Interested in waiving the green flag at an Indy 500 practice, and looking to stay busy during the Month of May? IndyCar and IMS have a solution.

IndyCar will host its season-opener at Texas Motor Speedway on June 6 as planned, but without fans and in a one-day show.

F1 driver Lando Norris calls McLaren fan Captain Tom Moore after the 99-year-old raised more than £27m for the NHS by completing 100 laps of his garden.

Hungarian Grand Prix organisers announce the race be held without spectators this year as a result of the coronavirus crisis.

Sporting events in the Netherlands will have to take place without fans until there is a coronavirus vaccine, Dutch Health Minister Hugo de Jonge says.

Writer Chris Terrio has responded to the controversy in interviews, pointing to issues over cut scenes between Rose Tico (Tran) and Leia (Carrie Fisher).

The Democratic presidential candidate gets a shout-out in the new film.

Big fan-culture events in Florida and California have just been postponed. May's Awesome Con D.C. takes a wait-and-see approach.

Darth Vader's former apprentice Ahsoka Tano, as played by Rosario Dawson, will compete with Baby Yoda for attention this fall on Disney Plus.

"Final Fantasy VII Remake" is a beautiful-looking game with a juvenile mindset that’s fun to pass through but hard for non-teenagers to be riveted by.

If you’re not put off by its low-key, text-centered nature you're likely to fall for this thoughtful, serene game.

Garoppolo was forced to leave the game against the Chiefs after taking a hit in the fourth quarter.

The Vikings will face off against the 3-0 Los Angeles Rams, which normally would trigger an automatic sit for any passing attack, but the Rams, on short rest, will be without cornerbacks Aqib Talib and Marcus Peters.

Joe Flacco's the way to go if you need a quarterback this week. And yes, we know what you're thinking.

Smith has lived up to expectations in 2018, completing 66 of 96 passes (career-high 69 percent) for 767 yards, four touchdowns and one interception.

Prescott's touchdown rate is down and his interception rate is up for the second straight season.

Michel will face a Chicago Bears defense that stops opposing rushers a league-low 13 percent of the time.

Thomas and the Saints will have to contend with a Vikings defense that has limited No. 1 receivers to an average of 53 yards per game.

A.J. Green and Tyler Boyd (Cincinnati Bengals) plus Odell Beckham Jr. (New York Giants) are among the top fantasy receivers off next week.

Six teams are on a bye this week, giving stars like Saquon Barkley, Odell Beckham Jr., Andrew Luck, Zach Ertz and A.J. Green the week off. Here are three players that could have big games in their stead.

It's a bad week to own a Washington skill position player, but a great time to get Tevin Coleman and other into your lineup.

Last Sunday, Jameis Winston started the game on the Buccaneers' bench. Here's why he needs to be in your lineup this week.

Washington will be without their starting right guard, right tackle, left guard, left tackle, center and starting quarterback on Sunday, making the Dallas defense a very solid pickup.

If you were relying on Jaguars running back Leonard Fournette to help you this week you’re going to need a back up plan.

There are a number of players with favorable matchups this week, but none as palatable as Cowboys WR Amari Cooper.

Cousins's next opponent, the Seattle Seahawks, has been kind to fantasy quarterbacks of late, surrendering at least 21 fantasy points in each of the last four contests.

The fantasy football regular season has come to an end but that doesn’t make the waiver wire any less important, especially if you have been streaming quarterbacks and defenses to make it this far.

It's never easy benching star players who are in less-than-ideal situations but it is often the right thing to do.

Sleep easy knowing that no matter what next week’s injury report reveals, you will have the players you need to secure a year’s worth of bragging rights.

The Patriots quarterback has been sensational for years, but with everything on the line for your fantasy season in Week 16, he's a liability.

In an emotional interview with TMZ, the comedian said she canceled her show there because of the state's attempt to, in effect, ban abortion.

At the Washington premiere of "Like a Boss," the comedian also talked about why she won't comment on the upcoming election.

