Prosopopoeia
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
gareth_wilson's LiveJournal:
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| Saturday, March 8th, 2008 | | 7:55 pm |
| | Tuesday, December 11th, 2007 | | 10:33 pm |
A Survey
This is inspired by a news item out of the Bush administration, but to give any more details might contaminate the results. Question 1: How old are you? Question 2: Do you know what happened during the Cuban Missile Crisis? Update: This survey was inspired by this (the third story down). The 35-year-old White House press secretary has admitted she didn't know what the Cuban Missile Crisis was. The significance of the ages is that if you're young enough it becomes a failure of research rather than of memory. I have mixed reactions to this. I know about the CMC despite not being an American and not holding any kind of public position, and at first I considered this a fairly shocking display of ignorance. But if she's gone this long without it coming up, you have to wonder how important it really was. | | Sunday, October 28th, 2007 | | 8:09 pm |
| | Saturday, October 20th, 2007 | | 9:12 am |
Robot Cannon Kills 9, Wounds 14
There's an alarming story here. It's worth noting that most military robots are either unarmed or require a direct command from a person to fire. The only reason the anti-aircraft gun is an exception is that human reflexes aren't quick enough. | | Friday, September 28th, 2007 | | 10:20 pm |
| | Saturday, July 28th, 2007 | | 5:00 pm |
Link of the Month
Planetocopia is a series of world building projects by Chris Wayan. Some of the planets he creates, like the ocean world Lyr, are traditional from-scratch alien planets, but some are strange alterations to Earth. For example, Seapole is Earth, tilted so that the poles are off Japan and in the middle of the South Atlantic. From there he extrapolates geography, climates, biology and cultures, in so much detail that he's discovered fictional seafloor geography, inserted into real maps for copyright reasons. I found Planetocopia via Strange Maps, which does what it says on the tin. | | Thursday, June 28th, 2007 | | 9:23 pm |
| | Tuesday, June 19th, 2007 | | 6:14 pm |
Tantalus
You've probably seen this essay by Charlie Stross, on the plausibility of space colonisation. His argument is that it will incredibly difficult and useless. Let's assume he's right. Interstellar colonisation is impractical with today's technology and any new technology doesn't make it significantly easier. This isn't as radical an assumption as it sounds - we've had lots of amazing new technology over the last 50 years, but relatively little that's helped to bring SF predictions any closer to reality. So humanity is confined to Earth. Even manned exploration is ruled out by the same arguments. Now, let's bring in this article about extrasolar planets, found via ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) james_nicoll. It argues that we're within three years of detecting a planet the same mass as Earth and receiving the same amount of energy as Earth does from the Sun. The mostly likely candidate for the star it will orbit is Proxima Centauri, the same destination Stross uses in his essay. It goes without saying that an "Earthlike" planet orbiting the closest star will send every science reporter in the world ballistic. Mass and insolation alone don't say much for habitability, the planet could be as sterile as a surgeon's blade. But it's fun to imagine what happens if the planet really is habitable. The first response will be an enormous effort put into passive observation. We'll say the planet transits Proxima for ease of analysis. A few years of work would show us that the planet has ozone and methane in its atmosphere, unmistakable signs of life. It would also confirm the atmosphere is thick enough to shield against flares and keep the dark side of the tide-locked planet from freezing. The next step is unmanned exploration. This would be a huge undertaking - the time needed to develop the probe might be even more than the decades it would spend travelling. But eventually signals come back from the planet and the human race has to deal with these facts: There is a planet only four light years away from us, where human beings could stroll unprotected on the surface, admire the advanced animal and plant life, and maybe even start a colony if they could find a good reason to. The probe that told us this is the size of Coke can, and the effort to get it there was as costly as Vietnam. Not the war, the whole country. In the fifty years since the probe launched, technology has made staggering advances, but nothing has made interstellar travel any easier. Therefore, no human being will ever set foot on the planet. The planet would quickly become the most frustrating object in the Universe, at least to a certain subset of the population. It wouldn't help that it was only the unmanned exploration that enabled us to accurately calculate how impractical a manned version would be. | | Saturday, June 9th, 2007 | | 12:20 pm |
The Logo Solution
 The image above is the logo for the 2012 London Olympics. It has attracted a far amount of criticism, and one of the printable descriptions of it is a "broken swastika". But it's already cost a large amount of money to design, and taxpayers might balk at the cost of redesigning it. So I suggest they switch to the other 2012 London Olympics logo, that was also professionally designed by a British company. See below the cut, and click on the image to enlarge it. ( Read more... ) | | Thursday, June 7th, 2007 | | 11:51 pm |
| | Monday, June 4th, 2007 | | 7:44 am |
| | Monday, May 28th, 2007 | | 6:01 pm |
Link of the Month
The Underwear Drawer. This is engrossing journal of Dr Au, a medical resident with a young child in New York. She's an anesthesiologist, and yes, she has heard that joke. Ignore the silly title and have fun. Check back in a month for the next installment. | | Wednesday, April 25th, 2007 | | 8:39 am |
A Terrestrial Planet in the Habitable Zone
Here. It's a tide-locked planet of a red dwarf, only five times more massive than Earth. The article describes it as "habitable", which might be generous for a planet with 2.2g surface gravity. | | Friday, April 6th, 2007 | | 8:27 pm |
I've made a huge mistake.
