Link dump for 20100326

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20 Most Commonly Used Plugins on Wordpress Blogs (WordPress, PlugIn, List)
One of the best things about the Wordpress platform is the extensive list of plugins available to extend and add new functionality to your site. Let’s take a look at the 20 most commonly used plugins on Wordpress blogs across the web, including those that provide additional features, to those that simply alleviate the simple tasks of running a blog.
A Place for Strangers and Beggars - Annoying Plot Tricks (Plot, Reading, Viewing, Writing, Annoyance, LiveJournal)
Adventures in Novel Writing: Genre Vs Literary Fiction, Again (Genre, Writing, Literary, Plot)
Advice on Novel Writing (Writing, Advice, Novel)
Aluminum Christmas Trees - Television Tropes & Idioms (CantDoThisInFiction, TvTropes)
Code Bubbles, an Interesting New Idea in Coding | _mindMeld (SoftwareDevelopment, Coding, Video)
Code Bubbles is an evolutionary idea which combines tools like Quartz Composer/Yahoo Pipes and traditional IDEs. It need polish, but this is an interesting idea. It seems to help provide some visual reference to make it simpler to understand the relationships in software. It seems like it combines MDA notions with code notions. Check out the video below. What do you think about it?
Comic-Book Costumes That Actually Look Good In Movies - Superheroes - io9 (Superhero, Costume, Movie, Photo, Image, io9)
Diana Peterfreund Blog | Writing Advice, and the Taking Thereof (Writing, Advice)
Ecstatic Days » Blog Archive » Genres of Fiction, and Why They Aren’t Discrete Entities (SF, Fantasy, Literature, Genre, Writing, StoryTelling)
Europe and US Country Size Comparison Map - How Big is Europe Compared to the US? (Visualization, Comparison, Europe, America, US, USA, Map, Geography, Size)
Five insights into the behaviors of social media users (Psychology, Culture, SocialNetworking)
We do a decent amount of social media coverage here at Ars, but not everything that happens with Facebook, Twitter, and the like is worth its own story. Sometimes, though, we happen across things that make us say "huh, that's interesting." It turns out there are a lot of things we thought we knew about social media users, but not all of them are true. Here are a few tidbits we gathered that may surprise some of you.
Flaxseed lowers cholesterol in men (Health, Diet, Study, Results, Gender)
A new study from Iowa State University's Nutrition and Wellness Research Center (NWRC) may give men a way to combat high cholesterol without drugs -- if they don't mind sprinkling some flaxseed into their daily diet.
Genre fiction - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (Genre)
Genres Aren't Boxes, They're Reading Instructions - Writing - io9 (Genre, Reading, Protocol, io9)
Harmony - Procedural drawing tool (Art, Drawing, Graphics, Online, Tool, JavaScript)
I am not an expert | Justine Larbalestier (Writing, Advice, Disclamer)
Infrared thermal imaging around the home - Telegraph (Infrared, Photo, Gallery)
Thermal imaging, or infrared thermography, makes it possible for us to "see" the amount of heat given off by everyday household objects. In the image above, a tea bag is lifted out of a hot cup of tea. The colours show temperature variation. The temperature scale runs from white (warmest) through yellow, orange, red, purple and black (coldest)
Interstellar World Building (Writing, SF, SciFi, WorldBuilding, Interstellar)
Inventor makes scanner that processes a 200-page book in one minute - Boing Boing (Book, Scanner, Watch, Tech, Video, BoingBoing)
Janet Reid, Literary Agent: Matterhorn (Writing, Query, About, Comparison)
kill_claudio: 1952 called. They want their clichés back. (Genre, Writing, Fanfic, Sexism, Gender)
Map / Reduce – A visual explanation (Algorithm, Visualization, SoftwareDevelopment, Explanation, Tutorial, Reference)
Map/Reduce is a term commonly thrown about these days, in essence, it is just a way to take a big task and divide it into discrete tasks that can be done in parallel. A common use case for Map/Reduce is in document database, which is why I found myself thinking deeply about this.
Matthew Woodring Stover | New York Times best selling author - Chicago (Fantasy, SF, Author, Blog)
Mobile Opportunity: The future of publishing: Why ebooks failed in 2000, and what that means for 2010 (Ebook, Publishing)
