The BBC Classic Serial is broadcasting 3 plays based upon Suetonius' Lives of the Cesars. The first 2 are currently available on their website. The first covers a clandestine meeting between Gaius Julius Cesar, Governer of Gaul, Cicero and Cato, in which they attempt to hash out their differences to let Cesar return to Rome without either being arrested or invading; also present, and inadvertantly key, are Cesar's daughter Julia, married to another, absent factor in the equation, the general Pompey, and Tulia, Cicero's daughter (Julia and Tulia may be historically accurate names, but they're too close for hearing; it's a credit to the actresses who played them that from the start there was no confusing the personalities of the high strung Tulia and the forceful Julia who inadvertantly brings about the final schism between Cato and Julius). The second play takes place after Cesar's assassination and concerns the survival and rise to power of Cesar's adopted son, Octavian (later Augustus), 19 years old at his adopted father's death.Two characters appear of whom I'd formed a strong impression from other works of literature - Livia, Augustus' wife (can anyone forget Sian Phillips in I, Claudius), and Mark Anthony. Only this is not Shakesphere's noble Mark Anthony, but a foul-mouthed brute of a Roman general. The BBC attaches a warning of "strong language" - Roman politicians are not delicate in their insults. The latter play reminded me a little of the recent film Elizabeth in the shape of the growth of a young person who, though innately noble, is a survivor more than he is an idealist, and when he finds himself forced to sacrifice principle, uses that sacrifice without apology to his advantage; in the case of the Octavian play, Octavian, who found war repugnant, builds an ordered society in which violence finds its release in the carnage of the arena. A note of warning: if you want to hear the first of these, listen before Saturday, as only two plays are available at one time, and each new play bumps the earlier of the 2 from the site.
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Also found in my irregular check-in to the BioMedNet Magazine, an article on "Astrobiology, the transcendent science: the promise of astrobiology as an integrative approach for science and engineering education and research", by a PhD candidate in astrobiology about why his discipline is so cool. It's available until July 29, 2003, for site registration. I still lament the passing of HMS Beagle; compared to that, the present magazine is stuffy and orthodox, but it offers a diverse selection of articles of more general scientific interest, culled from the journals every 2 weeks.
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The latest issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, probably the general medical journal, has a big yummy review article on the state of the science of stem cell research and stem cell therapy, bracketed by an editorial and a perspective article on the legislative disarray surrounding stem cell research in the US. Because of the great public interest in the subject, all three articles are free, full text on-line. Aside from the political aspects of it, since we posit that highborn sevolites are regenerative, these three should go on our reading list.

• Nadia Rosenthal. Prometheus's Vulture and the Stem Cell Promise (the review)
  
• Jeffrey M. Drazen. Legislative Myopia on Stem Cells (the editorial)
  
• George Q. Daley. Cloning and Stem Cells - Handicapping the Political and Scientific Debates (the perspective)
  

See also, Lynda's comments on stem cell research, from the ORU site.

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Last night found me laughing like a drain over items in The Geek Test, which another blogger whose blog I did not note down (a solecism) pointed to. I came out as a Total Geek, with 31.58819% - in reality a fairly modest score. I suspect there is a generational effect in there, since there are a fair number of items that rely upon being in tune with popular culture, rather than having tuned it out, which was the quintessential expression of geekiness some twenty years ago. My sixteen-year-old self, given a computer and the Internet instead of a notebook and the library, would have scored considerably higher.
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I've been meaning for a while to put up a list of favourites, and since I've been trying (once again) to get my links and references organized, here they are, in no particular order:

1. PubMed. This is my one-stop shop, or at least a one-stop starting point for any research to do with medicine. With the pull-down menu on the left on "PubMed", I can search MedLine, the best known medical indexing service, for papers and abstracts. Also on the pull-down menu is "OMIM", On-line Mendelian Inheritance in Man. This began as a book on inherited disease published in 1982, and is now a massive, constantly updated database on inherited disorders. If there's a gene in the picture, it'll be in OMIM. "Books" covers a growing collection of medical and biology textbooks that are on-line.
   
2. The BBC. Particularly the Radio 4 arts and drama page, for a steady diet of radio plays. I love that medium. I have fantasies about getting to adapt one of my novels for it. Getting Ian Holm to play Lian, and James Earl Jones to play Rache.
   
3. Baen Books. Aside from publishing Lois McMaster Bujold and David Weber (and some other authors I enjoy), they put up lots and lots of words, including whole books, free!
   
4. Sundry medical journals: The British Medical Journal, the The Canadian Medical Journal, The Lancet, The New England Medical Journal. The NEJM is in the process of publishing a nice meaty series on medical genetics. Also FreeMedicalJournals.com, for a collection of medical journals with content that is in whole, or in part, open access, and PubMedCentral, an open archive of selected journals.
   
5. Google of course, and a new search engine I was recently put on to, All the Web, which has, like Google, an image search and a news search.
   
6. The NASA website, and several of its many branches, including one on climate whose exact URL I cannot find at present, but that was very useful when I wanted to do warped and upsetting things with ocean currents and rapid climate oscillations.
   
7. The Astrobiology Web. I have this thing about extremophiles.
   
8. Sff.net ... dozens of writers' websites, including my own.
   

There are more, but that's a fair sampling.
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Certainly the question of being human is at the forefront for SF with a biological/genetic engineering theme. I wrote about it explicitly in Blueheart; it was one of the central arguments between Rache of Scole and Cesar, and at the core of the choice Cybele made. Rache never doubted his own humanity, or, for that matter, anyone else's. Biology and destiny works its way into the ORU as well. Erien, for one, has a lifelong quarrel with anyone who would define him by his artificial genome, built on a basic insecurity about whether of not he actually is defined by it. The Reetion influence doesn't spare him at all from the Gelack bloodline-is-destiny, because Reetion thinking for all it's highly individualistic is also deterministic. Not sure what he'd have to say to Rache, or Rache to him, about the philosophical aspects of being bioengineered beings; Rache would probably get rather testy and tell him to stop worrying about it and get on with life. I wonder where aliens fit in in a mediation on being human?
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Interesting question on the RFF (Readers for the Future) discussion forum. A teacher , Noah Tonk, asked what the "big question" is for sci fi. My reply (minus the late night awful typos) and the reply from James Gunn, are below.

James Gunn

Science fiction is the literature of the human species, and it asks how we, as a species, came to be human, what it means to be human, how do we relate to the universe, how is humanity going to change, and where is it all going to end.... Jim Gunn

Lynda Williams

"What is the best use of science for humankind?" Packed into that is the
challenge of deciding what "best" means and "for whom", and hence
a entire moral philosophy. (For science, read "power", and you have fantasy instead.)

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Taking a break from entering journals and links into my homemade database (and deferring discovery that the sudden discontinuity in my autoincrementing primary key that I've managed to create does persist after I've shutdown and restarted and therefore needs ... I don't know ... ). But I ran across these two in my notes, Geoffrey Landis' Classification of Spacedrives, a comprehensive list of every possible tried, untried, fictional and hypothetical way of getting from point A to point B, and Patricia Wrede's Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions. The latter may be intended for fantasy, but there's a lot that's relevant to the writing of SF.
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I have been reading Cathy off and on since my years in Boston. This one's for you, Lynda. And me. And half the wired world.
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One of my American Colleagues last week asked me "What's July 1?" I found the answer (beyond "It's the Canadian equivalent to Independence day") at the Canadian National Library.
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