The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon... Read More.
Praise for Star Dragon
"Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction."
-- David Brin
"Star Dragon is terrific fare, offering readers a fusion of hard science and grand adventure."
-- Locus Magazine
"Star Dragon is steeped in cosmology, the physics of interstellar travel, exobiology, artificial intelligence, bioscience. Brotherton, author of many scientific articles in refereed journals, has written a dramatic, provocative, utterly convincing hard science sf novel that includes an ironic twist that fans will love."
-- Booklist starred review
"Readers hungry for the thought-provoking extrapolation and rigorous technical detail of old-fashioned hard SF are sure to enjoy astronomer Brotherton's first novel."
-- Publishers Weekly
"Mike Brotherton, himself a trained astrophysicist, combines the technical acuity and ingenuity of Robert Forward with the ironic, postmodern stance and style of M. John Harrison. In this, his debut novel, those twin talents unite to produce a work that is involving on any number of levels. It's just about all you could ask for in a hardcore SF adventure."
-- Paul di Fillippo, SCI-FI.COM
I’ve got my own party going on March 26, but might well try to hit some of the events on the 27th. If you’ve never partied with Brazilians, you’ve never partied…And Gisele Dias is a fun dance instructor.
BRASILEIRINHO - a Weekend of Brazilian Dance and Music
Friday March 26
Music and Social Change Forum, with Marcus Santos
3-5 pm at Washakie Center Rendezvous Room (free of charge)
Bossa Nova Show featuring Sergio Augusto and Tony Moreira
at Alice Hardie Stevens Center
7pm - Social Hour with Brazilian Refreshments and Biojewlery Exhibit/Sale
8pm - Show
Admission: Student $15, General Public $20.00, includes a buffet of delicious Brazilian appetizers and a select beverage
Saturday March 27
An afternoon of free worshops at Washakie Center Rendezvous Room 12:30 - 2:30pm - Biojewelry Beading for a Cause
2:30 - 3:30pm - Samba and Afro-Brazilan Dance with Gisele Dias
3:30 - 4:30pm - Beginning Afro-Brazilian Percussion with Marcus Santos
4:30 - 6:30pm - Advanced Afro-Brazilian Percussion with Marcus Santos
Brazilian Dance and Percussion Party at Alice Hardie Stevens Center
8pm-12am - Featuring Brazilian dance lessons with Gisele Dias and live Afro-Brazilian percussion with Marcus Santos and Bloco em FoCo.
Admission: Students $15, General Public $20, does not include food and drinks available for purchase
Tickets available at: Wyoming Union Ticket Office, The Bead Shop, Big Hollow Food Coop and Brown & Gold
Sponsored by WY-Partners of the Americas, Luso-Brazilian Club, ASUW and The Good Mule
All proceeds support the WY-POA Breast Cancer Project
This will be a version of my “Science in Movies” or “Science and Science Fiction” talks I’ve given a few times over the years. If you’re not doing anything Wednesday night and you happen to be in Rock Springs (hundreds of you at least, I’m sure!), then come check me out at Western Wyoming Community College:
Astronomer and author Michael S. Brotherton will be giving a lecture called “Science and Science Fiction,” an entertaining look at how science is portrayed in popular media. This event will take place at WWCC on Wednesday, March 10 at 7 p.m. in Room 1005 at the Rock Springs Campus. It is free and open to the public, and is sponsored by the WWCC Cultural Affairs Committee. The presentation will be fun and educational for anyone interested in science.
Michael Brotherton is an astronomer at the University of Wyoming, specializing in the study of quasars and other types of active galaxies thought to be powered by super-massive black holes. He is also a science fiction writer. He has sold a variety of short fiction to magazines and anthologies, and his two novels “Star Dragon” and “Spider Star” were published by Tor Books in 2003 and 2008. “Star Dragon” is about an expedition to a distant binary star system, and was a finalist for the John H. Campbell Award for best science fiction novel of the year. During the summer he runs a NASA-funded astronomy workshop for writers called Launch Pad.
