Spider Star
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
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Ranty Starlinks
April 15th, 2009
Robert Letson at Locus On revolutionary vs normal SF (in the pseudo-Kuhnian sense) and other matters, including a mention of Spider Star in some good company. Not that new, but I missed it until yesterday.
Not everyone loves Strunk and White’s Elements of Stlye. No, they do not. I don’t think it’s all that bad at all, and most students would benefit tremendously if they just followed all its rules mindlessly. Mindfully seems a bit much to ask of average students these days, unfortunately…
Rant on. Sorry. Most people aren’t that brilliant, but they’re also not so stupid. But most students in college seem to take their classes with some level of disdain, more interested in passing and getting grades than learning much of anything. Where is the desire to learn? Are workloads too high? Is it too much to ask that everyone get a “well-rounded” education when they’re not interested in half the shit, or more, that they’re asked to take? As a prof I am forced to think about this reguarly, without great solutions. I do the best job I can to teach, to be interesting, and save my energy for the students who care. Rant off.
I love this one…Time Travel Cheat Sheet. It’s basically for rebuilding civilization from scratch if you get stuck in the boondocks of time.
On Bad Science, a free chapter about Matthias Rath and his evil anti-science crapfest. Worth the read, but dismaying. It’s about AIDS dissidents in South Africa. Read it if you have the stomach. It’s stuff like this that makes me cringe every time I stand up for science when it clashes with culture, being arrogantly chided that “science doesn’t tell you everything” or “you’re guilty of scientism.” Assholes. Science is a procedure that generates knowledge about how things work. Where it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. Where it does work, you should use it. Period. At least if you want to save lives and accomplish goals. Going to resist a rant.
Maybe this scholarly document is the rant I want to have: Are debatable scientific questions debatable? By John Ziman. It’s basically about whether or not areas of science seen as controversial (e.g., global warming, evolution, and apparently the cause of AIDS) should be publically debated in traditional fashion. Let me say why most scientists find the idea ridiculous and tend to dismiss it, even though it might be of public benefit in some cases. Scientists constantly debate any ideas that are actually controversial, and they do it in journals with meticulous experiments and arguments, justifying every step and trying to reach consensus on what we know and trying to figure out how to do the next experiment to further our understanding of what we don’t know. A public debate is a dog-and-pony show that can be “won” rhetorically, or by piling on argument after argument even though none of them are compelling, or by making up shit that can’t be easily refuted in a 90 second rebuttal. A live, face-to-face public debate may be educational and entertaining, but it is a ridiculous way at settling scientific questions. Furthermore, it legitimizes both sides in the eyes of viewers, even though both sides may not be legitimate. As a practical matter, anti-science IDiots (aka creationists), apologists, and deniers or anti-science folks of all types who debate regularly are good at it, and may well look convincing even when their arguments are poor.
OK, something I won’t get ranty about. How to estimate the temperature of a planet. Includes effects of albedo and greenhouse gas warming. It’s more complicated than the simplest sort of estimate, but not so complicated that a good hard sf writer wouldn’t use it if necessary. In my opinion.
Let’s mention the amazonfail thing. I’m getting sick of the “fail” thing on the internet recently, especially as it seems that everyone getting involved deeply in them behaves badly. The internet moves at lightning speed and people get incensed in seconds and feed off each other’s anger, whether justifiable or not. Even when the anger is justified it seems that it grows totally out of proportion and ignores facts, explanations, or appropriateness. So here are some links that may be of interest, although frankly I’m going to ignore this the way I think everyone should ignore it. Amazon screwed up, apparently not with malicious intent, and fixed things within a few days. Here’s one brief announcement of the problem. Here’s the site where you could go sign a petition and threaten boycott. Here’s one thoughtful early idea of what happened (which turned out to be more or less right), along with a long and torturous discussion with good and bad behaviour on display (and probably not everyone agreeing which is which), and an article here and here with some explanations from amazon. ‘Nuff said.
