Link dump for 20110518

Links

• 10 Simple Ways to Double the Speed of Your Writing ... Right Now | Write to Done - Felicia's Melange (Writing, GettingThingsDone, Advice, Tip, List)
• 3 Ways to Know When to End Your Chapters -- Writer’s Digest (Writing, Chapter, Advice)
• 400 Billion wandering planets in the Milky Way (Planet, Planet.ExtraSolar, Galaxy)
  Free-floating planets may be more common in our Galaxy than stars. / BBC News - Japanese astronomers claim to have found free-floating "planets" which do not seem to orbit a star. They say they have found 10 Jupiter-sized objects which they could not connect to any solar system. They also believe such objects could be as common as stars are throughout the Milky Way. Using a technique called gravitational microlensing, they detected 10 Jupiter-mass planets wandering far from light-giving stars. Then they estimated the total number of such rogue planets, based on detection efficiency, microlensing-event probability and the relative rate of lensing caused by stars or planets. They concluded that there could be as many as 400 billion of these wandering planets, far outnumbering main-sequence stars such as our Sun
• 5 Fast Differences Between YA and MG -- YA Highway (YA, MiddleGrade, Difference, Comparison, Writing, Publishing, Reading, Audience)
  A creative writing major could focus her thesis on the differences between young adult and middle grade novels. There are tons of articles online covering this topic in depth. My goal here is just to provide you with a hard and fast reference to glance at when you're trying to decide if that SNI tiptoeing around the corridors of your brain is one or the other.
• 7Plus: add many useful functions and tweaks to Windows | freewaregenius.com (Ms.Windows, Ms.Windows.7, FreeWare, Tweak, Tool, OpenSource, Review)
  Does Windows lack a feature which you wish it could have? Chances are this program offers it. 7Plus is a free, open source program that adds so many functions to Windows that it is hard to keep track of, ranging from interface tweaks and extensions to quick solutions for common tasks. / 7Plus offers so many additions, in fact, that it can become difficult to know what it offers that you will absolutely love, versus the many other tweaks which can sometimes feel like clutter. Rest assured, however, that the program allows you to pick and choose, activating and deactivating features and functions (and keyboard shortcuts) at will.
• 8 Things Readers Want From Self-Published Authors -- There Are No Rules (Publishing, SelfPublishing, Advice, Epublishing)
  1. Hire professionals for editing, proofreading, and design. / 2. Put most of your cost toward editing. / 3. Hire a conversion house for clean e-book formatting. / 4. Understand the difference between vanity publishing and the BUSINESS of being an author. / 5. Don't give 5-star reviews to friends' books that don't deserve it. / 6. Don't self-promote constantly. / 7. If there's no quality sample, readers won't buy. / 8. Be patient. In an environment where NO ONE seems patient enough to put out quality work, your book will stand out if you take the time to do it right. (Tony McFadden)
• A VPN to call your own | ZDNet (Security, Privacy, WiFi, VPN, Networking)
  With Firesheep potentially looking over your Web-browsing shoulder and password management becoming essential, wouldn’t be nice if you could easily keep all your Internet traffic really secure? As it happens, there’s long been a way to keep your online wandering secret: Virtual Private Networks (VPN).
• Activated graphene makes superior supercapacitors for energy storage (Graphene, Watch, Tech, SuperCapacitor, MaterialScience)
  Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have helped to uncover the nanoscale structure of a novel form of carbon, contributing to an explanation of why this new material acts like a super-absorbent sponge when it comes to soaking up electric charge. The material, which was recently created at The University of Texas - Austin, can be incorporated into "supercapacitor" energy-storage devices with remarkably high storage capacity while retaining other attractive attributes such as superfast energy release, quick recharge time, and a lifetime of at least 10,000 charge/discharge cycles.
• Against Craft -- Booklife (Writing, Art, Craft)
• All 6500+ pages of Elfquest comics online - Boing Boing (ComicBook, Fantasy, Scan, Online, BoingBoing)
  The Beat comics blog reports that the complete archive of Wendy and Richard Pini's Elfquest comic book series is available online. The scan quality is excellent.
• Amazon as publisher, publishers as booksellers | Jacket Copy | Los Angeles Times (Publishing, Amazon, Watch)
• Android has a gaping network security hole | ZDNet (Android, Security, WiFi)
• Author, Know Thy Shelf -- The Naked Book (Genre, Marketiing, Writing, Publishing, Analysis, Question, List)
