Your eyes were glacial and your promises all rang true

And this is why I am not a director, because while I realize that there is much psychological and supernatural ambiguity to be mined from the banquet scene in Macbeth—whether there is truly a spectre at the feast or whether Macbeth's reason is starting to give way, his guilt painting up murdered Banquo before him as previously his ambition drew a dagger on the air; or whether this question matters at all—I also think there's no argument: of course the ghost is really there. He promised Macbeth he would be.

MACBETH
            Here's our chief guest.

LADY MACBETH
            If he had been forgotten,
            It had been as a gap in our great feast,
            And all-thing unbecoming.

MACBETH
            To-night we hold a solemn supper, sir,
            And I'll request your presence.

BANQUO
            Let your highness
            Command upon me; to the which my duties
            Are with a most indissoluble tie
            For ever knit.

MACBETH
            Ride you this afternoon?

BANQUO
            Ay, my good lord.

MACBETH
            We should have else desired your good advice,
            Which still hath been both grave and prosperous,
            In this day's council; but we'll take to-morrow.
            Is't far you ride?

BANQUO
            As far, my lord, as will fill up the time
            'Twixt this and supper: go not my horse the better,
            I must become a borrower of the night
            For a dark hour or twain.

MACBETH
            Fail not our feast.

BANQUO
            My lord, I will not.

The world of Macbeth is one of witches and worse things waiting, curses and prophesies and adynata that come, however slantwise—none of woman born, till Birnam wood remove to Dunsinane—true. (I'm with Tolkien, however, in being disappointed that the actual wood does not go anywhere. I really expected it to, the first time I read Macbeth. It's like an entire forest of Chekhov's gun.) It's not the most supernatural play in the canon, but it's got to be up there. Ghosts and apparitions are not suspensions of disbelief, but factual as branches or blades. And words are spells. Our chief guest, all-thing unbecoming, a most indissoluble tie, this is performative speech. So don't command someone to dinner and then kill him, for the love of little green apples. Especially in a Scotland of völur, you're a fool if you think a man's death is a stronger bond than his word.

(I am quite sure every critic back to the seventeenth century has already figured this out, but I just thought of it in the shower. It saves me posting about the fact that what I have is probably a viral sore throat and may not go away for weeks, which is a lot more annoying.)

Once I built a railroad, now it's done

I have probably mentioned before that in high school I did a science project on the cellular slime mold Dictyostelium discoideum which involved converting a fish tank into an incubator and breeding E. coli as a food source—I'm guessing that might not be legal anymore—in order to study the effects of plenty, starvation, and time on D. discoideum's life cycle (which is awesome: amoeba to slug to fruiting body to spore; rinse, repeat). It was incredibly fun. I read a lot about cyclic AMP. I took dozens of photographs through a microscope. I had no moral qualms about eating mushrooms. And it still makes me happy to see plasmodial slime mold in the wild, as happens when walking in the woods. But I think that even were I totally indifferent to the concept of slime mold, this article in The Economist would still be a thing of beauty:

Tokyo's is not the first transport network to be modelled in this way. A study published in December by Andrew Adamatzky and Jeff Jones of the University of the West of England used oat flakes to represent Britain's principal cities. Slime moulds modelled the motorway network of the island quite accurately, with the exception of the M6/M74 into Scotland (the creatures chose to go through Newcastle rather than past Carlisle).

Science, I love you.