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Bush's Unlimited Powers

I just realized I've neglected to discuss last week's stunning statement from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales that he could not rule out President Bush authorizing the warranteless wiretapping of purely domestic calls in the US. This shouldn't really be a shock to anyone, as it is the logical next step in the administration's perception of its own powers as essentially limitless. If the administration believes that it has the inherent authority to arbitrarily suspend habeas corpus in specific cases as it sees fit and hold an American citizen indefinitely without filing charges against them…

Kenneth Oppel, Airborn [Library of Babel]

When I switched over the ScienceBlogs, I did so intending to keep my booklog separate. In the last several months, though, the book log has been languishing, in large part because I feel obliged to keep up the quantity and quality of the posts here. Which means that I end up not writing booklog entries because that would take time away from writing ScienceBlogs posts, and I don't have time to do both. So, I'm going to face facts, and just move the booklog posts over here. This also offers the advantage of allowing spoiler cuts (the current set-up for the book log does not), which is nice. So…

Hard-Rockin' Physicists

The prolific Bora at A Blog Around the Clock is looking for the rock stars of science, as part of a long chain of people picking up this quote from Morgan Spurlock: We've started to make science and empirical evidence not nearly as important as punditry--people wusing p.r.-speak to push a corporate or political agenda. I think we need to turn scientists back into the rock stars they are. In physics, we're ahead of the game, already having two actual rock stars working in the field. And how do you count the Hong Kong Cavaliers? Then again, maybe they're looking for a serious answer... (Below…

Intake Police

Two news stories today relating to students' intake of various substances, and the people who want to control them: First, an essay in the New York Times about misguided anti-obesity measures in the public schools. It's got the requisite list of dodgy medical statistics, and some shots at the BMI as a measure of "obesity." At a higher educational level, there's an Inside Higher Ed piece about debates over the definition of "binge drinking." Some people think that the current definition of 4-5 drinks in a two-hour period is too restrictive, and that efforts ought to be focussed on people who…

Study in Contrasts

Thursday was "Founders Day" at Union, and there were two major speaking events on campus. The official Founders Day address was given at lunchtime by Rev. Peter J. Gomes, the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard Divinity School. That evening, there was a second talk, not officially associated with Founders Day, by Chuck D, of the rap group Public Enemy. At first glance, that seems like the sort of weird collision of speakers that you can only find on a college campus. The really strange thing, though, was that in an odd way, they both gave the same speech. Gomes was pretty much…

climatedialogue.org

Go visit; its at climatedialogue.org. And Bart is involved, so it is at least promising. On the other hand the About Page says it exists because the Dutch Parliament... asked the government ‘to also involve climate skeptics in future studies on climate change’. That's pol-speak, therefore stupid. Any scientists with anything valuable to say, via the peer-reviewed literature or, I suppose, in other ways, is or can be already involved. However, don't let me be too negative too soon. The first topic up is Melting of the Arctic sea ice and that's not a bad idea for a start. Inevitably, the…

Copenhagen, again

mt has a a transcript of the Copenhagen closing plenary. Let's have a look. Better still, go read it yourself. I'm not going to cover it all. Our conclusion is that recent observations confirm that, given high rates of observed emissions, the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realised. For many key parameters, the climate system is already moving beyond the patterns of natural variability within which our society and economy have developed and thrived. These parameters include global mean surface temperature, sea-level rise, ocean and ice sheet dynamics, ocean…

The Bottleneck Years by H. E. Taylor - Chapter 12

The Bottleneck Years by H.E. Taylor Chapter 11 Table of Contents Chapter 13 Chapter 12 The Reception, July 23, 2055 Mom and Dad's old friends, university people, and a gaggle of 32nd cousins chattered and whispered at tables throughout the reception hall. Matt and Jon had disappeared. I was doing my best to represent the family. Everybody wanted to express their condolences in person. It was long and drawn out. People I hadn't seen for years kept coming up to me to commiserate and chat. All at once Jon was standing behind me. "It is decided," he said. "What's that?" "Matt's going to…

Classroom Prostletyzing

The New York Times has has this remarkable article about the high school teacher in New Jersey who was using his class as a mission field: Before David Paszkiewicz got to teach his accelerated 11th-grade history class about the United States Constitution this fall, he was accused of violating it. Shortly after school began in September, the teacher told his sixth-period students at Kearny High School that evolution and the Big Bang were not scientific, that dinosaurs were aboard Noah's ark, and that only Christians had a place in heaven, according to audio recordings made by a student whose…

