Link dump for 20120323

[edit] Links

"Superpowers" for non-superhero characters -- TalkToYoUniverse (Writing, Character, Superpower)
I often joke about my characters having superpowers. None of them are superheroes - what I mean by this is that they have special skills, or special powers of intuition, that allow them to get through the story. It makes sense to do this - if your protagonist is going to beat the bad guy, likely enough he or she will need to be a good sword fighter, or an expert thief, or able to put two and two together at critical points in the story. / Be careful. / First off, there's the danger of employing Superman in your story. You don't want your protagonist to be so powerful that nothing can hurt him. Vulnerabilities and self-doubt can go a long way toward making a protagonist relatable. It may be a product of our modern age that people are less interested in seeing an uncomplicated hero - on the other hand, look at Hamlet. He had issues, too (not that they were called "issues"!)
15 Grammar Goofs That Make You Look Silly | Copyblogger (Grammar, Writing, InfoGraphic)
2 Ways to Make the Most of Goodreads | Jane Friedman (Readers.Courting, Readers, Tip, Advice, Review, GoodReads, Author, Writing)
I really admire the folks at Goodreads, not just for their site, but also for the data they share with the industry, including tips for authors. (If you’re not familiar with Goodreads, imagine a Facebook for people who love to read books.) / The recent Goodreads author newsletter offered a number of gems helpful for any author with an upcoming release. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to archive their author newsletters online, so I’ll have to summarize what they said. / 1. Reviews are essential. / 2. Giveaways are a powerful promotional tool.
25 Things You Should Know About Word Choice (Advice, Writing, WordChoice, Words)
A Chart That Explains How Long Ago Star Wars Actually Took Place (io9, Timeline, StarWars)
A Powerful Sort of Doubt by Eugene Cross (SelfDoubt, Doubt.Self, Doubt, Writing)
Amazon & The Importance of Popularity | David Gaughran (Author, Comparison, Publishing.Traditional, Publishing.Self, SelfPublishing, SciFi, SF, Analysis, List, MostPopular, BestSeller, Amazon)
A few days ago, I tweeted a link to a survey which purported to show that self-publishers had captured 77% of the spots on the Kindle Top 200 Science Fiction Bestseller List. / As it turns out, the list the survey was based on was not the Bestseller List, but the Popularity List (and I’ll get to the differences between the two below). / After this discrepancy was pointed out, the author re-did the survey, based on the actual Bestseller List, and found somewhat similar results – if not quite as staggering. Namely, self-publishers had captured 66.1% of the Kindle Top 100 Science Fiction spots. / There are all sorts of interesting nuggets in that post including the various prices books were selling at, and that more than half of the books on the list from trade publishers were backlist titles over ten years old. It’s going to be fascinating to see the results of other genres (there’s data on Fantasy there too), and watch any changes over time.
CHART: College Tuition And Fees Have Nearly Sextupled Since 1985 | ThinkProgress (Info, Trend, History, Tuition, College, Graph, Chart)
A report released yesterday by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York shows that the total balance of student loans in the U.S. is $870 billion, and 27 percent of student loan borrowers are at least 30 days behind on their payments. Average student debt now surpasses $25,000, and as Catherine Rampell noted in the New York Times with the following chart, “College tuition and fees today are 559 percent of their cost in 1985.” “In other words, they have nearly sextupled (while consumer prices have roughly doubled),” Rampell wrote.
Computer simulations suggest graphynes may be even more useful than graphene (Tech, Watch.Tech, Watch, MaterialScience, Simulation, Graphyne, Graphene)
The past several years have seen a virtual explosion in the amount of research dedicated to graphene and as a result there has been a nearly constant stream of news pertaining to new discoveries regarding its attributes. Now it appears, graphene is about to be upstaged by a more interesting cousin called graphyne. Graphene, as most everyone is aware by now, is a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal or chicken-wire pattern. Graphyne is also a single layer of carbon atoms, but it comes in several different types of patterns, which likely make it more versatile. Now new computer simulations regarding its properties have been done by a team of researchers in Germany, who report in Physical Review Letters, that their research shows that some types of graphyne structures allow for electron flow in just one direction.
Conservatives Deeply Outraged by Science Fiction Story From 1992 -- io9 (io9, History, Racism, Culture, SciFi, SF)
Derrick Bell's story "The Space Traders" is one of science fiction's scariest thought experiments — because of what it reveals about human nature. It's a misanthropic tale in which aliens arrive on Earth and offer America the solution to all our problems, in exchange for all of our black people. For Bell, who spent years of his career fighting segregation in America, it seemed all too plausible that Americans might choose to trade minorities for wealth and alien technology. / In any case, this story — which was made into an HBO special in the early 1990s, see video above — somehow managed to avoid getting on the radar of the 24/7 outrage machine, until now. Conservatives are seizing on the story as proof that Bell was racist against white people — and thus, President Obama must be racist too, because he embraced Bell once in 1990. Obviously, this is the sort of fake controversy that cable news runs on nowadays — but also, it's apparently the product of people who live in some sort ...