  Last weekend I sat in a small room with Richard Abate, Reagan Arthur and Stephanie Abou at the Grub Street Conference in Boston, listening to aspiring writers pitch their work. While meeting with a number of genre writers, I saw (and overheard—it was a small room) several times a sense of confusion from writers about where their work belonged in the large and ever-growing community of books. Attempting to guide a few toward an answer, I tried to ask one question in a variety of ways: / What author would you compare yourself to? Whose writing resembles yours? / Where do you imagine this book being shelved in the bookstore? / If you imagine your ideal reader, what books are on his or her nightstand? / Imagine your ideal reader browsing Amazon; what books are alongside yours in the “People who bought this book also bought…” line-up? / All these questions are, of course, ways of offering a simple query: what genre? Regularly, I am surprised at the confusion on the face of the writer as...
• C.J. Cherryh: Advice for Writers -- The Night Bazaar (Writing, Advice)
• Colliding white dwarfs give each other a new lease on life (Astronomy, Physics, Star, Star.WhiteDwarf, io9)
  White dwarfs are the ultra-dense husks of stars like our own, dying remnants that are just a pale shadow of their former glory. But when two white dwarfs come together, they can create something very special: a brand new star. / About 90% of all stars eventually become white dwarfs, which have nearly the mass of our Sun crammed into a sphere the size of Earth. Nobody knows quite how long white dwarfs can last before their fuel finally runs out - it could take trillions of years, if not several orders of magnitude longer than that, and our universe is only about 14 billion years old. But a pair of white dwarfs have revealed at least one other alternative, and that's full-on stellar rebirth.
• Creating and Publishing eBooks Using the EPUB Standard (Publishing, EPUB, Ebook, HowTo)
• David Dobbs on the importance of open-source science - Boing Boing (OpenSource, Science, Journal, BoingBoing)
  Right now, most scientific research exists behind paywalls. And expensive paywalls at that. A license to read a single peer-reviewed journal article can set you back $50. Depending on the journal, that number might be a little lower, or a little higher, but access usually doesn't come cheap ... even if the research was funded with public money. When I write about a paper, I usually have to request a copy from the researcher before I can even know whether the paper in question is one I want to write about. And it's not just journalists that get locked out. Even scientists themselves can't always get access to the papers they need to read in order to do their jobs. New science is being stifled by the old business of scientific publishing, argues science journalist David Dobbs. / Open-access journals are different. These publications—the most famous being the Public Library of Science, or PLoS—make all the papers they publish available to anyone online, rather than printing expensive...
• Diigo - Web Highlighter and Sticky Notes, Online Bookmarking and Annotation, Personal Learning Network. (Tool, Blog, Web, BookMark, BookMark.Manager, del.icio.us)
• Does Your Story Have a Hook or Merely a Gimmick? -- Guide to Literary Agents (Writing, Hook, Agent, Cliche)
  Agents are always looking for something different inside their massive slush piles. Something unique and original—a “hook.” I became especially aware of this last summer, while querying agents I was invited by one agent to revise and re-submit my novel. Her main suggestion? A stronger hook. / I'll be honest—the word "hook" has always bothered me. Sure, I understand what it entails—giving your work that extra punch, that unique story idea in order to get the reader interested, and to stand out from the thousands of other trying-to-get-published writers.
• Fan-Art Nouveau (Fan, Art, ArtNouveau)
• Favorite Science Fiction Stories 3-Volume Set (Audiobook) | Free eBooks Download - EBOOKEE! (SF, SciFi, Anthology, Audio, Ebook)
• Felicia's Melange - A collection of links and small bloglets. (Blog, Actor, FeliciaDay)
• Flexible solar sheet captures up to 95% of light energy | KurzweilAI (Watch, Tech, SolarPower, Power, PowerGeneration, NanoTech)
  Using a thin flexible sheet of tiny antennas called nantennas, Patrick Pinhero, an associate professor in the Missouri University Chemical Engineering Department, has been able to achieve solar energy conversion rates of 90–95%, in contrast to traditional photovoltaic (PV) solar panels, which are only 20% efficient. / PV panels only utilize a small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Dr. Pinhero’s nantennas capture energy from both the near-infrared and optical regions of the solar electromagnetic (sunlight) spectrum. / Because the nantenna material is flexible, Dr. Pinhero sees it being used in ways that traditional PV cells are not, such as being built into roof shingles or custom-designed for power vehicles.
• Foldable display shows no crease after 100,000 folding cycles (Watch, Tech, Display)