Adler on Atheism

Via Afarensis, I came across this Newsweek article about atheism. It focuses mainly on Sam Harris, RIchard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. Overall I think it's a pretty good article. Here are a few highlights: This was not a message most Americans wanted to hear, before or after 9/11. Atheists “are seen as a threat to the American way of life by a large portion of the American public,” according to a study by Penny Edgell, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota. In a recent NEWSWEEK Poll, Americans said they believed in God by a margin of 92 to 6--only 2 percent answered “don't know”--…

Coulter and Conservatism

If you're wondering why only a small handful of prominent conservatives and Republicans have publicly criticized Ann Coulter, the answer is simple: Most of them agree with her, and the ones who don't are still happy to have her on their side. Coulter is what right-wingers are all about, you see. They are constantly attacking, rather like those genetically engineered super-soldiers you see in bad science fiction movies. Getting the basic facts right means nothing to them. No one seriously believes, for example, that Coulter's arguments about evolution are the result of a detailed…

The Central Problem of Academic Hiring

A bunch of people in my social-media feeds are sharing this post by Alana Cattapan titled Time-sucking academic job applications don't know enormity of what they ask. It describes an ad asking for two sample course syllabi "not merely syllabi for courses previously taught -- but rather syllabi for specific courses in the hiring department," and expresses outrage at the imposition on the time of people applying for the job. She argues that the burden falls particularly heavily on groups that are already disadvantaged, such as people currently in contingent faculty positions. It's a good…

Discovery Institute blockbuster evidence in the Gonzalez tenure case!

The DI had their press conference. They unveiled their killer evidence, emails from his university colleagues obtained via a Freedom Of Information Act request. They revealed — oh, horrors! oh, tea and crumpets! oh, I feel a swoon coming on! — that his colleagues had discussed Gonzalez's involvement with intelligent design in a negative way before the tenure decision was made. The disclosure of the e-mails is contrary to what ISU officials emphasized after Gonzalez, an assistant professor in physics and astronomy, learned that his university colleagues had voted to deny his bid for tenure. "…

Particle-Wave Duality for Eight-Year-Olds

Over at Scientific American's Frontiers for Young Minds blog, they have a great post on what happens when you ask scientists to explain key elements of a different research field. It's pretty funny, and rings very true, as SteelyKid asks me tons of science questions, very few of which have anything to do with atomic, molecular, or optical physics. so I spend a lot of time faking my way through really basic explanations of other fields. Of course, even pitching stuff from my own field at the right level for small kids is a challenge. Which reminds me, I never did explain my presentation for…

The Problem with (and Promise of) Word Problems

Math with Bad Drawings has a post about "word problems" that will sound very familiar to anyone who's taught introductory physics. As he notes, the problem with "word problems" for math-phobic students is that it requires translating words into symbols, and then using the symbols to select a procedure. It adds a step to what at a lower level is a simple turn-the-crank algorithm: given this set of symbols, do these abstract operations, and write down the answers. This is a very familiar problem in intro physics, where I regularly have struggling students tell me "I can do the math just fine, I…

Denial 101x Week 3

A few notes from Week 3 of Denial 101x: Making Sense of Climate Science Denial. These notes are mainly about the science and not the denialism part (unlike my last post, which addressed the central theme of the course, denialism, more.) The Carbon Cycle Atmospheric CO2 concentrations have gone up by about 40%. Simple explanation: Humans are releasing Carbon into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuel. More complex explanation: Humans are affecting the Carbon Cycle in a number of ways, releasing Carbon (burning fossil fuels) as well as affecting natural Carbon sinks. This became known,…

Global Warming Is Happening: DENIAL101.x

I'm auditing the EdEx course "Denial101x: Making Sense of Climate Science Denial." This is Week 2: Global Warming ins Happening. The course is covering indicators of warming, what is happening in the Cryosphere, and related matters. Here is an example lecture segment: A central theme of this week is the relationship between climate and weather, and how this relationship becomes fodder for the development of myths in service of denial about climate change. The climate is a cherry orchard. Weather is the cherries. Don't pick the cherries! There are many dimensions the climate system that…

Ubuntu Linux 15.04 Vivid Vervet Beta Mate Flavor

Ubuntu Linux 15.04 will be released in April. There is not a lot new for the average desktop user in the new release, as far as I can tell. One good "change" is a feature called "locally integrated menus." This is where the menus are, by default, where they are supposed to be, instead of, well, invisible until you stab at the menu bar that must reside at the top of your screen in Ubuntu with Unity. Then the menu appears and maybe you can use it. That was a bad idea, and over the last few revisions of Ubuntu with Unity, the top menu bar menus have slowly gone away, first as something you…

Fun with Colliding Galaxies!