Bollywood star, Irrfan Khan, has died after being admitted to the intensive care unit at Mumbai's Kokilaben hospital.

Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has issued a cease-and-desist order to the nation’s two largest daily fantasy sports companies, saying that the betting that takes place on their sites breaks New York's online gambling laws.

Yesterday saw the online premier of a mini-episode of a new animated comic series based on the classic Gilbert Shelton underground comic, the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. As a hippie wannabe teen in the 70s, this (and Zap! Comics) was everything to me.

In 1969, life in San Francisco consists of free love, communal living, and political protest. Freewheelin’ Franklin Freek (Harrelson), Fat Freddy Freekowtski (Goodman), Phineas T. Phreakers (Davidson) and their mischievous, foul-mouthed cat, Kitty (Haddish) spend their days dodging many things —- the draft, the narcs, and steady employment -– all while searching for an altered state of bliss.

But after partaking of a genetically-mutated strain of marijuana, the Freaks wake up 50 years later to discover a much different society. Quickly feeling like fish out of water in a high-tech world of fourth-wave feminism, extreme gentrification and intense political correctness, the Freaks learn how to navigate life in 2020 -— where, surprisingly, their precious cannabis is now legal.

OK, sounds good. But is it? If the reaction to the first mini-episode is any indication, maybe the Freaks should have remained in their drug-induced coma. As one Facbooker commented: "Get yourself a collected set of the original comic and skip this drivel!"

Read the rest

This article is part 3 of a series on Fantasy Fortifications by Toni Šušnjar.

The design of a fortification depends on its purpose and on the threats it is expected to face. A fortification facing only infantry-held weapons, one facing mechanical artillery, and one facing gunpowder artillery will all significantly differ in design characteristics. Some characteristics however will be the same – geography will always provide advantage (or disadvantage) in defending a fort or a city, and thus location has to be carefully chosen. In some cases, location may be good enough to allow the defender to skimp on certain design features – as seen with e.g. Klis fortress, where northern wall is waist-tall at best, thanks to its position on an inaccessible cliff (clissa). In other cases, disadvantageous terrain may have to be compensated with by massive man-made features.

General Design

In order to cope with development of artillery, design of fortifications changed with time. First fortifications, which only had to deal with handheld weapons, were simple wooden palisades. These were later supplemented with earthen ramparts

As siege weapons developed, fortifications grew both in height and thickness.

Continue reading Fantasy Fortifications — Part 3: Design at Mythic Scribes.

This is the second part of a two-part article on how time was perceived and measured in ancient and medieval Europe.

In the last installment of History for Fantasy Writers I addressed years, months, weeks, and days. Now I turn to shorter lengths: days, hours and still shorter periods. I’ll close with a more general consideration of time and the awareness of time.

Hours

We carve the day into twenty-four hours, but in the past the hour was a malleable thing. There were twelve hours of daylight and twelve hours of night, regardless of the season. The day began with zero at sunrise. Then came the first hour, the second, and so on. The twelfth hour fell at sunset. A winter daylight hour was therefore shorter than a summer hour.

This feels a little nuts at first, but it’s actually pretty sensible. At least the word midnight makes sense in that system—it’s the mid-point of the night, regardless of how long is the night. All we have to do is abandon the notion that an hour is a unit of time, to consider it as marking portions of a day.

Continue reading History for Fantasy Writers: Do You Have a Moment? at Mythic Scribes.

This article is part 4 of a series on Fantasy Fortifications by Toni Šušnjar.

Building a Fort

Build time of a castle, depending on design and available funds, may last from half a year to half a century. It also depends on the situation before the building: a ruined castle is a half-built castle after all, and rennovating (and/or updating) walls is much cheaper than building new ones. This can be seen with city of Dubrovnik, where (massive) medieval fortifications were, after the fall of Constantinople in 1453., reinforced with outer line of walls to reinforce them against cannon fire.

Both build time and extent of fortifications depend on material (financial, logistical, humane) capacities of the builder, as well as the perceived need. Many castles were never finished for lack of resources.