Pew Polls on happiness. Apparently I should have kids, and my cat doesn’t matter. Is it just me, or does anyone else see “pew” and think about psychic battles on South Park? Pew pew pew! Pew pew pew!
And let’s finish with some superhero type stuff.
Superman artist did lurid S&M comics, too, with characters that look like Lois and Clark. Cool.
Echo vision is real. See like a bat, or Daredevil. And for the sf writers out there, read this for thinking about how aliens with this sense might perceive their environment.
Who would win between Buffy the Vampire Slayer and River of Firefly? I’d watch the fight, I guess, but I don’t really care that much.
Me though? I’m no superhero. I seem to be in the early stages of a second bout of “frozen shoulder,” and, unfortunately, this does not give me ice powers. Took me 9 months and physical therapy last time. I’ve already started stretching and making sure I’m taking my thyroid medicine more regular, but I have some pain in front of me. Not good timing for me with another three weeks in China followed by a return to Brazil in May. Maybe I should have stocked up on the Tiger Balm in Bangkok.
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I’m not so sure that scientists debate things in a coldly rational way and accept the outcome. Too often revolutions are delayed because the old guard just flatly reject the new explanation (or worse, the new experimental results). I’m reading “13 things that don’t make sense” which goes into this in detail, so I’m obviously biased by that right now, but I think the guy has a point. There are still things that are being written off now that really should be investigated instead. “we don’t know enough” is not a reason to stop investigating in the way that “we’re all out of ideas” is.
http://www.amazon.com/Things-That-Dont-Make-Sense/dp/0385520689
moz, I agree with you, which is why it’s a good thing for science that people die, or at least retire. But the key here is that revolutions are delayed, not stopped, and when they occur they’re dramatic and solid.
The point for me is still that there’s a good way to reach a conclusion (the scientific process) and a much inferior way (scoring points in real time in a live debate, that may or may not hold up to scrutiny).
I’m all for funding longshots and fringe things at some appropriately small level, although to tell you the truth, it’s hard to do. I’ve sat on NSF and NASA review panels, and there’s so much clearly good to great science being proposed, and not enough money to go around, that rarely do the longshots get funded. Science needs more funding — there’s no shortage of interesting things to learn.
The book looks interesting. Some of those things get a lot of attention, some not so much. It would be fun to make my own list of these.
I’m totally with you on the rant about students who seem to treat their classes with disdain.
I have my own hypotheses about where this comes from, but I won’t rant here, since it’s not my blog
But it did always frustrate me that some fraction of students came into classes not even ready to possibly be interested in what was there. They got angry when you wanted to make them work and think in ways they weren’t used to, rather than giving them facts to memorize the way they did when they got good grades in high school and when they did well on standardized tests.
In my intro astronomy classes, back when I was still a prof, I would hand-wavingly estimate that about 10% of the class (maybe a bit more) came in interested in the subject, and as long as I didn’t completely blow it I’d keep them as interested students. About 20% came in having decided ahead of time that they don’t like science, and there was almost nothing I could do to win them over. Most of the rest were on a spectrum of maybe interested to probably disinterested. I felt like if I didn’t have that bottom 20%, I could win over many of the middle ones. That bottom 20% was such a drag, though, and sometimes they include charismatic students who would convince other students to their way of thinking, sadly.
Re: funding longshots, I never sat on an NSF panel, but I was on the NOAO TAC for a few years.
I felt like the process was designed to follow up last year’s exciting discovery.
The telescopes are all oversubscribed. As such, we usually end up going for the more safe things, and tend to be biased against longshots. The only way we’d give time to something unexpected and surprising was if there was preliminary data to indicate that there was a very small chance of it turning into wasted telescope time. This had two effects. First, it meant that the national telescopes were less likely to make those discoveries in the first place. Second, it meant that people from institutions that had large private telescopes– i.e. the people who arguably didn’t need the national observatories as much as others– had an advantage in getting telescope time on the national telescopes.
The whole way that astronomy is funded in the US is horribly, horribly broken. Yes, I know, I’m baised, because I got pushed out of the field by my inability to get funding in the current system. But there is a lot of damage and waste because of the way we fund things. I’m not convinced, either, that the way we handle it is making sure that only the best science gets funded.