Contests and Awards -- SFWA.org (WritingContest, Advice, Author, Publishing, Contest, Writing)
Convert screenshots to text with Capture2Text, a free optical character recognition (OCR) app | freewaregenius.com (Review, ScreenCapture, Tool, FreeWare, OCR)
There are times when you might see some on-screen text and want to grab it or use it in a document, only to find that for some reason it refuses to be clipped (e.g. it might be graphics-based or the document might be protected or whatever). A quick and easy solution would be a program that can clip the screen as an image and perform quick OCR (optical character recognition), and that, precisely, is what free program Capture2Text does, for more than 30+ possible languages. / Capture2Text has another component that can perform speech-to-text on short, ad-hoc voice recordings and convert them to useable text.
Dark matter core defies explanation (DarkMatter, Galaxy, Astronomy)
Astronomers using data from NASA s Hubble Telescope have observed what appears to be a clump of dark matter left behind from a wreck between massive clusters of galaxies. The result could challenge current theories about dark matter that predict galaxies should be anchored to the invisible substance even during the shock of a collision.
Doubting Your Work? An Excellent Sign! | Jane Friedman (Author, Comparison, SelfDoubt, Self, Doubt.Self, Advice, Doubt, Writing)
eBook Review: Ex-Heroes - Boing Boing (Ebook, BoingBoing, Review, Novel, Zombie, Superhero)
Talk about crazy eBook genres -- I started with Zombie novels; survive the apocalypse, rebuild society after the apocalypse, zombie break-outs through history -- you name it we got it. Then I was reading super-hero fiction that was surprisingly similar to the teen-angst magical powers; just replace the dark and brooding black outfits with capes and cowls. One totally mind-bending jumble of genres, however, is Ex-Heroes by Peter Clines./
Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc. Using Trademark Law To Prevent The Use Of Public Domain Stories | Techdirt (Intimidation, Legal, Fail, Copyright, EdgarRiceBurroughs, Barsoom, Lawsuit, Law, TradeMark)
Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Family Fighting To Help Disney Censor John Carter | Giant Freakin Robot (DejaThoris, Female, Character.Strong, Lawsuit, Estate, EdgarRiceBurroughs, Censorship, Comics, Barsoom, Disney, Watch)
Eleven SFF Series I Read And Was Surprised To Love | Bryan Thomas Schmidt (Recommendation, Reading, Series, Fantasy, SFF, SciFi, SF)
I read a lot of books for my author interviews on SFFWRTCHT and blogs like GraspingForTheWind.com, www.SFSignal.com, and Ray Gun Revival, as well as my own blog. In fact, reading for those dominates my reading time. I rarely squeeze in books for fun or learning anymore. Most of the time, I’m excited to read the books because I love discovering new authors and for years I didn’t read speculative fiction at all, so I am way behind in my genre knowledge. But every once in a while you come across one that makes you think “I probably won’t enjoy this” for various reasons. Isn’t it wonderful to instead discover you adore them? Here’s Eleven series I had that initial reaction to which are now among my favorites ...
Empire Weekend -- herosandwich.net (SpeculativeFiction, Genre, SciFi, SF, Pulp, Novel, Review, Fiction, Superhero)
Everything is Flowcharts -- The Mule Abides (Generation, HowTo, Character, Flowchart, DungeonsAndDragons)
Explaining Without Really Explaining -- SpecTechnique (Fiction.Weird, Horror, SciFi, SF, Genre, Exposition, Writing)
FINALLY: The Difference between Nerd, Dork, and Geek Explained by a Venn Diagram (Chart, Humor, Diagram.Venn, VennDiagram, Dork, Dweeb, Nerd, Geek)
To all of you nerds and geeks who–like me–have been unfairly and inaccurately labeled “dorks,” only to then exhaustively explain the differences among the three to a more-than-skeptical offender, I say: / You’re welcome. This nerd/dork/geek/dweeb Venn diagram should save you a lot of time and frustration in the future.
Genital-filled Princess of Mars comic shows off the full-frontal natives of Barsoom (NSFW) (io9, Artist, ComicBook, EdgarRiceBurroughs, Barsoom)
If your biggest problem with Disney's John Carter movie is that it didn't contain nearly enough Martian wang, then James Killian Spratt's graphic (in more ways than one) adaptation of A Princess of Mars might be up your alley. Spratt is creating his own comic version of Burroughs' classic pulp, where the action is set off by giant alien knockers. / Spratt, who works primarily as a sculptor, has been adapting A Princess of Mars since 2000, and he's 21 chapters into a planned 28 chapter book. And it's unlikely that you'll see much commonality between Spratt's vision for Barsoom and Andrew Stanton's. Nudity and blood are the central features of Spratt's Mars, which he explains was always how he pictured the books: ...