Builders are professionals; peasants, soldiers and other amateurs were used for muscle work only. This means that they have to be paid, and many in fact travel from a building place to a building place. Beaumaris Castle in England required 400 masons and 1,000 assistants to be built in a nearly record time (from 1278 to 1280).

Types of Castles
Motte and bailey castle

Motte and bailey castle is the earliest and simplest type of a castle.

Continue reading Fantasy Fortifications — Part 4: Types of Castles at Mythic Scribes.

Banks appear in a number of fantasy stories. George Martin’s Iron Bank is probably the best known, but banks and banking families can be found all around the fantasy landscape, especially in modern works. For writers considering including banks and bankers in their own stories, knowing something of the history can help add detail and color.

Money Changers

Europe in the High Middle Ages, say around 1100, had a bewildering variety of coinage (see my article on medieval money), a crazy cobweb of overlapping public authority, and an unreliable network of roads. Banking arose in response to the need of merchants to conduct large-scale business at a distance in that environment.

As you might guess, with so many different coins, knowing how to convert from one currency to another was a fairly technical business. That business was handled by a money changer. In Florence and other north Italian towns, the money changers set up shop at markets and near merchant establishments—any place where there was plenty of commercial traffic. The benches they sat on are called banca in Italian. That’s where we get the term bank.

Money changers knew more than just how to convert currencies.

Continue reading History for Fantasy Writers: Bank on It at Mythic Scribes.

Invisibility is no longer confined to fiction. In a recent experiment, microwaves were bent around a cylinder and returned to their original trajectories, rendering the cylinder almost invisible at those wavelengths. This doesn't mean that we're ready for invisible humans (or spaceships), but by using Maxwell's equations, which are partial differential equations fundamental to electromagnetics, mathematicians have demonstrated that in some simple cases not seeing is believing, too. Part of this successful demonstration of invisibility is due to metamaterials electromagnetic materials that can be made to have highly unusual properties. Another ingredient is a mathematical transformation that stretches a point into a ball, "cloaking" whatever is inside. This transformation was discovered while researchers were pondering how a tumor could escape detection. Their attempts to improve visibility eventually led to the development of equations for invisibility. A more recent transformation creates an optical "wormhole," which tricks electromagnetic waves into behaving as if the topology of space has changed. We'll finish with this: For More Information: Metamaterial Electromagnetic Cloak at Microwave Frequencies, D. Schurig et al, Science, November 10, 2006.

The sports industry is harnessing digital engagement to enhance fan experiences and cope with threats to its traditional business model

(University of South Florida (USF Health)) A new preclinical study by researchers at the University of South Florida Health (USF Health) Morsani College of Medicine and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine offers promise of a specific treatment for NEC, a rare inflammatory bowel disease that is a leading cause of death in premature infants. The team found that inhibiting the inflammatory and blood-clotting molecule thrombin with targeted nanotherapy can protect against NEC-like injury in newborn mice.

Current regulations do not effectively prevent potentially misleading claims, says Imperial scientists

Madison Bumgarner has made it known he's not a fan of the "opener," a strategy of utilizing a pitcher -- usually a reliever -- to get the first few outs of a game before bringing in a pitcher who would usually start or pitch long relief.

Widely considered the ‘kings of comedy’ in Jamaica, Ity and Fancy Cat have been serving up laughter to audiences for years. Their comedy series, The Ity and Fancy Cat Show, ended in 2017 but the duo continued to deliver high-quality entertainment...

It took only two words for Alex Bregman to send 9-year-old Jax Nystrom into a frenzy, but this kind of reaction -- young people freaking out at the slightest bit of attention from him -- has become commonplace for the Astros' All-Star third baseman.

As he walked around D-backs Fan Fest on Saturday afternoon at Salt River Fields, general manager Mike Hazen was pleasantly surprised to see the fan reaction as a record crowd of over 40,000 poured into the event.

A limited number of fans will be allowed to enter ballparks for games in Taiwan for the first time this season as stay-at-home orders continue to loosen amid the coronavirus pandemic.