Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 179

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...

The S Word

Here we see a view of one of the most famous back porches in America, that of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.
I spent a couple days traveling through Virginia before the Nebula Weekend, and one day— while Kathy was visiting a school chum in Charlottesville— I decided to go off in search of history.
I started with Monticello, and I tried to program my smartphone to give me directions. I thumbed in “Monticello Charlottesville Va.,” and was then asked, “Do you mean 1201 Monticello Lane, 1202 Montic...

Above and Beyond

Here we see astronaut Mike Fincke pointing out some of the features of the moon suit on display at the Air & Space Museum on the Washington Mall.
Mike didn’t have to do this. He and I were asked to guide a tour after the Nebula Weekend organizers were unable to find a docent able to take a party around on Friday afternoon. And whereas my contributions were along the lines of, “Oh look, it’s Skylab! Oh look, it’s a Ford Tri-Motor!”, Mike’s talks were informed by his knowledge of aerospace histo...

Ruling Ring

Behold! A composite photograph of yesterday’s annular eclipse, showing all stages of the event.
The reason the light turns amber as the eclipse progresses has nothing to do with the eclipse, and everything to do with the fact that the sun is setting as the event occurs.
In fact, the sun was still in partial eclipse when it set.
We are indebted to Cheryl and Bill Macey, who fed us a lovely dinner on their patio as the event progressed.

Burning Ring of Fire

It’s been a long and interesting day. At one o’clock this morning I was chatting at a room party with astronaut Mike Fincke. At dawn I was lost in Washington D.C., circling the Washington Monument (a lovely sight, actually). At noon I was landing at the Albuquerque Sunport, and shortly before sunset I was eating chilled shrimp and lobster mac and cheese, and also watching and photographing this annular eclipse of the sun.
You could see the mountains of the Moon silhouetted against the sun. Sun...