  One of the most difficult problems for designing mobile devices is finding a way to minimize the size of the device while simultaneously maximizing the size of the display. To get the best of both worlds, researchers from the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology in South Korea have designed and built a prototype of a seamless foldable display that folds in half without a visible crease in the middle.
• Get Started With a VPN: For Beginners, Power Users, and IT Pros | PCWorld Business Center (VPN, Network, Server, Home)
  Do you want to be secure--I mean really secure--when you're on the Internet? If so, then you want a virtual private network.
• Greenshot | Download Greenshot software for free at SourceForge.net (OpenSource, ScreenCapture, Ms.Windows)
  Revolutionary screenshot tool optimized for productivity. Save a screenshot or a part of the screen to a file within a second. Apply text and shapes to the screenshot. Offers capture of window, region or full screenshot. Supports several image format
• Ground-effect robot could be key to future high-speed trains | KurzweilAI (Watch, Tech, Transportation, GroundEffect, Video, Japan)
• How Robber Barons hijacked the "Victorian Internet" (History, Victorian, Internet, RobberBaron, Law, Copyright)
  It was 1879, and investor Charles A. Sumner sat at his desk, frustration pouring onto the page through his ink pen. Sumner, business partner to the radical economist and journalist Henry George, was finishing the concluding passages of a book about what had happened to the telegraph, or the Victorian Internet, as one historian calls it.
• How to Choose the Best Outline Method for You -- Writer’s Digest (Writing, Outline, Style, Advice)
• Iain M Banks: Science fiction is no place for dabblers | Books | The Guardian (Writing, SF, SciFi, Interview, IainBanks)
• Img to Css (Web, Tool, Image, CSS)
• Javascript PC Emulator - Technical Notes (JavaScript, Emulator, PC, Linux)
• Keeping Space Opera Relevant [UPDATED] -- SF Signal: MIND MELD (SpaceOpera, SF, SciFi, MindMeld)
• Latitude and rain dictated where species lived (Pangea, Animal, Environment, Habitat)
  Aggregating nearly the entire landmass of Earth, Pangaea was a continent the likes our planet has not seen for the last 200 million years. Its size meant there was a lot of space for animals to roam, for there were few geographical barriers, such as mountains or ice caps, to contain them.
• Logical punctuation: Should we start placing commas outside quotation marks? - By Ben Yagoda - Slate Magazine (Writing, Culture, English, Grammar, Punctuation)
  The period outside the quotation marks is not a copy error.
• Michael Moore's "Some Final Thoughts on the Death of Osama bin Laden" - Boing Boing (Watch, USA, Politics, Terror, BoingBoing)
• Mini black holes that look like atoms could pass through Earth daily (BlackHole, Physics, DarkMatter)
  In a new study, scientists have proposed that mini black holes may interact with matter very differently than previously thought. If the proposal is correct, it would mean that the time it would take for a mini black hole to swallow the Earth would be many orders of magnitude longer than the age of the Universe.
• Nintendo 3DS license: We'll brick your device if we don't like your software choices, you have no privacy, we own your photos - Boing Boing (Security, Privacy, Nintendo, DRM, Fail, BoingBoing)
• Pyr to Enter Young Adult Market (News, Announcement, YA, Market)
• Query letters – do you have personality? -- Behler Blog (Query, Letter, Letter.Query)
• Sense of Wonder | The Night Bazaar (Movie, Film, SF, SciFi, Fantasy, SenseOfWonder)
• Should You Self-Publish After a Near-Miss? -- There Are No Rules (Publishing, Publishing.Self, Advice, Writing)
  Writers often ask if it's wise or helpful to self-publish their work if they have "near-misses" with agents or publishers. / There's no one answer that works for everyone. But I'll try to help you come to the right conclusion.
• Six eBook Formatting Tools - eBookNewser (Writing, Tool, Ebook, Format)
  Even with ePub becoming the standard format for eBooks, formatting an eBook can still be tricky. So we have put together a list of tools to help you make your books available in the eBook form. / Here is a list of six tools that can help you format an eBook into ePub and from common formats such as HTML and Word documents
• So You Need a Typeface (Font, Design, Decision, DecisionMaking, DecisionAid, DecisionTree, Tree, InfoGraphic)
• Strong, tough and now cheap: New way to process metallic glass developed (w/ video) (Watch, Tech, MaterialScience, Metal, Glass)
  Stronger than steel or titanium -- and just as tough -- metallic glass is an ideal material for everything from cell-phone cases to aircraft parts. Now, researchers at the California Institute of Technology have developed a new technique that allows them to make metallic-glass parts utilizing the same inexpensive processes used to produce plastic parts. With this new method, they can heat a piece of metallic glass at a rate of a million degrees per second and then mold it into any shape in just a few milliseconds.