"Where there is an observatory and a telescope, we expect that any eyes will see new worlds at once." -Henry David Thoreau This past weekend, the Astronomy Picture of the Day was a remarkable shot of the giant spiral galaxy NGC 6872, taken by the Gemini Telescope. (It's not Hubble, but Gemini is pretty impressive in its own right!) One look at this galaxy should tell you that it's an interacting galaxy in the process of a collision! How should you be able to tell? The distorted shape is a big clue; normal galaxies don't have extra-long tails stretched out in a line through space! That's…

Your First Year in Physics Grad School

Teacher Writes on Blackboard: "The Method of Guessing" Student: "What! There's a method???????" Teacher: "Yeah, there's even a proof!" -overheard in a physics grad school As a physics professor, one of the challenges I face is how to advise young students nearing the end of their undergraduate career on how to succeed in graduate school in physics. The best I can do is tell them about what I've done myself that's worked for me, and what pitfalls I've seen others fall victim to. As an undergraduate, my grades were all over the place. I'd take an advanced astrophysics course I was really…

The Stingray Nebula and XKCD

"There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach." -J.R.R. Tolkien But over at XKCD, that quote provides little comfort. After all, "for ever" isn't exactly quite right. Even the stars must all exhaust their fuel and die. Right? Let's head on…

Fascism Forever Club

Correction: Apparently, the part about Gorsuch creating a "Fascism Forever Club" is a falsehood! Well, that's what we get for using the Daily Mail. (In my defense, I originally rejected this story when sent to me because of the source, but then USA Today picked it up. Even thought USA Today was still citing the Mail, the truth is, the Mail is not always wrong, so I assumed USA Today journalists had some verification. Silly me.) Gorsuch is still to the right of Scalia, but he apparently didn't have this club. I quickly add that the source I have that this is a falsehood is not necessarily…

Go Tell It On The Grocery Store

The press helped elect Donald Trump. The mainstream press loved itself that false balance, giving absurdly pseudo-even coverage to whatever tripe might be spewed by willfully ignorant conservatives. So, screw them, and we await their apology. Meanwhile, the tabloid press has made its own contribution to the problem. Part of that is impressing on so many minds such crazy crap that a large percentage of Americans (apparently about one half of the actual voters) will believe anything. Or, perhaps, simply don't care about what is real and what is not. People are looking for things to do to…

The Likely Outcome Of The Latest Trump Revelations

You know the problem. Not just the release of the "I'd grab her ..." tape, but starting before that. Here, watch: A roughly written Facebook comment by me, reacting to much of the reaction I'm seeing: To everyone who is saying that Trump is out of the race because of his admitted preference for sexual assault as a way of getting women to like him: Sorry, you are wrong, and you may be living in a bubble. Do a transect across humanity, in the US. You will find that a double digit percentage of both women and men (though I'll allow you the possibly true but possibly not true idea that more men…

How lucky would Kepler have to be to see us?

"No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit." -Helen Keller If you've been paying attention, you heard that the Kepler mission, earlier this week, announced the discovery of 706 candidate planets orbiting stars in its field of view. And while most of the planets it found were Neptune-sized or smaller, they were still mostly gas giants, and still mostly closer than Mercury to their parent stars. Kepler's looking at 100,000 stars, and while finding 706 planets is certainly not bad for just over a month's…

Q & A: The Shape of Things

It's only natural to wonder why things are the ways that they are. Take a look at our Solar System, for example. A central bulge with planets, moons, and whatnot moving in a disc around it. Is this the way things have to be? My friend Rich, a chemist, asks: It seems that all the objects in our solar system orbit the sun in nearly the same plane. Why is that? Why doesn't the solar system have spherical symmetry? In particular, Rich wants to know why our Solar System doesn't look more like this: Our Solar System is definitely not shaped like a sphere; it definitely is a bulge at the center…

Six dead, one remembered, and the $64,000 question.

