SF
drorzel | February 18, 2009I've already mentioned two of the program items I was on at Boskone (global warming and quantum physics for dogs). I should at least comment on the other two, "Physics: What We Don't Understand" and "Is Science Addicted to Randomness?" They both featured me and Geoff Landis, but other than that were very different.
"Physics: What We Don't Understand" took off from a column by John Cramer from ten years ago, laying out seven big problems in (astro)physics that hadn't been solved. We talked about how some of Cramer's items have been more or less solved (gamma-ray bursts, solar neutrinos, and…
drorzel | February 17, 2009My cold from last week has shifted into a bit of bronchitis (and here I thought my virus-fighting strategy of staying up really late drinking beer would clear everything up), so I'm kind of groggy and lethargic. And I have book edits to work on, which precludes taking a long time to write blog posts about science, so here's some babble about card games.
Saturday night at the Tor party, a bunch of people started playing poker using Tor.com buttons as chips. They were playing the obligatory Texas Hold 'Em, and there were a couple of guys standing off to the side (one of whom reminded me of…
drorzel | February 16, 2009On Saturday at Boskone, I gave a talk on the Many-Worlds Interpretation of QM. This was held up a bit by waiting for the projector to arrive (I was busy enough with other stuff that I didn't notice that I hadn't received confirmation of my request for a projector until late Thursday night, so this was entirely my fault). They were able to come up with a projector, sparing people the need to squint at my tiny tablet PC screen, but it took some time off the beginning of the talk.
The talk consisted of me reading the dog dialogue from Chapter 4 (not to different from the original post), then…
drorzel | February 16, 2009Sunday morning at Boskone, I moderated a panel on "Global Warming: Facts and Myths, (and all that jazz)", featuring James Morrow, Mark Olson, and Vince Docherty. As noted previously, I was a little worried that this would turn out to be absolutely awful in one of a couple of obvious ways, but it wound up being pretty good, all things considered.
The panelists were all pretty much on board with my request to try to keep from being soul-crushingly depressing, and a lot of the discussion focused on things that can be done to mitigate the worst effects of global warming. The whole thing was…
drorzel | February 12, 2009I usually post something here about what panels look interesting when the Boskone program goes up on the web. This year's program went up over the weekend, and I'm just now getting around to making a list of worthwhile items. This tells you what kind of week I'm having.
Anyway, I looked the program over this morning, and here's what I came up with:
Friday 7:30pm Independence:
Reading
Rosemary Kirstein
We won't be able to leave Schenectady until 4pm or so, so the odds of making it to this are pretty slim. I'm really curious to know what the status of the Steerswoman books is, though.
Friday…
drorzel | February 3, 2009Locus magazine has come out with its "Recommended Reading" list of science fiction and fantasy published in 2008. There are, as always, some annoying quirks-- several of the books making the list have been published only in the UK or by small presses, so I've never even seen them-- but it's a reasonably good consensus list of what people on the literary end of SF think was good.
As usual, I've only read a smallish fraction of these. Somewhat unusually, I've read more of the science fiction list than the fantasy list-- 4/20 science fiction novels (Matter, Pirate Sun, Anathem, and Implied…
drorzel | February 3, 2009The Arxiv blog highlights a post on John Scalzi's favorite science question: the Fermi Paradox:
We have little to guide us on the question of the existence intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. But the physicist Enrico Fermi came up with the most obvious question: if the universe is teeming with advanced civilizations, where are they?
The so-called Fermi Paradox has haunted SETI researchers ever since. Not least because the famous Drake equation, which attempts put a figure on the number intelligent civilisations out there now, implies that if the number of intelligent civilisations…
drorzel | February 2, 2009In Friday's installment of his ongoing examination of Left Behind: The Movie, Fred Clark points out some gaps in the movie-Antichrist's plan, where it departs from the loopy prophetic cosmology of the Left Behind books. He then notes how they could've done better:
If Team Nicolae had really done their homework, they'd have consulted with groups like the Canaan Land Restoration of Israel, Inc., to make sure they had all their ducks in a row before trying to launch their apocalypse. The frustrating thing for Nicolae at this point has to be that it's already too late for him to get in touch with…
drorzel | January 29, 2009As noted in the previous post, I'm supposed to be moderating a panel at Boskone the weekend after next, with the title:
Global Warming: Facts and Myths, (and all that jazz)
This is not my usual line, but then, I don't have to provide expert commentary, I just need to steer the discussion. Still, it would be good to have some idea where to steer it, so I will throw this out to the larger ScienceBlogs community:
What should I make sure to talk about in a panel on global warming facts and myths?
Of course, there are some additional constraints:
1) I'm looking for general discussion topics, not…
drorzel | January 29, 2009Boskone, the Boston-area SF convention that Kate and I go to every year, is the weekend after next. Once again, I'll be doing a few panels and one talk. For those who might be attending, or who care about this for some reason, here's my preliminary schedule:
Saturday10am Physics: What We Don't Understand
Geoffrey A. Landis
Mark L. Olson
Chad Orzel
Karl Schroeder
Ian Tregillis
In 1999 John Cramer wrote a column in Analog describing seven big
unsolved problems in physics (including the nature of dark matter,
the origin of ultra-high…
drorzel | January 26, 2009In what will surely come as a surprise to the people who say mean things about the award, the John Newbery Medal for children's literature was awarded to Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book.