Writing 7,009 words of background material has persuaded me that writing 50,000 words of it would only be useful if I was planning a ten-season TV series, or a Neal Stephenson-sized oligology, so I'm bringing this writing exercise to a close, a nail-biting 25 days short of the finish. I've now got material on 16 different star systems, if you count both near-future Earth and far-future Earth, and a clear idea of how my characters encounter each one. The basic idea is Starfarers meets Ocean's 11. I'll now spend some time revising the background and adding some numbers, so in the next 30-day month I'll be able to start writing the story itself. | | Sunday, April 1st, 2007 | | 6:01 pm |
InBaWriMo
I'm currently fascinated by National Novel Writing Month, where people pledge to write 50,000 words in a month, presumably at a constant rate of 1667 words a day. This usually doesn't produce a full, publishable novel but usually represents considerable progress towards one, or at least gives valuable practice in writing. I'd participate myself, but none of my ideas are quite ready to be put into novel form yet. Plus the month is the November of each year, and I may well have lost interest by then. So I've decided to carry out a different challenge. I have the rough background for a story about exploring interstellar colonies with a lightspeed ship, originally inspired by a post by james_nicoll. I need considerably more detail on the colonies the characters visit, plus the culture they come from themselves. Therefore, every day from the first to the 30th of April, I will write at least 1667 words of background for the story, reaching 50,000 words by the 30th. I won't post all of the background here - it'll be far too long and not polished enough for public consumption. But from time to time I'll mention what I've been writing, and I'll post edited highlights if there's any interest. Today, for example, I wrote 1672 words about Afis. This is an American colony, founded to preserve American values until the end of time, that runs into a serious problem that the United States itself has never faced. Although some of its major rivals have... | | Friday, March 23rd, 2007 | | 4:09 pm |
Stirling at a Glance
If you've never read S.M. Stirling and are wondering whether his books might interest you, take a look at this map. It illustrates a particular book, but is representative of much of his fiction, for good or for ill. | | Friday, March 9th, 2007 | | 8:01 pm |
Huge Star Trek Spoiler
Here. It's not a spoiler for the characters, plot, or casting of the new Star Trek movie, but for something much bigger. Via, oddly enough, The Corner at National Review Online. ETA: Spoilers are openly discussed in the comments. | | Tuesday, February 20th, 2007 | | 10:31 pm |
Alpha Centauri
One of the biggest cliches in SF is a habitable terrestrial planet orbiting one (or more) of the stars of Alpha Centauri. It's a cliche, not a mistake, because it's quite possible from a astronomical point of view. But the chance that any particular star has a planet conveniently in the habitable zone has to be pretty small. So what is likely to be there? The orbit of the two big stars seems to rule out Solar System type gas giants. Planet searches haven't found anything, which just means there's nothing bigger than Neptune in the inner system. So, if you were writing about exploration of Alpha Centauri and didn't have to tweak the probabilities to get a habitable planet, what would you put there? | | Tuesday, February 13th, 2007 | | 6:51 pm |
| | Tuesday, February 6th, 2007 | | 9:57 am |
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