Mediaeval science; stories. Titles, feh.
So, remember Sixteen Across, those short stories I was writing as part of my thesis on online fiction? A handy combination of crossword clues, interlocking fiction and map of Adelaide, ideal for anyone who wants to make an appointment in the city centre and then have a good excuse for not turning up. I've busily spent the last few months working on the other part of the thesis (current status: 180 footnotes and rising) and eroding the readership of the stories to occasional strangers searching for "discoloration of thumbnail", "fifteen there's still time when she walking down town", "thicken arms photoshop", and "is there supposed to be hair down there".

In today's exciting news (well, last week's exciting news really), new stories are being posted again, with extra hints (the solution to each one is an answer to the first question asked within it), the ability to check your answers, and a livejournal feed of links to new stories at 16across. Exciting puzzles! Sinister characters! Suggestions that maybe I'm more nervous about moving than I thought! The perils of colouring your hair! Mysterious robot ghosts, or, um, something! An ongoing attempt to convince myself that editing things manically after they're posted is justifiable because mutability is a primary characteristic of online fiction, and that a four-month gap is a demonstration of the importance of maintaining regularity in installment-based fiction!

If you're not interested in short stories, though, have a quotation from the twelfth-century Natural History of Adelard of Bath, which I've only just discovered exists and which is fantastic, though it doesn't seem to be online.

Nephew: So solve this problem for me first: Why don't men have horns?

Adelard: In order to establish that your question is worth answering, you must first bring forth some true or likely reason why it seems they ought to have them. Otherwise such a question does not merit discussion among philosophers. For I am not one who thinks we should struggle to find the causes of all the things that exist, but only of those things which seem to reason that they should be otherwise than they are.

Nephew: That is a reasonable demand. Here is my explanation: Everything which the Creator brought forth from formless nothing into the form of being, just as it was made by the Best, so, reason shows us, was made in the best possible way. The Creator gave to all the things he made the capability of existing, and they have a strong desire to exist. And so that they might preserve their existence they were given the means to defend themselves. Some animals (and it is these I am talking about) have weapons which are part of their substances—for example, the boar has tusks, the lion claws, the bull horns—by which they can defend themselves from any danger which threatens them. Now I ask you why, when the lower animals have inborn means of defense, man, who is more worthy than all the rest of nature, is not born with any weapons, such as horns or lethal tusks, and cannot even avoid a threatening enemy by swiftness of flight.

Adelard: First I will give the popular answer. For I believe that man is dearer to the Creator than all the other animals. Nevertheless it does not happen that he is born with natural weapons or is suited for swift flight. But he has something which is much better and more worthy, reason I mean, by which he so far excels the brutes that by means of it he can tame them.

Indeed, man is a rational, and therefore a social animal, particularly suited for two types of activity, namely action and deliberation, which some people like to call war and peace. His day by day experience teaches him that the use of weapons is required for warlike activities, but truth teaches him to lay these aside in times of peace and to remove them from his thoughts. Indeed, anger stirs up one of these, and reason calms the other. And so if he had natural weapons, he would not be able to put them aside when he was making a treaty of peace.

Apparently he also covers whether stars are animals, and what they eat if so, though I haven't got to that bit yet.