter, the "treacherous eight" from Fairchild Semiconductor. The stage was set in 1909, in the wake of the great quake&mdash;and at the birth of radio.