You'll remember that Philando Castile was killed in cold blood by a St. Anthony cop, who was later acquitted with the defense that "he was a black guy, I wuz scared." A couple of days ago, tragically and sadly, a cop in a town near me was run over by a driver who was probably on drugs and drunk, who was told by the courts she was not allowed to drive because she is so dangerous but was driving anyway. That is very sad. That particular cop was said by others to be "one of the good ones" and I believe that. He had a boy Huxley's age, in the same school system (but a different building). The…

Pamela Anderson Roast

Warning: This post contains strong language and jokes that will likely be offensive to some people. If that will bother you, don't read it. If you do read it, don't complain about it. One of the cool things about having a relatively popular blog is that I'm now occasionally being sent books and DVDs to review. This is doubly cool when it's something that I really enjoy, and I really love roasts. No, not the culinary variety, the "let's get together and insult someone for an hour" type. It's one of my favorite forms of comedy and always has been. And one of the best things that has happened in…

StopTheACLU Loses a Lawyer

You may remember a few weeks ago when I had a good laugh at the expense of our witless friends at StopTheACLU for thinking that they were going to be allowed to intervene in the ACLU's lawsuit against the NSA over the wiretapping program. Well now it turns out that Debbie Schlussel, the equally witless attorney who told them they could intervene in the case if they paid her to represent them, has pulled out of the arrangement: Because I reported on this site, which has been deleted now, about a fight between Debbie Shlussel and other bloggers, Debbie has decided to no longer represent…

Two Great Arguments on ID

In the last couple days I've encountered two brilliant arguments concerning ID that I'd never thought of before. One was offered by Steve Reuland, a fellow Panda's Thumb contributor, in a comment following my post about Dembski's duplicity on whether the "intelligent designer" has to be supernatural or not. He says: What sense does it make to have a movement whose stated purpose is to overthrow "naturalism" and "materialism" if your designer is natural and made of matter? Excellent point. The ID crowd, as usual, wants to have it both ways. On the one hand, they pretend that the designer could…

There is nothing wrong with Tsarnaev's face

Does this picture of Hitler make you like him? I dislike Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's, that dislike contingent on his guilt yet to be proven (but very likely, it seems). His picture on the cover of Rolling Stone makes a point that struck me during the mayhem in Boston, and it is a good point. Those who reacted to this photograph negatively are seeing this situation in the first order, missing the point, missing the nuance. They are operating at the bodice-ripping romance novel level of thinking, not even the semi-complex Hercule Poirot level, of thinking. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts cop…

Reproductive Success and Fitness are not the same thing

Reproductive Success (RS) is defined in many ways in different places by different people, but one of the most common definitions is simply the number of offspring an individual produces. This definition is further modified in most cases to mean only those individuals that will be fertile, i.e., capable of producing further offspring. RS is important in understanding Natural Selection (NS). In the simplest model, a heritable feature that increases RS will be selected for over time in a population because individuals with higher RS will contribute more offspring to future generations and this…

720 sq km Ice Block Falls Off Antarctica

The Pine Island Glacier, in West Antarctica, drains (as ice and water) a measurable percent of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. It is probably the case that glaciers in this area of the Antarctic contribute more of the ice to water transition than any other glacial region in the world, so how they melt is of great interest. And now, Pine Island Glacier has given birth! In October 2011 a large crack started to form across the glacier, downstream from its grounding line. Over the last few days, it seems, this crack finally transected the entire glacier, causing the down-stream side of it to…

There is no fruit in a BLT

First, I want to say that tomatoes are a fruit. Here is a scientific definition of fruit: Fruit noun, plural: fruits (1) (botany) The seed-bearing structure in angiosperms formed from the ovary after flowering. source See? Tomato is a fruit. Having said that, in common English parlance we do not call a tomato a fruit. We put the tomatoes in with the vegetables. Is this because we are unknowledgeable? No. It is because we are wise. Anyone who reads Fortune Cookies knows this: Knowledge is knowing that a Tomato is a Fruit. Wisdom is not putting a Tomato in the Fruit Salad. There are two…

A True Ghost Story Part 3: Who is that kilted man with the big gun?

