Most Popular Posts
Search
-
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
Some Quick Starlinks, Including the Top 100 Science Fiction Blogs List
January 28th, 2009
The Top 100 Science Fiction Blogs. I am there — good! — and the blogs listed there are good, at least the ones I recognize, but there are a few I would have included. Jay Lake, for instance, Scalzi as well (although he tends to be much broader than science fiction), and half a dozen of others. Speaking of the Crotchety Old Fan…
No. Snark, in this context, is not speech - it’s attitude. An attitude that says ‘My opinion is more important than yours because I’M more important than you are’. ‘If you don’t agree with me there’s something wrong with you’. ‘If you identify with the group that I’m criticizing, I’m criticizing you.’ ‘Any defense you might offer is pointless - because you’re a part of it.’ ‘The only way to really enjoy something I’m critical of is to poke fun at it’. ‘It’s not enough to find the flaws, it is necessary to belittle as well.’ ‘It’s not only necessary to belittle - it is imperative that we humiliate.’ ‘We do this not because we are offering a substantive, contrary point of view, but because we can and because doing so draws attention and builds not only our egos but our traffic.’
Almost everyone regularly blogging is guilty of some snark level, and there are certainly plenty of targets I get snarky about (for better reasons than suggested, I hope, most of the time, and not carrying it too far too often). Anyway, interesting read and interesting to think about. I wouldn’t want to eliminate snark, but I do think we should strive to keep it at a tolerable level as we look into the future. Blogging is NEW and and I have some fear about what it might look like 20 years from now.
The five most powerful telescopes, and five that will define the future. I like the list pretty well, although I thought radio should have been a bit more prominent. The VLA and VLBA systems are pretty damn powerful by some measures.
On the slow death of cursive in elementary school.
Ten Myths and Ten Truths about Atheism, from Sam Harris.
My hometown, St. Louis, to host the U.S. Invitational Chess Championships. Whoo hoo! Sorry. No one else cares, do they?
Finally, the black hole of dumb returns, as Fox News tries to scare us some more about how scientists really aren’t so sure the Large Hadron Collider won’t destroy us all. This story is be based on the paper under discussion at the physics preprint archive blog, and someone concerned about how the phrase “does not seem possible” really might mean “we are all totally doomed.” Check out some of the discussion there too — Geoffrey Landis chimes in as a reasonable voice (sf writer being the reasonable one, uh oh) — and a whole lot of ignorance and crackpottery. This is what happens when idle chatter about a single paper of a speculative nature gets turned into news for the general population. It ain’t pretty. The truth seems to be that the public will swallow all sorts of fear mongering and start talking about things they have no clue about as if it is meaningful talk. This happened with the Plutonium aboard Cassini, it happens with genetically modified foods (some potential dangers but not the ones people are capable of articulating, if they can even articulate it). Related but different phenomenon happen with evolution and global warming issues, where lots of people who are too ignorant to have opinions on these topics don’t know it yet become extremely devoted and passionate about their perspectives. Sigh. I’ll probably turn some of this into a longer post soon. I understand more why guys like Carl Sagan wrote books like The Demon-Haunted World even though the people who need to read those books never do.
Related Posts
Related Posts
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
<
January 28th, 2009 at 12:53 pm
I read this on a forum where people were bashing FOX NEWS´ article
“I’ve been reading quite a bit of quantum mechanics recently, just for fun, and a microscopic black hole of the mass made in a partical accelerator is incredibly small, much smaller than an individual proton, and are not charged. Thus, a microscopic black hole will interact with matter roughly on the same level as the neutrino.
If you want to guarantee that a neutrino will hit a particle of matter, you need to fire it into a block of lead about 1 light year long. A microscopic black hole lasting one second with that weak an interaction with matter won’t hit anything in that time frame, and will evaporate.
Also, cosmic ray collisions with atoms in our atmosphere happen at far higher energies than the LHC can create. So if the LHC can make a black hole, they should be forming in our atmosphere all the time naturally, yet nothing bad happens.
Gravity is so weak at the subatomic level that the gravity of even a microscopic black hole can’t compete with the strong or electromagnetic forces.”
I was surprised about the fact that these micro blackholes are as interactive with normal matter as a neutrino. Is that true?
I was not afraid of the LHC, but if these microblackholes need to transverse one light year of lead to have a chance of capturing another atom, the chances of anything happening have diminished like 1 trillion %!
January 29th, 2009 at 12:44 pm
Mike,
Confirming your suspicion that nobody cares where the US Chess Championship will be played, even I do not care. If I follow the event at all, it will be over the internet. Once in my life I visited a chess tournament as a spectator rather than participant. That was the Foxwoods Open, and there were other attractions. But it is good news for chess enthusiasts who live in the St. Louis area.