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, by Abelson, Sussman, and Sussman (ComputerScience, Education, SoftwareDevelopment, Book, Reference, Free)
  This site is a companion to the influential computer-science text Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, by Abelson, Sussman, and Sussman. Its purpose is to demonstrate the Web's potential to be a channel for innovative support for textbook users. / The material on this site is aimed at instructors using SICP as a course text, and at people using the book for self-study.
• Successful Queries: Agent Sara Megibow and ''Score'' -- Guide to Literary Agents (Query, Agent, Writing, Example, Success, FirstPerson, POV)
  Query written from the characters POV.
• The Argumentative Theory | Conversation | Edge (Brain, Cognition, Psychology, Argument, Reason, Reasoning)
  Last July, opening the Edge Seminar, "The New Science of Morality", Jonathan Haidt digressed to talk about two recently-published papers in Behavioral and Brain Sciences which he believed were "so important that the abstracts from them should be posted in psychology departments all over the country." / One of the papers "Why Do Humans Reason? Arguments for an Argumentative Theory," published by Behavioral and Brain Sciences, was by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber. / "The article,” Haidt said, "is a review of a puzzle that has bedeviled researchers in cognitive psychology and social cognition for a long time. The puzzle is, why are humans so amazingly bad at reasoning in some contexts, and so amazingly good in others?"
• The audience for your book… (Writing, Publishing, Question, List, Audience)
• The Centered Librarian: 40 literary terms you should know (Writing, Reference, Definition, List)
• The Cost of Bin Laden: $3 Trillion Over 15 Years - Tim Fernholz & Jim Tankersley - Business - The Atlantic (USA, Terrorism, Economy)
  As we mark Osama bin Laden's death, what's striking is how much he cost our nation--and how little we've gained from our fight against him. By conservative estimates, bin Laden cost the United States at least $3 trillion over the past 15 years, counting the disruptions he wrought on the domestic economy, the wars and heightened security triggered by the terrorist attacks he engineered, and the direct efforts to hunt him down.
• The Hidden Message in Pixar’s Films | Science Not Fiction | Discover Magazine (Pixar, Movie, Theme, Film, Lesson, Learning, Society)
• The People vs. Goldman Sachs | Rolling Stone Politics (USA, Politics, Banking)
  A Senate committee has laid out the evidence. Now the Justice Department should bring criminal charges
• The SF&F Short Story Collection Meme -- Bibliophile Stalker (SF, SciFi, Fantasy, Anthology, List)
  I love the short story format and the problem with a lot of the book memes circulating is that they exclusively focus on novels. I've done some crowd sourcing (and some personal recommendations of course--this list isn't meant to be objective) and I've come up with a list of 166 short story collections.
• This movie is 100% realistic | MetaFilter (Movie, Film, Review, Link, Satire, MetaFilter)
  Building on the popularity of their previous "Harry S Plinkett" movie reviews, Red Letter Media's Mike Stoklasa and Jay Bauman have been working on a second line of film mockery: Half In The Bag / The statement on their website announces "This is not meant to REPLACE the Plinkett reviews…just something we’re doing IN ADDITION TO them" and extends the conceit of character-based film critique. There are seven episodes so far.
• Three Sneaky Tricks to Slide in Settings | The Parking Lot Confessional (Writing, Setting)
• To Become A True Storyteller, You Must Cloak Yourself In The Mantle Of Evil Puppetmaster (Writing, Storytelling)
• Top Three Overrated SF Authors -- Ecstatic Days (SF, SciFi, Author)
• Using rules as a distraction - Babel Clash (Writing)
• Videos to Help You Find the Muse -- There Are No Rules (Writing, Inspiration, Video)
• Where’s the Plot? – Grasping for the Wind (Writing, Plot)
• Working Lego Super-8 projector - Boing Boing (Lego, Projector, BoingBoing, Video, Movie)
  Friedemann Wachsmut built a fully functional Super-8 projector out of Lego Technic: "The only non-Lego parts are the lens, the reel spindles and the lamp. The projector uses just two engines and is fully featured with automatic feeding, 24 fps, fast rewind and 120m reel capabilities. A decent LED flashlight makes it pretty amazingly bright."
• WriterMatch.org (Writing, Online, Critique)
  Have you written a novel, screenplay or non-fiction book but found it difficult to find someone to read the entire work and critique it?
• YouTube - Cinemassacre's Top 10 Jackie Chan Fight Scenes (Video, MartialArt, JackChan, Movie, Film, Fight, FightScene, Top.10, YouTube)

