Joe Haldeman's Blog, page 85

UFOs, etc.

Blues, eye-witness testimony isn't strong evidence for single events, even when the witnesses are people you'd expect to be good observers, like jet pilots and police officers. Lawyers love accident cases where they can have a choice among various credible eyewitnesses.

Photographs of UFOs would be nice, but it's hard to find examples that will convince skeptics (though easy to find photos that believers believe). And how do the UFOs know to keep out of range of the thousands of all-sky surv...

back home

Just got unpacked from a trip to Orlando, the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts. Decided to write on the novel rather than blog, when I had time.

Couldn't work at the hotel coffeeshop, since I must have known half of the 450 people at the con. So every day I biked about four miles to a Burger King, where I could get a piece of pie and a cup of coffee for $1.50 -- the service was quite personalized; every receipt said "Senior Joe -- $0.50." They not only knew my name, th...

Great Irish physicists

[In sff.net, Neale Morison said

• In The Third Policeman Flann O'Brien (Brian O'Nolan) recorded, in a large footnote,
• a similar device suggested by the polymath De Selby. You place a mirror in front
• of you and a mirror behind you. The diminishing series of images you see is
• also increasing in age, as each reflection results in a longer light path to
• your eye. With an adequate telescope you should be able to see yourself as a
• baby, and possibly before. :]


Flann O'Brien was a grea...

Baseball?

(For some reason people started arguing about baseball in my sff.net topic, so I had to put in my two bits' worth -- )

Well, there are fucking robins everywhere (at least here in northern Florida), so I guess you might as well start talking about baseball.

Like, who do you want for the Series? Taylor or MacLaurin? Or is that too obscure Fourier?

I do have a hard-science question for someone who knows baseball. I happened to see a clip of some pitcher doing a beautiful double play, snagging a ...

of dinosaurs and corporations

(In sff.net, Dave Nicholas mentioned participating in a decades-long study of social networking . . . )

That anthropological study of social networks would be interesting. It predicted couch potatoes, not too daring, and of course missed the effect of the internet. Did it say anything about the shift of networking away from propinquity -- hanging around with your physical neighbors -- toward associations based on shared interests?

A lot of people have remarked on sf fandom as a technologicall...

Good model; bad role model

We had a fun model for studio Saturday morning. Her first time; she's a student at the massage school next door. Cute as can be, but lots of tattoos and piercings. I guess that's kids nowadays. By cracky, used to be when you looked at a naked girl you saw skin. Now it's all dragons and barbed wire. Just once I'd like to see "Proud to be a Marine" or "Mom" . . . that would be different . . . .

I spent about 45 minutes out under the stars last night without learning anything new about th...

bumper sticker seen at farmers' market . . .

"The world has been a lot different since that house fell on my sister."

Joe

off by a hair

(Background: "An engineer shims between two surfaces to adjust them by a small amount that is called a "cunt hair" in the English system. When the German scientists surrendered to the Americans after WWII, they were all amused that the two cultures had both come up with the same unit of measurement. Eine Kunthaar, I guess, assuming it to be a feminine noun.")

======== moving on to last night . . .

Had an interesting but not too productive night with the telescope, trying to deduce why the ...

thinking books

(talking in sffnet about Granden's book THINKING IN PICTURES)

John, I clicked over to Amazon and ordered THINKING IN PICTURES. Then it reminded me of a book I haven't seen in many years, which I first saw in highschool or early in college -- THINKING WITH A PENCIL. Found a used one listed for seven bucks and got that, too.

THINKING WITH A PENCIL is a ramble through heuristics, the squishy science of problem-solving. It's about diagramming and doodling and drawing, with some set theory thrown...

Temple Grandin

Last night I took a salad over to Lore's for dinner and a movie. She made excellent "white" lasagna, ground beef and cheese but no tomato.

We don't get HBO, so she had taped the made-for-TV movie _Temple Grandin_ for us to watch. I had sort of a "take your vitamins" feeling about it, a movie about an autistic woman who made good.

In fact, it was much more than that. If it had been on the big screen, it would definitely be Oscar material. Claire Danes is totally convincing in the role of Gra...