Google's new privacy policy: what has changed and what you can do about it (Policy, Privacy, Google)
Today s the day Google s broad new privacy policy goes into effect. European regulators are claiming it violates data protection laws, but it s here and it may be here to stay. There are some not-completely-foolproof ways to hide from Google, but first let s talk about what s changed. Prior to today, Google had more than 70 privacy policies for its various products. But with the company trying to create a seamless experience across search, Gmail, Google+, Google Docs, Picasa, and much more, Google is consolidating the majority of its policies down into just one DOCUMENT covering most of its products. This will make it easier for Google to track users for the purpose of serving up personalized ads. The main change is for users with Google Accounts, Google said at the time of its January announcement. Our new Privacy Policy makes clear that, if you’re signed in, we may combine information you ve provided from one service with information from other services. In short, we’ll treat you ...
Hero Sandwich (Superhero, Blog, PopCulture, Comics, ComicBook)
Comics, Pop Culture, and General Geekery
How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Romance | Tor.com (WorldBuilding, Fiction.Historical, RegencyRomance, Romance.Regency, LoisMcMasterBujold, GeorgetteHeyer, JoWalton, SciFi, SF, Genre, Romance)
How to write compelling sci-fi short stories -- BestScienceFictionStories.com (Advice, ShortStory, SciFi, SF, Writing, HowTo)
If you're on parole, don't steal a judge's office-door nameplate (If you do, don't pose with it on Facebook) - Boing Boing (Facebook, BoingBoing, StupidCriminalTrick)
21-year-old Steven Mulhall cut a Spicolian caper when he stole the nameplate off a judge's courthouse office-door, then posed with it for a photo, which his romantic ladyfriend posted to Facebook. It was discovered by a law enforcement professional, who took the fellow into custody.
Iowa State engineer discovers spider silk conducts heat as well as metals (Tech, Watch, Watch.Tech, MaterialScience, Engineering, Spider, SpiderSilk)
Spider silk has some interesting properties: it s very strong, very stretchy, only 4 microns thick human hair is about 60 microns and, according to some speculation, could be a good conductor of heat. But nobody had actually tested spider silk for its thermal conductivity.
Japanese Speech-Jamming Gun (Jammer, Speech, Japan, Watch.Tech, Tech, Watch)
Kazutaka Kurihara site - In this paper we report on a system, "SpeechJammer", which can be used to disturb people's speech. In general, human speech is jammed by giving back to the speakers their own utterances at a delay of a few hundred milliseconds. This effect can disturb people without any physical discomfort, and disappears immediately by stop speaking. Furthermore, this effect does not involve anyone but the speaker. We utilize this phenomenon and implemented two prototype versions by combining a direction-sensitive microphone and a direction-sensitive speaker, enabling the speech of a specific person to be disturbed. We discuss practical application scenarios of the system, such as facilitating and controlling discussions. Finally, we argue what system parameters should be examined in detail in future formal studies based on the lessons learned from our preliminary study.
Manuscript Editing: How to Resurrect a Stalled Manuscript | WritersDigest.com (Advice, Writing)
Are you working on a nonfiction writing or fiction writing project that needs the mirror test just to see if it’s still breathing? If so, take a break from completing fiction projects. Hit the “Save” button; file it under “manuscript drafts.” Then check out these three prescriptions to help resurrect a stalled project. Which one does your book need? Take the time to diagnose it now, and you’ll be primed to take a healthy manuscript into its next phase: completion.
Mercedes creates digital camouflage for a car (Watch, Watch.Tech, Tech, Car, Camoflage)
Mashable - Mercedes placed a mat of LEDs across one side of the vehicle and mounting a video-shooting Canon 5D Mark II digital SLR camera on the other side to provide a one directional illusion of background camouflage The resolution of the LED pixels is not high so this mainly works at a fairly large distance.
Michael Chabon and Patrick Stewart, Genre Fiction Champions | ThinkProgress (MFA, StarTrek, Genre.Ghetto, LiteraryFiction, MichaelChabon, Genre)
Movies based on Philip K. Dick stories - FritzWiki (FritzWiki, SciFi, SF, List, Film, Movie, PhiliKDick)
Mystery deepens around dark core in cosmic collision (Astronomy, DarkMatter, Galaxy)
Five years ago, San Francisco State researcher Andisheh Mahdavi and his colleagues observed an unexpected dark core at the center of Abell 520, a cosmic train wreck of galaxy clusters. With new space-based telescope observations, they have CONFIRMed that the core really does exist. But they are no closer to explaining why it is there.