The problem with ebook vs. hardcover pricing is that publishers bundle two sorts of value when they create a hardcover book: The physical product is more impressive, and you get earlier availability of the book, [...]. Unfortunately, book buyers think most of the extra value they're paying for from a hardcover is the physical book. Meanwhile, publishers (and authors) often think the main value of a hardcover is early availability. Many authors and publishers don't want to say this to the public, but hardcover books are a tax on the most enthusiastic fans of an author. / E-publishing breaks that cozy little arrangement, by separating the early availability value from the better production value. Publishers couldn't figure out what to do about that in 2000. So they often did the conservative thing, pricing ebooks the same as hardcovers. To ebook customers, that felt like exploitation, if not outright fraud. / It still feels that way today.
More Red Ink: Is Anybody Out There? -- Revealed (SETI, FermisParadox)
Moving WordPress « WordPress Codex (WordPress, Admin, Tutorial)
There are times when you need to move WordPress around within your server, and times when you need to move WordPress from one server to another. You don't need to reinstall. WordPress is flexible enough to handle all of these situations.
Napoleonic Military Glossary : The Napoleonic Guide : (NapoleonicWars, Glossary)
Nathan Bransford - Literary Agent: The Secret Strength of Killer Queries: Specificity (Writing, Query, Agent, Advice)
And here's what I think is one of the very most important thing to do in a query: be as specific as possible. Allow me to be even more specific: be as specific as possible about the right things. / When I say "be specific" I don't mean that we need to know every character's name and the name of every city and place in the Realm of Unpronounceable Cities and Places. In other words, I don't think it's a good idea for your query to read along the lines of, "Morfor travels to the Uwn'uim Square in the town of Zxcimist in order to meet his brother Phoidum." / When I say be specific I also don't mean that we need to get bogged down in tangential details either, like ages and hair colors and other things characters are doing if they don't play a major role in the story. / Instead I mean this: be as specific as possible about the plot.
New analysis of the structure of spider silks explains paradox of super-strength (Watch, Tech, MaterialScience, OrganicChemistry)
Spiders and silkworms are masters of materials science, but scientists are finally catching up. Silks are among the toughest materials known, stronger and less brittle, pound for pound, than steel. Now scientists at MIT have unraveled some of their deepest secrets in research that could lead the way to the creation of synthetic materials that duplicate, or even exceed, the extraordinary properties of natural silk.
Not too bright list - Amidst a tangled web (Idiom, Slang, Insult, Euphemism, English)
These are one-liners that you really don't want people to be using to describe you. I think it's nicer to use these though instead of saying that someone is just unintelligent. If they aren't intelligent though, they may not understand what you're saying about them. If they're the type to seek revenge that may just be to your benefit.
Oglaf - Television Tropes & Idioms (TvTropes, WebComic, Pick)
Physicists Observe Quantum Properties In The World Of Objects - Science News (Watch, Tech, Quantum)
Physicists have demonstrated behavior governed by rules of the quantum world, which operate at the level of atoms, in mechanical objects large enough to see. / The accomplishment fulfills a long-held dream to bridge the quantum and everyday worlds. One day, researchers say, mechanical devices in a laboratory might be manipulated according to the rules of single atoms — paving the way to quantum information processing or probing other unusual behaviors of the subatomic world. / “This is groundbreaking work,” says Markus Aspelmeyer, a physicist at the University of Vienna in Austria who was not affiliated with the work. “Now the door is open. Now the fun begins.”
Reality Is Unrealistic - Television Tropes & Idioms (CantDoThisInFiction, TvTropes)
recessional: On the Literary Canon [repost from lj, backdated] (Literature, Religion)
SF Signal: SF Fanatic: I Am Not A Fan Of Fantasy, Here's Why (Reading, SF, SciFi, Fantasy)
Short blasts of exercise as good as hours of training, scientists find - Telegraph (Exercise, Health, Research, Results)