... Continued ... Well, we were living with this ghost who would walk up and down the hall in the middle of the night, invisibly leaving behind only the sound of its footsteps. But before I tell you how this all came out, I want to tell you a related side story. As I had mentioned, I had the "hallway extension" room. Let me explain. To get into the apartment, you would walk up a set of stairs and through a lockable doorway. Then to the right was a bedroom, and to the left a bathroom. Moving on ahead down the hallway were two more bedrooms on the right for a total of three. On the…

Finding Facebook

"Hey, look! I've located my first love! Cool, maybe we can go have dinner or something!" ... precisely the words a newlywed husband was hoping to hear from his wife ... Amanda was sitting on the couch discovering Facebook, a place on the Internet she had been assiduously avoiding until only a day or two earlier. Finally, she became convinced that she could do this and keep it under control ... keep her professional life (as a teacher) separate from it (if any of her students are reading this, don't even try to friend her!). It was fun watching her learn the ins and outs, and to reconnect with…

Are female night owls screwed?

As I write this at 2AM sitting under annoying fluorescent lights, am I increasing my risk of developing breast cancer? Maybe, according to a recent study showing that melatonin-depleted blood can spur the growth of mammary tumors: The increased breast cancer risk in female night shift workers has been postulated to result from the suppression of pineal melatonin production by exposure to light at night. Venous blood samples were collected from healthy, premenopausal female volunteers during either the daytime, nighttime, or nighttime following 90 minutes of ocular bright, white fluorescent…

First Week Of 2016 Excavations At Birgittas udde

Ulvåsa in Ekebyborna is a manor near Motala with two known major Medieval elite settlement sites. Excavations in 2002 proved that the unfortified Gamlegården site was established before AD 1100. The fortified Birgittas udde site has seen no archaeological fieldwork since 1924, when the main building's cellar was emptied and restored. Its date is only known to the extent that almost all moated sites of this kind in Sweden belong to the period 1250-1500. My current book project deals with Östergötland province's fortified sites of the High/Late Middle Ages, and so I decided to spend two weeks…

GMO corn for LSD

Since the anti-science foo-foo hippies lost their bid to have all foods labeled 'CONTAINS GMO WARBLEGARBLE! TEACH THE CONTROVERSY!', a group of scientists at the Evil League of Evil have generated GMO corn for LSD. I guess as a gesture of good-will, or something. There. I hope everyones happy now. *whisperswhisperswhispers* What? *whisperswhisperswhispers* The GMO corn for 'LSD' is not for the mind-altering drug 'LSD', but actually a putative treatment option for 'Lysosomal storage diseases'?  This is GMO corn that could help treat a collection of genetic conditions that kill children/…

GMO Virus for Nicotine Addiction

I used to think gene therapy was an absurd 'solution' for HIV/AIDS.  Well, 'absurd' is putting it lightly.  I thought gene therapy was a perverted solution-- Even if it 'worked', it would only be available for the richest people in the richest countries, not the millions and millions and millions of individuals living in poverty who need a solution the most (not just the poor abroad, I doubted the poor right here in the USA could get this kind of therapy). But in the six years Ive been writing at ERV, my stance on gene therapy has changed from 'Thats disgusting, and Im actually kind of angry…

Links for 2012-03-29

The Virtuosi: Money for (almost) Nothing I am not typically interested in lotteries. They seem silly and I am seriously beginning to question their usefulness in bringing about a good harvest. But this morning I read in the news that the Mega Millions lottery currently has a world record jackpot up for grabs. In fact, the jackpot is so big... Tonight Show Audience: HOW BIG IS IT? It is so big that I decided to do a little bit of analysis on the expected returns. Zing! Drowning Doesn't Look Like Drowning How did this captain know - from fifty feet away - what the father couldn't…

Scientific Commuting: Some Answers to "How Much Faster?"