Norwegian heavy water sabotage - Wikipedia (Commando, Wikipedia, WW2, History, Research, Nuclear, HeavyWater, Norway)
Quadrotor drones are amazing and cute, and they will probably destroy us all. - Slate Magazine (Privacy, Military, Robot, Surveillance, QuadCopter, Video, Drone)
It was way back in May 2010 that I first spotted the flying drones that will take over the world. They were in a video that Daniel Mellinger, one of the robots’ apparently too-trusting creators, proudly posted on YouTube. The clip, titled “Aggressive Maneuvers for Autonomous Quadrotor Flight,” depicts a scene at a robotics lab at the University of Pennsylvania, though a better term for this den might be “drone training camp.” / In the video, an insectlike, laptop-sized “quadrotor” performs a series of increasingly difficult tricks. First, it flies up and does a single flip in the air. Then a double flip. Then a triple flip. In a voice-over so dry it suggests he has no idea the power he’s dealing with, Mellinger says, “We developed a method for flying to any position in space with any reasonable velocity or pitch angle.” What does this mean? It means the drone can fly through or around pretty much any obstacle. We see it dance through an open window with fewer than 3 inches of clearance
Quantum biology on the transition of chaos increase coherence times by orders of magnitude (Stability, Transition, Order, Theory, Chaos, Biology, QuantumMechanics, Quantum)
A new mechanism in quantum biology could be exploited to enable room temperature quantum devices with very long coherence times. / We give a new explanation for why some biological systems can stay quantum coherent for long times at room temperatures, one of the fundamental puzzles of quantum biology. We show that systems with the right level of complexity between chaos and regularity can increase their coherence time BY orders of magnitude. Systems near Critical Quantum Chaos or Metal-Insulator Transition (MIT) can have long coherence times and coherent transport at the same time. The new theory tested in a realistic light harvesting system model can reproduce the scaling of critical fluctuations reported in recent experiments. Scaling of return probability in the FMO light harvesting complex shows the signs of universal return probability decay observed at critical MIT. The results may open up new possibilities to design low loss energy and information transport systems in this Poise
Recursive D&D; dungeon is a procedural dungeon-generation system - Boing Boing (Generator, BoingBoing, Generation, Dungeon, DungeonAndDragons)
Tavis sez, "A mind-blowingly recursive poster that represents the AD&D; rules for procedural dungeon generation as a flowchart which is drawn as a dungeon. From the The Mule Abides blog at NYC's intersection between role-playing games, the gallery art scene, and how Kickstarter can jam 'em together. Cory's linked the Mule before as HOWTO have a D&D; party for 8-year-olds; also featured in this post is a nifty Kickstarter for the first publication from the Play-Generated Map and Documents Archive, similarly linked for Homemade D&D; module, 1981."
Regency Romance -- guest post by Madeleine E. Robins -- Deborah J. Ross (JaneAusten, GeorgetteHeyer, Writing, Reading, Genre, RegencyRomance, Romance)
Researchers 'Print' Polymers That Bend Into 3-D Shapes (Printer, Print, Fabrication, MaterialScience, Polymer, Shape, 3D)
NSF.gov - Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst employed photographic techniques and polymer science to develop a new technique for printing two-dimensional sheets of polymers that can fold into three-dimensional shapes when water is added. The technique may lead to wide ranging practical applications from medicine to robotics. / The technique could be used to direct growth of blood vessels or tissues in the laboratory. / Researchers used a photomask and ultraviolet (UV) light to "print" a pattern onto a sheet of polymers, a technique called photolithography. In the absence of UV exposure, the polymer will swell and expand uniformly when exposed to water, however when polymer molecules within the sheet were exposed to UV light they became crosslinked--more rigidly linked together at a number of points--which prevented them from expanding when water was added. Patterning the amount of crosslinking across an entire sheet allowed researchers to control how much eac ...
Review: Samsung Galaxy Note a too-big phone, too-small tablet (SamsungGalaxy, Phone, CellPhone, SmartPhone, Review)
When Samsung unveiled the Galaxy Note in September, the South Korean tech giant pitched the Note as a gadget that offers the best of a smartphone and a tablet in one groundbreaking new category of device.
RIP, Moebius - Boing Boing (BoingBoing, Obit, Moebius)
Scott Turow: Wrong About Everything | David Gaughran (Publishing.Traditional, Government, USA, Apple, Amazon, Publishing)
On Thursday it was reported that the U.S. Justice Department was preparing to sue five of the largest publishers, and Apple, for (allegedly) colluding to fix e-book prices. Despite the shock expressed in some quarters, this is hardly a bolt from the blue. / It’s almost a year since the European Union raided the offices of several publishers in France, Italy, and Germany, kicking off their own Europe-wide anti-trust investigation – later folding into that probe a similar move by the Competition Authority in the UK to examine the Agency Agreement. / It was also widely reported late last year that a U.S. Justice Department investigation, along similar lines, had commenced.