The body can get as much benefit from a short but intensive bursts of exercise lasting ten minutes than it can from ten hours of moderate training.
start [BookLiberator Wiki] (DIY, OCR, OpenSource, Book, Scanner, Scanning, Design, Wiki, HowTo, HowTo.Build)
This is the home page and the documentation wiki of BookLiberator. / BookLiberator is a set of free software and hardware to digitize books: it lets you photograph all the pages in a book without harming the book. The resulting images can be processed with free, open source software to make user-friendly files in a variety of formats.
Stover’s Rules of Writing 2 | Matthew Woodring Stover (Writing, Advice, SF, SciFi, Fantasy, HowTo, HowTo.Write)
Stover’s Rules of Writing | Matthew Woodring Stover (Writing, Rules, Advice)
Supertwisty Light Proposed - Science News (Physics, Light, Hmmm)
Researchers suggest the existence of a never-before-imagined property of electromagnetic fields
tansyrr.com» Blog Archive » Stealth Worldbuilding & the Other Kind of Standalone Fantasy (WorldBuilding, Fantasy, Writing, Reading)
I have been talking this week about the value of standalone fantasy, and composing a list of my favourite single volume fantasy novels, just to prove that yes they exist, and yes there are good ones. But what came up most commonly in the discussion surrounding those posts is how many standalone fantasy novels actually are less standalone than they appear – once you start reading the other works in that author’s backlist, you may discover that you have in fact been subject to Stealth Worldbuilding.
The Anatomy of an 80’s Action Movie | EgoTV (80s, Movie, Action)
The Dropout Economy - 10 Ideas for the Next 10 Years - TIME (Futurism, Economics, Politics, Agriculture, Society)
Imagine a future in which millions of families live off the grid, powering their homes and vehicles with dirt-cheap portable fuel cells. As industrial agriculture sputters under the strain of the spiraling costs of water, gasoline and fertilizer, networks of farmers using sophisticated techniques that combine cutting-edge green technologies with ancient Mayan know-how build an alternative food-distribution system. Faced with the burden of financing the decades-long retirement of aging boomers, many of the young embrace a new underground economy, a largely untaxed archipelago of communes, co-ops, and kibbutzim that passively resist the power of the granny state while building their own little utopias.
The Extended Mind (Cognition, Thinking, Mind, Brain, Body, Philosophy, NeuroScience, Cyborg, Tech)
Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? The question invites two standard replies. Some accept the demarcations of skin and skull, and say that what is outside the body is outside the mind. Others are impressed by arguments suggesting that the meaning of our words "just ain't in the head", and hold that this externalism about meaning carries over into an externalism about mind. We propose to pursue a third position. We advocate a very different sort of externalism: an active externalism, based on the active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes.
The First Line . . . | Matthew Woodring Stover (Writing, Reading, Start, FirstLine)
The Intern: NaNoReVisMo #1: the electric kool-aid conflict test (Writing, Advice, Conflict)
The Intern: The Ten Best Things You Can Do For Your Manuscript (Writing, Submission, Manuscript, Advice)
The Jon Stewart Clip That Will Make Glenn Beck Cry Real Tears - Jon Stewart - Gawker.TV (DailyShow, TV, Politics, Video, Humor)
Jon Stewart opened The Daily Show with what was probably one of his greatest segments ever: a complete and utter destruction of everything Glenn Beck stands for and propagates. And Stewart did it as Beck.
The Tough Guide To Fantasyland - Television Tropes & Idioms (Fantasy, TvTropes)
The unreal art of realistic dialogue | Books | guardian.co.uk (Writing, Dialogue, Realism, CantDoThisInFiction)
Credible conversation in fiction is a long way from the chaos of ums and ahs that you'll see if you look at transcripts of the real thing. / In his intriguing book of short stories, Twins, writer Chris Gregory explores the difference between narrative fiction and real life. "Gradually I realised that the real world was flawed in ways that were not and could not be reproduced in a book of fiction." Similarly, Alfred Hitchcock said that a good story was "life, with the dull parts taken out" and, while Samuel Beckett might disagree, dialogue follows the same pattern: it's human conversation without the ums and ahs. / Dialogue is, of course, distinct from conversation. While people have conversations, characters have dialogues – and, ideally, every piece of dialogue in a story is a means to a narrative end. In real life, conversations can be purely pragmatic, or solipsistic; sometimes they're nothing more than an antidote to silence, sounds to fill the quiet margins of our social lives.