Tagged Art

• Against Craft -- Booklife
• Fan-Art Nouveau

Tagged Author

• Top Three Overrated SF Authors -- Ecstatic Days

Tagged ComputerScience

• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, by Abelson, Sussman, and Sussman

Tagged Critique

• WriterMatch.org

Tagged Fantasy

• All 6500+ pages of Elfquest comics online - Boing Boing
• Sense of Wonder | The Night Bazaar
• The SF&F Short Story Collection Meme -- Bibliophile Stalker

Tagged FreeWare

• 7Plus: add many useful functions and tweaks to Windows | freewaregenius.com

Tagged Genre

• Author, Know Thy Shelf -- The Naked Book

Tagged JavaScript

• Javascript PC Emulator - Technical Notes

Tagged Movie

• Sense of Wonder | The Night Bazaar
• The Hidden Message in Pixar’s Films | Science Not Fiction | Discover Magazine
• This movie is 100% realistic | MetaFilter
• Working Lego Super-8 projector - Boing Boing
• YouTube - Cinemassacre's Top 10 Jackie Chan Fight Scenes

Tagged OpenSource

• 7Plus: add many useful functions and tweaks to Windows | freewaregenius.com
• David Dobbs on the importance of open-source science - Boing Boing
• Greenshot | Download Greenshot software for free at SourceForge.net

Tagged Plot

• Where’s the Plot? – Grasping for the Wind

Tagged Publishing

• 5 Fast Differences Between YA and MG -- YA Highway
• 8 Things Readers Want From Self-Published Authors -- There Are No Rules
• Amazon as publisher, publishers as booksellers | Jacket Copy | Los Angeles Times
• Author, Know Thy Shelf -- The Naked Book
• Creating and Publishing eBooks Using the EPUB Standard
• Should You Self-Publish After a Near-Miss? -- There Are No Rules
• The audience for your book…

Tagged Reading

• 5 Fast Differences Between YA and MG -- YA Highway

Tagged Review

• 7Plus: add many useful functions and tweaks to Windows | freewaregenius.com
• This movie is 100% realistic | MetaFilter

Tagged SF

• Favorite Science Fiction Stories 3-Volume Set (Audiobook) | Free eBooks Download - EBOOKEE!
• Iain M Banks: Science fiction is no place for dabblers | Books | The Guardian
• Keeping Space Opera Relevant [UPDATED] -- SF Signal: MIND MELD
• Sense of Wonder | The Night Bazaar
• The SF&F Short Story Collection Meme -- Bibliophile Stalker
• Top Three Overrated SF Authors -- Ecstatic Days