Self-Published Book Awards | WritersDigest.com (Publishing.Self, WritersDigest, EntryFee, Contest, SelfPublishing, Writing)
Each year, Writer’s Digest honors self-published authors with the Annual Self-Published Book Awards.We’re proud to be in our 20th year of spotlighting today’s self-published works. This could be your year. Whether you’re a professional writer, a part-time freelancer or a self-starting student, here’s your chance to enter the only competition exclusively for self-published books.
Shining light in the ears may alleviate SAD symptoms (Weird, SeasonalAffectiveDisorder, Health)
Millions of people experience depression and lower levels of energy in the winter due to seasonal-affective disorder (SAD), or the “winter blues.” Since the disorder is thought to arise due to a shortage of natural light, one common form of treatment is light therapy, in which the person sits in front of a bright, full-spectrum light at certain times of day. But the effectiveness of light therapy has been unclear, and now researchers from Oulu, Finland, think they know why: light-sensitive regions of the brain may actually play a larger role in SAD symptoms than those in the eyes. For this reason, they’ve designed earphones that shine light through the ear canal to light-sensitive proteins on the brain’s surface, with encouraging results.
Sixteen 16 square inches of DARPA Geckskin can stick to glass and support 700 pounds (MaterialScience, DARPA, Watch.Tech, Tech, Watch)
The Z-Man programs aims to develop biologically inspired climbing aids to enable warfighters to scale vertical walls constructed from typical building materials, while carrying a full combat load, and without the use of ropes or ladders. / Geckos, spiders and small animals are the inspiration behind the Z-Man program. These creatures scale vertical surfaces using unique systems that exhibit strong reversible adhesion via van der Waals forces or hook-into-surface asperities. Z-Man seeks to build synthetic versions of these biological systems, optimize them for efficient human climbing and use them as novel climbing aids. / “Geckskin” is one output of the Z-Man program. It is a synthetically-fabricated reversible adhesive inspired by the gecko’s ability to climb surfaces of various materials and roughness, including smooth surfaces like glass. Performers on Z-Man designed adhesive pads to mimic the gecko foot over multiple length scales, from the macroscopic foot tendons to the ...
Startup announces big breakthrough for electric vehicle batteries (Vehicle, Watch, Watch.Tech, Tech, Battery)
For years, the electric vehicle industry has been eager to build a better electric car battery: one that extends range while having a longer overall life, is affordable, quick-charging and safe.
Strong Female Characters, My Own Definition | I Should Be Writing (Definition, Character.Strong, SciFi, SF, Character, Female, Women)
In storytelling, moreso in SFF, women have often been cardboard cutouts. Mothers, wives, lovers, things to be rescued, or married, or escaped from. Some older “forward thinking” stories put women as scientists and astronauts, and STILL had them sit aside while the men did the action.(Uhura, anyone?)
Study supports theory of extraterrestrial impact (PreHistory, Impact, Asteroid)
A 16-member international team of researchers that includes James Kennett, professor of earth science at UC Santa Barbara, has identified a nearly 13,000-year-old layer of thin, dark sediment buried in the floor of Lake Cuitzeo in central Mexico. The sediment layer contains an exotic assemblage of materials, including nanodiamonds, impact spherules, and more, which, according to the researchers, are the result of a cosmic body impacting Earth. / These new data are the latest to strongly support of a controversial hypothesis proposing that a major cosmic impact with Earth occurred 12,900 years ago at the onset of an unusual cold climatic period called the Younger Dryas.
Stumped by a problem? The ‘generic parts technique’ technique unsticks you | KurzweilAI (Feature, Language, Bias, ProblemSolving, Thinking.Lateral, Function, Description, Part, Generic, Decomposition, Technique, Analysis, Problem)
University of Massachusetts psychologist Dr. Tony McCaffrey has developed a systematic way of overcoming “functional fixedness” (the tendency to fixate on the common use of an object or its parts, hindering people from solving problems). He calls it the “generic parts technique” (GPT). / He found that people trained in GPT solved eight problems 67 percent more often than those who weren’t trained, and the trained group solved them more than 8 times out of 10. / How GPT works / “For each object in your problem, you break it into parts and ask two questions,” explains McCaffrey. / 1. Can it be broken down further? / 2.Does my description of the part imply a use?”
