NASA Sin Tax?
A Republican senatorial candidate has proposed a 1% tax on SF and space related materials to support NASA.

I think he has an grossly inflated idea of the profitability of SF! A 1% tax on my books would probably have bought a few ceramic tiles.
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Switching the Blog to new host

This is a traditional testing, testing, message.

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Thanks for the Morale Booster

...and my update to the ilse.rtf file can be found in our stash, in the ilse directory.

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Beyond the Blue Screen
Beyond the blue screen of death lies the fluorescent Navajo tweed of complete crogglement. This I discovered by forging onwards through repeated "this program has performed an illegal operation and will shut down" messages, to blue-screen-of-death with registry errors, to black screen with error boxes, to the point at which even an attempt to log onto my work PC produced a succession of blue and black screens - and finally a screen that consisted of the top 1/4 vertical green and blue bars with an interweaving of other colours of the type that bottom market fashion purveyors like to convince people are "in", and the lower 3/4 vertical hot pink/purple bars with some of the same interweaving, which gradually gave way to bare bars. I'm sure with the addition of LSD - or maybe jet lag - it would have been fascinating. (Have you ever noticed that the pattern on the carpet in Vancouver airport creeps.) At which point even the IT people gave up, came over, looked, worked and eventually gave me an new-to-me computer.

How do I love Windows, let me count the ways ...

You've gotten rid of all this kind of thing on Rire, haven't you?

Arbiters never crash, they just get eccentric.

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To Boldly Go, With Data
I have learned many things from Star Trek. Some of them are even useful. However, as I work on a clinical study report, I need constantly to remind myself that data are not singular.

Having reviewed that previous sentence and had to make not one grammatical revision, but two, I recognize the other lifelong grammatical mark of ST. A tendency to regard the infinitive, like the atom, as splittable.
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On the need for the writer to have a hide like a rhino
The reviewer at Challenging Destiny did not like TP. Putting up a link seems an exercise in masochism, but it's easily enough found. Unfortunately, it's not the kind of review the writer can learn much from, because his issue was with fundamentals, our "feudal society in space" and the story we chose to tell. It just didn't work for him, and after a fair summary of the book, he said so. Not much one can do with that but listen respectfully and stand by the society we built and the story itself; if we didn't believe in it ourselves, we wouldn't have written it.

Well, Ranar had the same problem with the sword thing. Guess some people won't believe it until they visit Gelion. :-) Good time to remember that someone slammed Marie for her history and hated J.K. Rowling's take on magic. Personally it is Earth-style militarism in space that I have always found hard to swallow. The cost and fragility of colonies suggests to me that if we ain't going out there if we don't solve the war problem. Even planets won't be safe if we're still into mass murder as a defensible lifestyle by the time we have easy access to space travel. But no one complains about shoot 'em ups in space as implausible from a short term economic or long term survivability of the species point of view. I guess I always knew, though, that "swords in space" would not go down well with some people no matter how carefully it is justified sociologically or how interesting it is as a metaphor for our on-going preoccupation with the imperatives of the last millenium as we grop our way forward into the next one.

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Old letters
While hunting for something to do with insurance or income tax I came across the computer files of assorted letters from myself to Lynda from the late 80s, early 90s (MacWrite - anyone remember MacWrite); plus I have all kinds of hard copies dating from I don't know when - possibly as far back as the early 80s. Never mind the ton of e-mail. Lynda, not having moved, should have even more early hard copy ... I wonder if any of this stuff would be worth editing, for historical interest? Lynda?

And now I must go to work. This is my deadline weekend for the short story, and I need to wrap up the fix I've got my characters into in 2500 words or less!
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On the Bible as a source for scientific speculation
One of my favourite bits from A Random Walk in Science (RL Weber, ed), who has taken it in turn from Applied Optics 11, A14 (1972).
According to Isiah 30:26. "Moreover the light of the Moon shall be as the light of the Sun and the light of the Sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days." Plugging that into the Stefan-Boltzmann fourth power law for radiation the temperature of Heaven is 525 C.
According to Revelations 21:8. "But the fearful and unbelieving ... shall have their lake which burneth with fire and brimstone." Brimstone is sulfur; sulfur changes from a liquid to a gas at 444.6 C, thereby putting an upper bound on the temperature of Hell as 444.6 C.
In other words, Heaven is hotter than Hell.

On the other hand, I was again struck while visiting the Lincoln monument down in Washington, reading the text of Lincoln's speech on the walls, at what a wonderful literary model the Bible was. (The King James Version, of course, not those modern travesties - although I suspect the King James Version's contemporaries reacted even more vehemently to IT*). Whole generations got those rolling cadences and phrasings in their ears, including Lincoln, and the writer of a 50-year-old classic on kidney evolution From Fish to Philosopher, Homer W. Smith, which to my delight I found still on the shelves of the Victoria Public Library. There is a section I will quote when I come across it again, talking about evolution, which simply reverberates with "begats".

*I am partial to the King James Version, since it was done under the patronage and possibly with the contribution of that canny old survivor of the ill-omened Stuarts, James I of Scotland and VI of England. I am partial to canny old survivors, having no patience with the romance of youth struck down in its folly. Give me Katherine Hepburn over Marilyn Monroe, James Mason over Jimmy Dean.
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Literature, Arts and Medicine Database
Lynda, I know you'll get to this well before you'd get to an e-mail - and in any case, I can't resist a public plug for one of my favourite websites - the Literature, Arts and Medicine Database from the Medical Humanities Program at New York University. It is founded and maintained by a group of educators interested in the use of literature in medical education. It's searcheable and annotated, and I've frequently wished I had (a) time and (b) technical competence to do something like it for science and literature, extending my interest in women scientists in fiction to let me discuss Frayn's Copenhagen, a play about Heisenberg and Bohr that just blew me away when I saw it in London, and Snow's novels about scientists (and a couple of dozen others I have accumulated without trying; and to give me an excuse to go after more!).