Mr. Gaiman, 48, won for "The Graveyard Book," a story about a boy who is raised in a cemetery by ghosts after his family is killed in the opening pages of the novel. In announcing the winner of what is widely considered the most prestigious honor in children's literature, the Association for Library Service to Children, a division of the American Library Association, cited Mr. Gaiman's work for its "…
drorzel | January 24, 2009Via a bunch of people, but most directly Matt Ruff, the Guardian has published a list of "1000 Novels Everyone Must Read". Which has triggered the usual flurry of procrastinatory blog posts indicating which books from the science fiction and fantasy sub-list one has and hasn't read.
I have other things I really ought to be doing, so of course, I had to follow suit. Below the fold is my list, following Matt's convention of marking in bold face those books that I've read all the way through, and putting an asterisk (*) after books I've started or skimmed, but never fully read.
The Hitchhikers…
drorzel | January 13, 2009Over at Built on Facts, Matt Springer is easing his way back into blogging by asking "What is Science?". He offers a simple one-sentence definition:
Science is the testing of ideas.
That's all. Every technicality I can think of is avoided so long as the person doing the science is honest. Create fair and objective tests, try not to fool yourself or anyone else, don't be wedded to your hypothesis, basic things like that. Be dishonest and I doubt there's a definition in the world that some sufficiently clever pseudoscientist can't wriggle out of. Test your ideas and be honest about it. That's…
drorzel | January 13, 2009Or, Brian Greene Writes a Kid's Book...
This is a very odd book. It's printed on boards, like a book for very small children, but the story is a bit beyond what I would imagine reading to a normal kid of the age to want books of that format. It's too short and simple, though, to have much appeal to significantly older children, aside from the fact that the story is written over the top of 15 absolutely gorgeous reproductions of pictures of astronomical objects.
This is probably one of those objects whose cool appearance is the only real reason for the thing to exist. The pictures really are…
drorzel | January 5, 2009As Kate notes, I am a paid-up member of this year's Worldcon, and thus entitled to nominate works for the Hugo Awards. Of course, there are a zillion categories, and I'm not entirely sure what to nominate for any of them.
So, if you are a reader or watcher of science fiction and/or fantasy, this is your opportunity to influence my nominations. If there's a book, story, tv show, movie, editor, or artist that you really, really want to see on the ballot, drop me a comment and let me know. I'll look at the work, if I have time, and give it proper consideration.
If you are a person who cares…
drorzel | January 4, 2009Fannish regions of the Internet are all abuzz today, with the introduction of Matt Smith as the next actor to play the lead role in Doctor Who. Sadly, this is not the Matt Smith I went to college with (who would've been a really unusual choice for the part...)-- he's still comfortably obscure to anyone not receiving fundraising letters from the Class of '93.
This is probably as good an occasion as any to make an admission/ provocative statement: I don't get Doctor Who. Probably to an even greater extent than I don't get Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I've watched it on occasion since the days when…
drorzel | December 31, 2008Terry Pratchett knighted:
Terry Pratchett, the author of the Discworld series of novels that have sold more than 55 million copies worldwide, said he was "stunned, in a good way" after receiving a knighthood in the New Year's Honours List.
The 60-year-old writer, below, whose first book was published in 1971, told The Independent last night: "I'm having difficulty fitting it into my head. I'm very pleased indeed. It cheers me up no end." He added: "It will also impress some of my American friends, who started calling me 'Sir' after I received my MBE, which was a little embarrassing."
[...] "I…
drorzel | December 2, 2008A while back, Kate started doing a chapter-by-chapter re-read of The Lord of the Rings on her LiveJournal. Life intervened, though, and the project fell by the wayside.
She's re-started it, this time as part of the Tor media empire. So far, there's an introductory post and a discussion of the foreword and prologue, with Chapter 1 to come next week. If they're conscientious about their use of tags, the whole thing should be at this link.
So there's yet one more reason to subscribe to Tor's RSS feed.
drorzel | November 30, 2008I've gotten out of the book-logging habit, but Spaceman Blues is good enough that I feel compelled to write about it. I had heard of the book some time back-- I believe I recall Patrick Nielsen Hayden saying nice things about it at some con or another-- but the packaging didn't really give me a clear idea of what it was like, so I never got around to buying it until Tor offered it as a free e-book. I'll buy a paper copy soon, though, and probably pick up his new book as well.
It's hard to fault the copy writer, though. This is a really difficult book to describe. The promotional site name-…
drorzel | November 24, 2008The Corporate Masters have decreed a new question Ask a
ScienceBlogger question, and this one's right up my alley:
What do you see as science fiction's role in promoting science, if any?
If you look over in the left sidebar, you'll see a
href="http://scienceblogs.com/principles/sf/">SF category, which
is all about, well, science fiction stuff. I read a lot of SF,
regularly attend Boskone (a Boston-based convention), and we scheduled
our big Japan trip to coincide with the Worldcon in Yokohama. So,
yeah, this is a question I can spend a little time on...
The short version of the answer is…