Super City Blues | Superhero Novels (PoliceProcedural, Review, Fiction, Novel, Superhero)
S.C.P.D.: The Case of the Claw / By Keith R.A. DeCandido / First Printing: July 2011 / ISBN: 9780983434870
Suspended tent-hammock sleeps 5-8 - Boing Boing (BoingBoing, Design, Tent)
Hammock-tent-makers Tentstile have a new 5-8 person model -- string it up between a couple-three massive trees and it becomes a treetop aerie, far above the madding crowd of critters and hikers.
Team generates frequency comb with more than 100 terahertz bandwidth (SignalProcessing, Tech, Watch.Tech, Watch)
Many of the communication tools of today rely on the function of light or, more specifically, on applying information to a light wave. Up until now, studies on electronic and optical devices with materials that are the foundations of modern electronics—such as radio, TV, and computers—have generally relied on nonlinear optical effects, producing devices whose bandwidth has been limited to the gigahertz (GHz) frequency region. Thanks to research performed at the University of Pittsburgh, a physical basis for terahertz bandwidth (THz)—the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum between infrared and microwave light—has now been demonstrated.
The "QWERTY Effect" is changing what words mean to us -- io9 (io9, Words, Psychology, Language, Keyboard)
Back in the 1870s, a newspaper editor named Christopher Latham Sholes rearranged the letters on typewriters so that the keys would stop jamming. The result was the QWERTY keyboard... and his innovation has actually fundamentally altered how we think about words. / That's the idea put forward by Kyle Jasmin of University College London and Daniel Casasanto of the New School for Social Research. The idea builds on a well-supported psychological phenomenon known as the fluency effect, which basically means that the harder a word or a name is to pronounce, the less positively a person will feel towards it. (Oh, so that's why I wasn't popular in high school. Always wondered about that one.)
The Business Rusch: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics | Kristine Kathryn Rusch (Publishing, Business, BusinessRusch, Stats)
The quote in my title comes from Mark Twain’s autobiography. Twain said: / “Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.” / The problem with Twain’s attribution, however, is that no scholar can find anything in Disraeli’s papers that even resembles it. (Yes, scholars have that kind of time on their hands.) The website twainquotes.com cites an 1895 article by Leonard H. Courtney in which the quote first appeared—or so everyone thinks.
The case for dolphin rights - Boing Boing (BoingBoing, NonHumanIntelligence, NonHuman, Rights, Cetacean, Dolphin)
Recently, I posted a series of videos where science writers talked about some of the fascinating things they learned at the 2012 American Association for the Advancement of Science conference. In one of those clips, Eric Michael Johnson talked a bit about a panel session on whether or not certain cetaceans—primarily whales and dolphins—deserve to have legal rights under the law, the same as people have. / This is an issue that just begs controversy. But in a recent blog post following up on that panel and the meaning behind it, Johnson explains that it's not quite as crazy an idea as it might at first sound.
The Collusion Case Against Publishers – Whatever (JohnScalzi, Collusion, Publishing)
I was asked what my thoughts are about the US Justice Department telling Apple and five major publishers (including Macmillan, where my Tor books are published out of) that it plans to sue them for collusion regarding ebook prices. My immediate thought is that if all of them were in fact stupid enough to have colluded, then sue away, United States Justice Department. If they were dumb enough to collude, then they get what they get. /
The illusion of "natural" electronics interfaces, and the book -- TalkToYoUniverse (Natural, Interface, Design, Book)
Ever since the advent of the iPad and iPhone I have noticed people talking about how "natural" the touch-screen interface is. I have seen people on Facebook posting video of their children trying to make a magazine perform like an iPad (with little success, obviously). Quite recently I have also seen advertising for new products that involve flexible circuits, where you'll be able to bend and flex your little phone or what-have-you in order to make it work, and how "natural" this is compared to everything that has gone before (I'm assuming, by implication, this includes the touch interface). / I would like us to take a little step back and examine this idea of what "natural" means. "Natural" means something that we do as part of our nature - but our nature is quite complex. Humans are capable of all kinds of complex learned behaviors. When I examine different kinds of interfaces with electronics that we've used, what it commonly comes down to is a question of metaphor. ...
The Indie Exchange (Publishing.Self, Publishing, IndiePublishing, WebSite, Blog, Author, SelfPublishing)
The Tech-Empowered Writer (AWP Panel Resources) | Jane Friedman (Alternative, Publishing.Traditional, Publishing, Thinking.Lateral, Tech, Writing)
This week I’ll be in Chicago for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs annual conference. I’m a panelist on “The Tech-Empowered Writer” on Thursday at 1:30 p.m. This post serves as a handy resource for anyone who attends the panel, plus all of you who will miss it. / Think beyond the [analog] book / * Traditional authorship focuses on the traditional publication of books or articles, with everything else viewed as ancillary. This is very narrow or limited thinking when considering how many ways a message or story can be spread in today’s tech-driven world. / * How can your story or message be adapted, expanded, or shared across a variety of media? / * Think broadly about your strengths to reach and engage with readers across a variety of channels. / * The future of reading does not equal the future of print. Don’t limit yourself to books/articles/text. Consider how you can offer diverse experiences.