Brotherton received a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin and has worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Kitt Peak National Observatory. His research includes work with the Very Large Array (the “VLA”, a radio telescope in New Mexico featured in the movie Contact), the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Wyoming Infrared Observatory (WIRO) and many other facilities around and above the world.
Brotherton’s lecture will include a look at how science is portrayed in movies. He says, “Sometimes movies get the science just right, but not often. While the biggest scientific blunders in movies may misinform audiences, they also lead to teachable moments.”
Woman’s Day gives you tricks about how to look smart! Some of them are actually kind of clever… These would be the kind of things I’d have characters in books do to show that they’re smart without me having to tell the reader that (show don’t tell is the rule).
Oh, I love this. Every time that creationists or anti-science types make me lose faith in people, I find something like this. Will a lava lamp work on Jupiter? God, I must find out!
Check out the 1980s Cartoons on sale now on DVD. Thundarr the Barbarian is all I have to say. I’m going to show the intro of that show to my astronomy students I think…
If You Homeschool, Don’t Use Religious Textbooks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
March 8th, 2010
I’m fucking serious about this. A lot of people homeschool because they are religious idiots, fundamentalists of the worst sort, who don’t dare show their children what the world of science thinks about the origin of species on Earth, or pretty much anything that has even the most minor conflict with their handed-down lies.
As an educator, a smart and educated person, with intellectual integrity, who cares about our society’s children and the future, I am totally serious.
Personally, I think homeschooling can be a great thing. A dedicated parent with a clue can do a better job than the public system in most places. But I don’t believe that most do. Which is a damn shame.
Look, these folks are not rational. Being tolerant doesn’t mean I don’t get to call them out for being irrational. It means the government can’t squash them and I won’t either. Except I will say what I think of them. That’s freedom of speech.
If I had kids and the resources to homeschool, I would seriously consider it. I don’t want smart dedicated kids with smart, dedicated families, to be tarnished by religious nimwits.
OK, I’m not that big of a commercial guy and I also don’t shop that much locally, given how I live in a small town and its hard or impossible to find some things. So, I shop online a lot and deal with shipping costs and the trouble to return things that don’t work out (e.g., poorly fitting clothes or even furniture that isn’t right).
Here’s the trick now.
A lot of online vendors have promotions for new or repeat customers. Coupons, if you will. Anytime you see a place in the ordering process with a box for a “coupon code” or something like that, take a minute to google for “Vendorname coupon code.” Chances are good you’ll find one that will work for you, too, and I think the vendors are still happy to get the sale. I just did this today for Petco scratching posts — the only kind my cat will use (she’s rejected three other brands so far, finicky girl), and of course we have no Petcos in Laramie. I saved $3.39.
Lots of sellers offer these, and there are websites that collect and list them.
Not my normal blog post, but something useful I wanted to share.
Maybe this is in bad taste. I don’t know. I don’t care too much. There are some weird looking actors out there who have gotten a lot of work over the years. They’re not ugly. They’re “Hollywood Ugly” which means you don’t scream when you see them and there’s something about the way they look that makes you keep looking. Not sure what I mean?
Let’s start with Ron Perlman, who has done a lot of great work. Quest for Fire, Hellboy, and on TV Beauty and the Beast. Notice a pattern? He’s playing cavemen, monsters, and demons, with minimal makeup. Here he is being honored for his work portraying a beast:
Then there’s Steve Buscemi, who in the movie Fargo keeps being described as “funny looking.” Yeah. How about in other movies:
Reminds me of Marty Feldman (EYE-Gor in Young Frankenstein):
Then there’s Vincent Schiavelli who played alien John O’Conner in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai and the crazy ghost in Ghost:
Willem Dafoe, oh yes, a natural for vampires and green goblins:
Oh, one of my faves! Michael Berryman…
Richard Kiel, Jaws from the old James Bond movies:
Rowan Atkinson, of Black Adder and Mr. Bean fame:
How about women? How about alien Shelly Duvall? Or maybe she’s from the future, or an elf, or something in the eyes, like Buscemi and Feldman…see her in a kafkaesque moment:
And finally, Tilda Swinton, that androgynous angel in Constantine:
That’s the culmination of 15 years of hard work at Keck Observatory. Stars orbiting the supermassive (several million solar masses) black hole at the center of our galaxy. Totally cool.
