Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 179

Caine/Mountain/Caine

Nancy Kress and I are up the mountain now, preparing for Taos Toolbox. We have computers, a printer, lots of electric cords, and enough office supplies to equip the Pentagon.
Since I’ll be up here for two weeks closely engaged with over 300,000 words of fiction, I likely won’t be posting much.
For now, you’ll have to be satisfied with the sight, or rather the sound, of Michael Caine dueling Michael Caine.

Fahrenheit Zero

I found a picture of Ray Bradbury as he looked before he became the affable, bespectacled, white-haired figure we’ve seen over the last couple decades. This is a lot closer to how he looked when he wrote the stories and novels for which he’ll most likely be remembered.
He looks serious, driven. He looks like he’s taking dead aim at something. Most likely he’ll hit it.
He also looks like someone who’s at home in a feud. My understanding is that this was pretty much the case.
I’ve been several tim...

Teh Science

Random news from the World O’ Science, all of which came in on the same day.
Via friend of the blog Density Duck, the news that the National Reconnaissance Office, which is so hyper-secret that its very existence was kept from the public for forty-odd years, has gifted NASA with a couple of space telescopes, either of which out-Hubbles Hubble by a factor of 100 to 1. The NRO doesn’t need them any more, which suggests that they’ve either got something better now, or ordered too damn many of the...

Venus/Melancholia

I spent much of the afternoon and early evening shuttling in and out of the house watching the Transit of Venus. Through the telescope the sun seemed quiescent and slightly blotchy, and then a black disk began to move across it, as if our star had donned a beauty patch. Venus was larger than I anticipated— I had expected a point, but I could see an actual disk.
I took numerous pictures, but my zoom lens, as it turns out, couldn’t reach all the way to Venus. The sun’s disk, and the little mark...

Dead Soldiers

Oh yeah. We had fun.
And, if you read the previous post, you know this implies a lot of critique.
In addition to all the, um, critique, there was black roux gumbo, Louisiana boudin, slow-braised brisket, Moroccan chicken, linguine in ginger-garlic sauce, leg of lamb stuffed with mint pesto, and other goodies my brain is too staggered to recall, all washed down with lots of, um, critique.
Plus there were parties in the hot tub, late-night discussions of practically everything under the sun, hikes...

Workshop Drinking Game

I’m up the mountain at the Rio Hondo workshop, hanging out with eleven other talented writers, talking deep into the night, enjoying hot tub parties, critiquing their work, and grooving on the spectacle of the natural world.
This also means my posting here might be scant for the rest of the week.
We— well actually some of them— have invented a drinking game specially for writers’ workshops. Here’s how it works.
You slam down a drink whenever you hear any of the following in critique:


I’m not your...

Flame On

So today we heard about the Flame Virus, now infecting the Middle East and Iran.
What this demonstrates is how effective governments can be when they turn to cyberwar. It puts the hack tools used by the likes of Anonymous far, far into the shade.
“The complexity and functionality of the newly discovered malicious programme exceed those of all other cyber menaces known to date.” Boy howdy.
Flame is infecting computers mainly in Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, and the occupied territories. It’s clea...

The Future On Little Cat Feet

As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, I broke a tooth and needed a crown. I’ve had a temporary filling while I’ve been traveling, but yesterday I had the actual procedure.
Which led to a number of those science fiction moments in which you suddenly realize that you’re living in the future. I’ve had laser dentistry before, in which I was surprised to see smoke rising out of my mouth and smell my own flesh burning, and this time I had it again. But what was new this time was my dentist creating a c...

Dead Trees Strike Back!

Someone pointed me at the online edition of Forbes, which features an article about an independent bookstore that is, contrary to about every other independent bookstore in the country, thriving in the current ebook-saturated environment.
Jeff Mayersohn, the new owner of the Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge, managed to create a bookstore even more efficient than Amazon.
How? He installed an Espresso Book Machine, a small printing press that can take a digital file and produce a perfect-bound hard...

Guinness Book of Teleportation

I bet you didn’t even know there was a World Teleportation Record. Let alone that it’s just been broken.
A group of European scientists have just teleported photons 142 kilometers, between the Canary Islands of Tenerife and La Palma. This breaks a Chinese record of 100 km set just a few weeks ago.
This demonstration of quantum teleportation, aside from showing just how bizarre modern physics has become, is a big step toward setting up entanglement-assisted communications satellites, which would...