The wild, all-naked JOHN CARTER comic Disney does not want you to see (NSFW) | The Beat (Adaptation, Comic.Book, ComicBook, Barsoom)
In a few short hours, I’ll be doing something I’ve dreamed about my whole life—going to see a movie about John Carter of Mars. Yes, I am one of those rare Barsoomian enthusiasts, like director Andrew Stanton, for whom this movie has been a pipedream many times thwarted. I’ve always been a pulp lover, and the whole 11 book series was a parade of oddities—Gheks and Kaldanes, Tara and Gahan, Tur is Tur, Ras Thavas, green white and red Martians, the hurtling moons of Mars—it’s all corny and pulpy and imaginative as hell. Like his contemporary, L. Frank Baum, Edgar Rice Burroughs had an interior life full of the grotesque and heroic in equal measure, and crazy ideas poured from their pens in an unstoppable rush. (Baum was older then Burroughs, and his literary heyday didn’t overlap Burroughs by much, but it’s safe to say that early Hollywood was obsessed with both of them, and they wereamong the first authors to succeed in every medium of the day.)
These colliding galaxy clusters challenge everything we know about dark matter (io9, DarkMatter, Astronomy, Galaxy)
Top 10 Most Influential Science Fiction Writers (Influence, Top.10, Top, List, Author, SciFi, SF)
Warner wants you to go to a depot and pay to rip your DVDs to DRM-locked formats - Boing Boing (BoingBoing, CustomerService.Fail, VisitFromClueFairy.Suggested, DRM, Service, Duplication, DVD)
Here's a scathing editorial from Public Knowledge's Michael Weinberg on the Warner Home Entertainment announcement of a new "service" that allows you to legally rip your DVDs by driving over to a special DVD-ripping depot and paying a fee to have them converted to DRM-locked formats that only play in approved devices. Warner calls this "safe and convenient."
We already have the technology to send trains into space, at a fraction of the cost of rockets (Engineering, MegaEngineering, Orbit, LaunchSystem, SuperConductor, Startram, Tech)
This is Startram, a proposed launch system that would use magnetic levitation trains, a 1000-mile tunnel, and a superconducting cable to reach low Earth orbit. Amazingly, we already have the technology to do it...at far less than the cost of rockets. / Gizmag has a great overview of how Startram would work, but the basic idea is simple enough. Because maglev trains hover above their tracks and thus don't have to worry about friction, they are theoretically capable of going far beyond their current mark of about 350 miles per hour to reach the 20,000 miles per hour needed for orbital velocities. Of course, to safely accelerate humans to those speeds, you'd need a lot of track, not to mention a way to keep a hypersonic train from being ripped to shreds by the air around it. According to its engineers, a vacuum tube that's 1,000 miles long and simulates the lower air pressure of the mesosphere should do the trick.
Website Looker -- Website Value Calculator, Estimations and Information (Online, Tool, Traffic, Analysis, WebSite, Web)
What It Takes: DÉJÀ VU ALL OVER AGAIN (Publishing)
Why Some Bad POD Publishers Ignore Public Criticism -- Writers Weekly (Fail, Criticism, BadPress, PrintOnDemand, POD)
Why we ve got the cosmological constant all wrong (VacuumEnergy, QuantumMechanics, Cosmology, Gravity, Physics)
Some scientists call the cosmological constant the worst prediction of physics. And when today’s theories give an estimated value that is about 120 orders of magnitude larger than the measured value, it’s hard to argue with that title. In a new study, a team of physicists has taken a different view of the cosmological constant, ?, which drives the accelerated expansion of the universe. While the cosmological constant is usually interpreted as a vacuum energy, here the physicists provide evidence to support the possibility that the mysterious force instead emerges from a microscopic quantum theory of gravity, which is currently beyond physicists’ reach.
Wild brown bear observed using a tool (NonHumanIntelligence, NonHuman, Tool.Use, ToolUse, Tool)
Because brown bears are so reclusive, not to mention dangerous to be around, not a lot is really known about their brain power. This is actually rather odd because bears have the largest brains for their body size of all carnivores and are thought to be rather clever, though mostly through anecdotal evidence. Now comes news of British researcher Volker Deecke of the University of Cumbria, who while on vacation in Alaska, came across a brown bear using a rock covered with barnacles to help alleviate the itch associated with molting. Deecke photographed the use of the tool by the bear and has published his findings in Animal Cognition.