I can’t believe I’d never seen any of these before today, let alone heard of them. Prometheus and Bob is a series of short cartoons about an alien trying to educate a caveman about various things 900,000 years ago. They’re funny and clever. Not always a tremendous about of science content, but good science fiction fun. Thanks, America!
Here are some I watched and liked. A lot more on youtube.
I actually think Bob looks more like E.T. than the alien…
Avatar: “The most demonic, satanic film I have ever seen.”
February 27th, 2010
People like this piss me off…luckily Avatar is the most popular movie ever and those preaching against it are in the minority here. Jesus, this guy pisses me off. The dude can’t even see he’s criticizing an alien ecosystem that literally works the way it does…
I really do believe that there are a lot of hateful evil things in the the message of mainstream Christianity, and it should be held out for examination and ridicule. I just ridiculed an eastern religion (via Bill Maher), so let’s point out how silly the west is, too…this guy claims that Avatar is Eastern (but also from the devil). Let him hang himself:
…or most of it, from the end of his most recent New Rules part of his HBO show. As sympathetic as I am to any region of the world under control of invaders (and we count among those invaders, unfortunately, too often), I am not in favor of reinstating any form of screwed up theocracy. To wit… (the end part is the Dalai Lama rant).
Is the system picking the Dalai Lama really any different or more sensible from that of ancient England that was eventually overthrown?
HST proposals are due today. I meant to write a couple of serious original posts this week, and will fall short. Had a lot of interesting links, however — maybe it’s clearer to me now why I work to deadline rather than getting things done early!
A couple of different places covering the story about how liberals and atheists have higher IQs on average (see also here), and some other findings from a study of young adults. I saw this spun a lot of different ways this past week. Hard to say what to think about it without digging deeply into the study (e.g. exactly what the distributions look like rather than comparing only averages). I think all the interpretations I saw are pretty biased. Well, chew on it, for what it’s worth.
“All people are born alike—except Republicans and Democrats,”quipped Groucho Marx, and in fact it turns out that personality differences between liberals and conservatives are evident in early childhood. In 1969, Berkeley professors Jack and Jeanne Block embarked on a study of childhood personality, asking nursery school teachers to rate children’s temperaments. They weren’t even thinking about political orientation.
Twenty years later, they decided to compare the subjects’ childhood personalities with their political preferences as adults. They found arresting patterns. As kids, liberals had developed close relationships with peers and were rated by their teachers as self-reliant, energetic, impulsive, and resilient. People who were conservative at age 23 had been described by their teachers as easily victimized, easily offended, indecisive, fearful, rigid, inhibited, and vulnerable at age 3. The reason for the difference, the Blocks hypothesized, was that insecure kids most needed the reassurance of tradition and authority, and they found it in conservative politics.
Ten geekiest ways to hide your age. I have a birthday coming up in a month, and I’m embracing 42. It’ll be a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy themed party. I’m inviting guests to bring a towel and telling them “don’t panic!”
One of Douglas Adams’s buddies, Richard Dawkins, has apparently had some sort of episode over his website and forums. The internet is leading to a lot of weird social problems among folks who should get along better (and exacerbating relations among those who shouldn’t and don’t).
Astronomer and author Michael S. Brotherton will be giving a lecture called “Science and Science Fiction,” an entertaining look at how science is portrayed in popular media. This event will take place at WWCC on Wednesday, March 10 at 7 p.m. in Room 1005 at the Rock Springs Campus. It is free and open to the public, and is sponsored by the WWCC Cultural Affairs Committee. The presentation will be fun and educational for anyone interested in science.