Tagged SpaceOpera

• Keeping Space Opera Relevant [UPDATED] -- SF Signal: MIND MELD

Tagged Tech+Watch

• Activated graphene makes superior supercapacitors for energy storage
• Flexible solar sheet captures up to 95% of light energy | KurzweilAI
• Foldable display shows no crease after 100,000 folding cycles
• Ground-effect robot could be key to future high-speed trains | KurzweilAI
• Strong, tough and now cheap: New way to process metallic glass developed (w/ video)

Tagged Video

• Ground-effect robot could be key to future high-speed trains | KurzweilAI
• Videos to Help You Find the Muse -- There Are No Rules
• Working Lego Super-8 projector - Boing Boing
• YouTube - Cinemassacre's Top 10 Jackie Chan Fight Scenes

Tagged Writing

• 10 Simple Ways to Double the Speed of Your Writing ... Right Now | Write to Done - Felicia's Melange
• 3 Ways to Know When to End Your Chapters -- Writer’s Digest
• 5 Fast Differences Between YA and MG -- YA Highway
• Against Craft -- Booklife
• Author, Know Thy Shelf -- The Naked Book
• C.J. Cherryh: Advice for Writers -- The Night Bazaar
• Does Your Story Have a Hook or Merely a Gimmick? -- Guide to Literary Agents
• How to Choose the Best Outline Method for You -- Writer’s Digest
• Iain M Banks: Science fiction is no place for dabblers | Books | The Guardian
• Logical punctuation: Should we start placing commas outside quotation marks? - By Ben Yagoda - Slate Magazine
• Should You Self-Publish After a Near-Miss? -- There Are No Rules
• Six eBook Formatting Tools - eBookNewser
• Successful Queries: Agent Sara Megibow and ''Score'' -- Guide to Literary Agents
• The audience for your book…
• The Centered Librarian: 40 literary terms you should know
• Three Sneaky Tricks to Slide in Settings | The Parking Lot Confessional
• To Become A True Storyteller, You Must Cloak Yourself In The Mantle Of Evil Puppetmaster
• Using rules as a distraction - Babel Clash
• Videos to Help You Find the Muse -- There Are No Rules
• Where’s the Plot? – Grasping for the Wind
• WriterMatch.org

Tag Cloud

Actor Advice Agent Amazon Analysis Android Animal Announcement Anthology Argument Art ArtNouveau Astronomy Audience Audio Author Banking BlackHole Blog BoingBoing Book BookMark BookMark.Manager Brain CSS Chapter Cliche Cognition ComicBook Comparison ComputerScience Copyright Craft Critique Culture DRM DarkMatter Decision DecisionAid DecisionMaking DecisionTree Definition Design Difference Display EPUB Ebook Economy Education Emulator English Environment Epublishing Example Fail Fan Fantasy FeliciaDay Fight FightScene Film FirstPerson Font Format Free FreeWare Galaxy Genre GettingThingsDone Glass Grammar Graphene GroundEffect Habitat History Home Hook HowTo IainBanks Image InfoGraphic Inspiration Internet Interview JackChan Japan JavaScript Journal Law Learning Lego Lesson Letter Letter.Query Link Linux List Market Marketiing MartialArt MaterialScience MetaFilter Metal MiddleGrade MindMeld Movie Ms.Windows Ms.Windows.7 NanoTech Network Networking News Nintendo Online OpenSource Outline PC POV Pangea Physics Pixar Planet Planet.ExtraSolar Plot Politics Power PowerGeneration Privacy Projector Psychology Publishing Publishing.Self Punctuation Query Question Reading Reason Reasoning Reference Review RobberBaron SF Satire Scan SciFi Science ScreenCapture Security SelfPublishing SenseOfWonder Server Setting Society SoftwareDevelopment SolarPower SpaceOpera Star Star.WhiteDwarf Storytelling Style Success SuperCapacitor Tech Terror Terrorism Theme Tip Tool Top.10 Transportation Tree Tweak USA VPN Victorian Video Watch Web WiFi Writing YA YouTube del.icio.us io9

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• 2011/05/18