What would I like to know?: Are you able to tell by looking at it, how it was done? Or how would you do something like it - which programs, where could I find out/learn? (I feel the need to get more in touch with my inner geek.) Could we do something like it for the resources section of the ORU? And would the Reading for the Future group be interested in developing something like it - or is there something like it already out there? (Broken link alert - the Developing Young Readers link off your revised UNBC page doesn't connect. The page itself is very nice).

And finally, not entirely disconnected with everything else - while trying to find out whether were any scripts out there that would let me set up threaded posts on Blogger (so I could collapse everything into one personal Blog, because I keep coming up with new ideas!), I came across a review by a scientist on tools for scientific collaboration on-line, which may be pertinent to you as educator, us as collaborators, myself as not-yet-lapsed scientist, and assorted readers; and with that preamble, here's the link to Jon Udell on Internet Groupware (I know that name; I just can't recall in what connection!).
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Postmodernism, Science and Creationism
"For a generation now, the academic left has been engaged in a war against science as we know it: propagating the notion that science is an inherently Western concept, that it is culturally perspectival, but most of all, after Werner Heisenberg, that it is an imperfect and thoroughly flawed 'discourse'." ... Patrick West's argument is that the postmodernist insistance that "there is no such thing as truth; there is only interpretation", and their readiness to interpret the (sexy) metaphors of uncertainty, chaos and relativity as the reality, while disregarding the mathematical and theoretical underpinnings of all of those, have led to an erosion of understanding of the absolutes of science. Add to that the various political movements - of varying degrees of self-servingness and idealism - trying to qualify or undermine the actual or perceived supremacy of science in our culture, and there are a number of converging philosophies and fields of thought arguing that science is just another belief-system. Add to that the fact that, although technology may be privileged, science actually isn't - or there would not be such wisespread innumeracy and scientific illiteracy as there is - and, to paraphrase the very famous line, we've got a problem.

This is the one you mentioned to me on the phone which called to mind "Prove we don't live in a beer bottle" debates I had with fellow students in the Raven Wing cafeteria at UVic as an undergrad. It usually started with something like an assertion that we didn't know there wasn't a 5th dimension through which telepathy was conducted or some such thing, and reduced to the logical equivalent of asserting we lived in a giant beer bottle. That could not be disproved either. Maybe the maxim should be: "Complete lack of reproducible evidence for a conclusion does not make it true." Strange world.

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Serious Exam Writing Avoidance

Changed the homepage for the Okal Rel Universe.

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A Family I Met In the Pro-Lounge

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Ron Cleveland, the man behind
RingCon and the Renaissance Fantasy Faire. I met him the last day of the con, in the bar. He runs these two events, suitable for kids and families, at Gig Harbor, Washingon State.

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First Set of Norwescon Pictures Up

Realized if I wait unitil I can do what I WANT with the pictures, I won't get them up until the NEXT con. So
here's a sample below, and the rest can be found here.

PS I have another 10 or so waiting to be scanned ...

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Backstory, with style
Apropos of all our bouts of wrestling with our characters' backstories, here's how SL Viehl dispatches four novels worth of backstory (Another character has just told her protagonist "It's a personal problem .... you wouldn't understand"):

Cherijo: "Squilyp, I'm a fugitive genetic construct on the run from basically everyone in the galaxy. My adopted family are lovely blue people who eviscerate anyone who threatens their relatives -- handy in my case, but often nerve wracking. My father was a monster, my genetic twin, and experimented on me for twenty-eight years. My alien-raised husband until recently had no human emotions, and you incubated my daughter in an artificial uterus." I laced my fingers together and rested them on my knee. "Believe me when I tell you, there is no personal problem I can't handle."

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Progress with Second Contact

I'm up to...

Chapter 12: Consequences of Courage "I had to tell them," Jarl explained with a shrug. "They threatened torture. So I told them, and I volunteered to fetch you down. I was on my way when you so obligingly came of your own accord. You're not up to pain, H'Reth," he finished, soberly. "Order the pretty brat down."

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Fear not, the pictures are coming

Read through your recent contributions. Have to start transplanting some of your blog entries to the ORU Research and Commentary section. The one on evolution for example. It wouldn't take much to turn that into a R&C entry on the ORU. Just ask the question, rhetorically or otherwise, of whether it would be any more reassuring to be Sevolite (and know and accept how and by whom you were 'evolved'.) I may lift it and transplant if I ever get one of those Round Tuits with an hour at home working on the web site written on it.

Pictures from Norwescon coming soon. David took them in to get them developed yesterday. Greatest modifier of 'soon' will be the 100 midterms I must get finished for return on Friday.

Take your point about what is a link and what isn't, on the cover of ROW. Sticking in the flash symbols was a last minute impulse.

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Is that all I get tonight??
I'm still awake. You can phone me! I durn't phone you. Blogger's up and down like a fiddler's elbow - probably overloaded, poor thing - and I don't seem to be able to get from ProBlogger directly to this Blog. Probably because I'm not registered. Anyway, going to push this message through the window.
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Back from Norwescon

... with plenty of pictures and news. Stand by for pictures to get developed and scanned.

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