Wildest Alternate Timeline Yet: The Titanic Never Sank, so the Japanese Won World War II (io9, Excerpt, TimeTravel, 20thCentury, Titanic, AlternateHistory, SciFi, SF)
This is apparently the year of bizarre novels about time travel and people creating alternate timelines. And the wildest example yet of this subgenre may well be David Kowalski's The Company of the Dead — in which a time traveler goes back and saves the Titanic from sinking, with unpredictable results. / Yes, saving the Titanic from that iceberg results in more changes than just the fact that James Cameron never makes that interminable, Celine Dion-soaked movie. It also changes everything about World War II.
Write Tip: Transitions & Seeding – Essentials For Plausibility | Bryan Thomas Schmidt (SciFi, SF, WorldBuilding, Transition, Foreshadowing, Advice, Writing)
Recently I came across a situation that reminded me how important transitions and seeding story details are to good fiction. These are things which most pros do without even thinking about it, but up and coming writers, learning craft, probably have to be more deliberate about. I will not specify where I encountered this but will give examples and suggestions how to handle this better. By transitions, in this case, I am talking not about segways between scenes, but rather, transitions in introducing new world elements so that we accept them as organic. And by seeding, I mean subtly introducing these things early enough so that when they become key to the story we have no trouble believing they belong there. (These are the best terms I can come up with to describe it, so that’s what we’re going with.)
Writers on Writing: Process Narration -- BOOK VIEW CAFE BLOG (Narrative, Narrator, NarrativeVoice, Viewpoint, Writing)
At a workshop last fall, a bunch of writers were talking about varieties of narrative voice. We were observing that there are actually many varieties of the seemingly straight-foward third person. Limited, omniscient, stream-of-consciousness, camera-eye . . . there are as many names as representations, and of course a writer can vary these narrative approaches within a work. / I made an observation that we need to watch out for process or authorial narration just as we need to watch out for scaffolding in our prose. Someone asked for more on what I mean by process narration, so I thought I may as well type it up.
Writer’s Craft #62 – Time Travel Rant « Clarion Blog (Rant, SciFi, SF, TimeTravel)
January’s theme for Broad Universe’s podcasts was “Time Travel”, a subject that always sets my teeth on edge. Mr. Wells’s novels notwithstanding, time travel stories are not science fiction, at least not the sort of SF I favor, which bases itself on real science, not fantasy. Physics as we currently understand it does allow for the possibility of time travel, but only in one direction: into the future, one way. And it requires near-light speeds to achieve. / I regret that the geek in me just can’t get past this when listening to time travel stories, no matter how well-written. So when, during the Broadly Speaking interview segment, host Tracy Morris asked Lynda Williams about Okal Rel and her version of time travel, my propeller beanie spun with delight. Her work grounds itself solidly in Special Relativity. Woot.
Writing a Realistic Superhero Story -- Superhero Nation (Advice, Story, Fiction, Superhero, Realistic, Writing)
Writing Dialogue: How to Write Dialogue in a Story -- WritersDigest.com (Advice, Dialogue, Writing)
Whether you write novels or prefer writing short stories, it’s important to know how to write dialogue in a story. Dialogue is one of those key elements of fiction that a lot of writers struggle with. It’s difficult to make the things your characters say smack of real life—to convey the important details of the story without sounding forced or fake.
Writing Rules: 10 Experts Take on the Writer s Rulebook -- WritersDigest.com (Advice, BadWritingAdvice.Counteracting, BadWritingAdvice, WritingRules, Rules.Writing, Rules, Writing)
As wordsmiths, many of us rejoice in a single fact every day: Writing is not math. But still, in creative writing classes and workshops, at conferences and indeed here and there in how-to books and magazines including this one , it may sometimes seem like there’s a formula for good writing, even for approaching the writing life the “right” way. You’re given absolutes and adages that come to be accepted as truth and add up, almost without anyone noticing, to a set of—gasp—rules. You’ve heard them over and over, the basic writing equivalents of 1+1 2: “Show, don’t tell.” “Write what you know.” “Silence your inner critic.” But in writing, 1+1 isn’t always 2—sometimes, 1+1 10. Sometimes, it’s best to tell, and not show. Sometimes, you have to break the rules.

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Why Some Bad POD Publishers Ignore Public Criticism -- Writers Weekly

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Eleven SFF Series I Read And Was Surprised To Love | Bryan Thomas Schmidt

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Convert screenshots to text with Capture2Text, a free optical character recognition (OCR) app | freewaregenius.com

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Movies based on Philip K. Dick stories - FritzWiki

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Eleven SFF Series I Read And Was Surprised To Love | Bryan Thomas Schmidt

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Quadrotor drones are amazing and cute, and they will probably destroy us all. - Slate Magazine

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2012/03/23