First of all, I added a Hooke biography and a general Royal Society And Its Predecessors book to the science section of our Good Reads page, so swing on by!

Second, if the cashing of checks is any indication, it looks like our application for Emerald City 2012 has been accepted! We had an absolutely phenomenal time at the 2011 show - I think all I did the second day there was sketch and eat handfuls of specialty flavored popcorn that Art would bring over by way of nourishment. Best time ever. Of course, if you can't wait that long, we'll be at APE in San Francisco on October 1st and 2nd - just two short months away!

Last time, we focused on a lot of the things Hooke totally discovered or perfected. It is a substantial and impressive list that entirely qualifies him, I think, to at least be in the running for the title he has given himself in today's comic of the Greatest Experimental Philosopher of all time. There are some pretty strong contenders in the field though, so I can't say whether he'd win it. I figure I'll open a discussion over on Facebook and we can thrash it out there. But, suffice to say, there was a bunch of stuff that he said he had invented that he didn't. This included "hundreds of approaches" to the secret of flight, a parallax proof of the motion of the Earth, the proof that inverse square laws necessitate elliptical motion, and the solution to the longitude problem.

For those looking to take a break from seventeenth century scientific one-upsmanship, I have been finding the rap battle between Ludwig van Beethoven and Justin Bieber eminently satisfying.

- Count Dolby von Luckner