One more thing, moz. Keep in mind that “13 things” is cherry-picking particular cases. There are a thousand more things we should probably be looking at, but are not obvious, and hundreds of thousands of things we are looking at. People get these strange ideas that science is bad at getting the right answers because you see these stories about the Church punishing Galileo, continental drift being pooh-poohed, etc., but I would submit that these are the exceptions and that its more normal for things to move slowly, continuously, with a lot more steady, small steps that are in the right directions.
Rob, it seems higher than 10% of the students to me that come in excited. Maybe 20%. The rest of the numbers sound right from my experience. I didn’t require attendance, and the bottom 20% rarely showed except for review sessions before the test. They were all pretty uniformly upset, shocked even, with only a few exceptions, that memorization would only work for answering a minority of the exam questions.
As for the funding issue, I’m biased by being successful with it. I can write and tell a story, which helps, and having been on a few NSF review panels before writing my first grant didn’t hurt. I don’t agree that the system is “horribly, horribly broken” but I will say that it has shortcomings. First of which is funding being unsteady and often declining. Second is how the split between NSF and NASA generally means space-based funding is much more plentiful and that favors some astronomers at the expense of others. Third, there is an enormous effort made in grant writing and reviewing that in some ways is a colossal waste of time (I’d love to see applications, grants, and references letters shared among employers, schools, and funding agencies to minimize wasted effort even though that has some problems, too). Fourth, it’s a game of small number statistics usually, with the vagaries of panel make-up making consistency difficult to achieve. I served on committees two runs running at one point (to have some “memory”) and did see revised NSF proposals get ranked higher.
What I think is really good about the system is that it is peer reviewed. When you agree to serve on one of these panels, you get a chance to convince people how it should be done and you can have an effect. I’ve seen initially highly ranked but flawed proposals torpedoed, and great proposals rescued from misunderstanding. I’ve also seen the opposite, unfortunately, but not often. And I have seen some speculative ideas with potentially large payoffs funded/given time. The key there seems to be to have modest requests, and trial runs preceding a larger effort. Hard, but not impossible.
Anyway, I’ve read some of your posts in the past on this topic (you’re a bit internet famous that way). It’s definitely a topic to discuss and work to improve. I guess I feel that alternative systems have a lot of flaws, too. For the record, Wyoming has awarded tenure to at least one person in my department while I’ve been there who didn’t get funded but diligently applied. He was successful right after getting tenure, finally, so everyone could be happy it was a good decision.
Now that I’ve gotten tenure, funding isn’t so much about keeping my job, but keeping my students and myself employed in the summer and making my next promotion.
Oh, Rob, please do feel welcome to share your theory about where the student disdain comes from. I have my pet theory, too! Maybe they’re the same…
Mike, I definitely agree that he picked a bunch of exciting things to write about from a field of possibilities. But that’s kinda the point. And for the most part it’s the revolutions that have issues AFAIK, it’s only when you have to stand up and say “you’re all wrong” that people react badly. Just saying “this minor change makes it go better” is usually ok.
As far as funding long shots, I’m not sure that it’s really a good idea to get government involved. Their role really is to fund the boring bits between “that’s odd” and “I’m sure this will be useful”. Personally I’ve funded a few long shots and for the most part they’ve petered out into nothing. WindFlow is the only one that’s currently visible.
Even when I was an undergrad, students who couldn’t be bothered paying attention to their studies drove me absolutely berserk. University isn’t compulsory; nobody is forcing you to be there; if you’re not passionately interested in your field of study, then for fuck’s sake DROP OUT and make space for someone who really does want to be there. Aaargh.
From the teaching side, I think the best you can do is just to be genuinely enthusiastic about your subject and clearly communicate that enthusiasm to your students. Passion is contagious, and there’s nothing worse than a lecturer who treats their teaching as a boring chore.
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As for Buffy vs River: River would slap Buffy around to start with, but the Buffster would win in the end. She always does.