There Are No Rules - No Description Dumps! Crafting a Story With Details & Immersion (Writing, Infodump, Incluing)
There Are No Rules - Showing & Telling in Scenes & Dialogue (Writing, Dialogue, ShowVsTell, ShowDontTell)
There Are No Rules - The Biggest Bad Advice About Story Openings (Writing, Advice, Action, Start)
Tough Guide to the Known Galaxy (SF, SciFi, Trope, Glossary)
Trailer for Parallel Lines: five short films that use the same dialogue - Boing Boing (Movie, Trailer, Dialogue, BoingBoing, Video)
Two Trick Pony | Orbit Books | Science Fiction, Fantasy, Urban Fantasy (SF, Author, Writing, Bio)
Urban Fantasy Always Takes Place In Alternate Worlds - Fantasy - io9 (Genre, io9, SF, Writing)
Warning: Your reality is out of date - The Long Now Blog (Knowledge, Change, Reality, Time, Perception, Philosophy, Fact, Mesofact)
Slow-changing facts are what I term “mesofacts.” Mesofacts are the facts that change neither too quickly nor too slowly, that lie in this difficult-to-comprehend middle, or meso-, scale. Often, we learn these in school when young and hold onto them, even after they change. For example, if, as a baby boomer, you learned high school chemistry in 1970, and then, as we all are apt to do, did not take care to brush up on your chemistry periodically, you would not realize that there are 12 new elements in the Periodic Table. Over a tenth of the elements have been discovered since you graduated high school! While this might not affect your daily life, it is astonishing and a bit humbling. / For these kinds of facts, the analogy of how to boil a frog is apt: Change the temperature quickly, and the frog jumps out of the pot. But slowly increase the temperature, and the frog doesn’t realize that things are getting warmer, until it’s been boiled. [Same for] humans and how we process information.
What if Sauron Had Won? - Suvudu - Science Fiction and Fantasy Books, Movies, and Games (Writing, Idea)
What makes a bad book bad? | MetaFilter (Reading, Writing, Bad, MetaFilter, Criticism, Literature, Genre)
In its latest issue, the American Book Review has taken stock of literature and come up with its Top 40 Bad Books [pdf]. Faced with the unusual Top 40 list (which is not strictly a list and includes, among other things, The Great Gatsby) Alison Flood at the Guardian responds by asking, "What makes a bad book bad?" while at the L.A. Times, Carolyn Kellogg puts forth that the list's only constant is "that the best books that appear on their worst-book list are subject to the most unreasonable critiques."
Write What You Don’t Know at SF Novelists (Writing, Advice)
Writer's Digest blog - MFA Confidential - Creating Characters (Writing, Character)
Writing advice disclaimers - FritzWiki (Writing, Advice, Disclaimer, List, Example, Fritz, FritzWiki)
YouTube Guide: Best YouTube Tips, Hacks and Resources (YouTube, Tip, HowTo, QandA, Link, List)

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Harmony - Procedural drawing tool

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What makes a bad book bad? | MetaFilter

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More Red Ink: Is Anybody Out There? -- Revealed

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The Dropout Economy - 10 Ideas for the Next 10 Years - TIME

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Harmony - Procedural drawing tool

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start [BookLiberator Wiki]

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Oglaf - Television Tropes & Idioms

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Mobile Opportunity: The future of publishing: Why ebooks failed in 2000, and what that means for 2010

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The Jon Stewart Clip That Will Make Glenn Beck Cry Real Tears - Jon Stewart - Gawker.TV

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Oglaf - Television Tropes & Idioms

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2010/03/26