So, the previous post poses a physics question based on some previous fooling around with modeling my commute: A car starts from rest at the beginning of a straight 1km course, accelerates up to some speed, cruises at constant speed for a while, then decelerates to a stop at the end of the course. A second, identical car does the same course, but decelerates to a stop at the halfway point. It then immediately accelerates back to its cruising speed, and then decelerates to a stop at the end of the course. How much faster does the second car have to go in order to complete the course in the…

Links for 2011-07-21

Towards an Opt-Out Button in Left-Liberal Debates | Easily Distracted "Here's what I want and I think maybe a lot of people, both Americans and otherwise, want. I want what my colleagues Barry Schwartz and Ken Sharpe call "good enough". I don't want to grab for the brass ring, be the alpha male, see my name in lights, have the penthouse apartment on the East Side. I don't want to write out a lengthy policy manifesto on what American foreign policy towards 21st Century African states should be and then spend the next ten years taking meetings and writing op-eds to push my plan. I just want…

Biomedicine: The English Literature of the Sciences?

Thursday's post about the troubles of biomedical scientists drew a response from Mad Mike saying that, no, biomedical science Ph.D.'s really don't have any career options outside of academia, and pointing to Jessica Palmer's post on the same subject for corroboration. Jessica writes: This is something I've tried to explain many times to nonscientists: most of the esoteric techniques I mastered during my thesis aren't useful outside a Drosophila lab. They're not transferable to any other field of biology, let alone any other scientific or nonscientific profession. Those skills I picked up on…

America: slouching towards the Enlightenment

So…have you all read the latest Pew report on American religion? It's been reported in the NY Times, too, and I heard that it was the lead story on CBS News (which, unfortunately, said something about a "secular, morally empty America" — did anyone catch it, or better yet, record it?). It's mostly good news. We've got a fragmented, shrinking Protestant population, Catholics are abandoning ship in droves and what's keeping it afloat is Catholic immigration from the south, and the "unaffiliateds" are growing fast, especially among young adults. The survey finds that the number of people who…

Howard Williams Studies Memorials

Last Monday, we had a guest entry by my friend Howard Williams about his excavation of a Devon manor site abandoned in the 1580s. Here's his account of some other recent work of his, stuff many people may not recognise as archaeology, but nevertheless treating source material that very few non-archaeologist scholars pay much attention to. Further Fieldwork in Devon in July 2007 By Dr Howard Williams Churchyard Survey In addition to the archaeological excavation, we conducted other forms of fieldwork. Very few historical churchyards in Devon have been recorded to a high archaeological…

More Wadhams

Browsing Twitter after a break I was unsurprised to see the usual suspects dissing that fine chap, Peter Wadhams. Heaven forfend that I should ever stoop so low. It is tempting to describe the "lame article" they were dissing as the usual stuff, but alas it isn't. It lards extra Yellow Peril guff onto the pre-existing guff. Incidentally the author, Paul Brown, was once a respectable chap - my great-aunt Proctor knew him somewhat. But that was many years ago. Bizarrely, the first "related posts" link in the article is to a far better article by Ed Hawkins pointing out how bad the previous…

I Teach for Free, They Pay Me to Grade

Over at Unqualified Offerings, Thoreau has a bit of a rant about what students perceive as grading on a "curve": Moreover, many students have only the foggiest idea of what a curve is. Many (though probably not all) of their high schools had fixed grading scales with fixed percentages for each letter grade. The A/A- range is 90% or above, or 85% or above, or whatever. The B+/B/B- range is whatever percentage range below that. And so forth. If we set the grade markers anywhere below the ranges they saw in high school, that constitutes “a curve” in their eyes. We could base those ranges…

The Physics of Wall Street by James Owen Weatherall

As I hinted obliquely a little while back, I don't have a terribly high opinion of Wall Street or Wall Street traders. Given that, I'm not the most obvious audience for a book titled The Physics of Wall Street, and truth be told, I wouldn't've picked it up on my own. The publisher sent me an advance copy back in August, though, and I had a plane trip coming up to go play golf with some guys who work in business, so I thought it might make a decent read and possible conversation topic, and took it along. I was very pleasantly surprised to find that it contains much more physics than Wall…

The Inspiring Power of You're Doing It Wrong

I've got a bunch of browser tabs open on my various computers that have been there for weeks, one of which is Alastair Reynolds on writing science fiction. This is mostly a response to a not-terribly-interesting complaint that the science fiction genre has been "exhausted," but there was a bit in there that resonated with me, where Reynolds talks about how he started writing one of his books: That reaction, for me, encapsulates something fairly central to my subsequent relationship with SF. I don't care for a lot of it. Never have done, never will. But at the same time, I doubt that I'd feel…