Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 215

My God--- It's Full of Planets!

I certainly picked an interesting time to take an intensive astronomy course.Via David Brin, I hear that we've now found that our new space telescope Kepler has found 140 Earth-sized exoplanets. Kepler finds planets by detecting almost imperceptible 'winks' - the tiny amount of dimming that occurs each time a planet moves across the face of a star . . . 'Transits', as they are known, by

Signing in Albuquerque

I'll be signing in Albuquerque this weekend, on Saturday the 24th, from 3-4:30pm. The signing will be at Page One, Albuquerque's biggest independent bookstore. I will be signing The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories, along with whatever else they have in the store (which should be everything in print, and some other stuff besides.) I'll be alongside Bob Vardeman, and we'll read, chat,

1979: The Writer's Life

We've been reorganizing the garage, and I've been going through a lot of old paperwork to see what can be tossed away. Among other things, I found boxes upon boxes of old tax forms and documentation stretching back to 1979, my first year as a full-time professional writer. I've tossed away pounds and pounds of old bills and canceled checks, but I've hung onto the actual tax forms and my expense

Ten Atmospheres

When I was learning scuba, I was being forever warned about the kind of stuff that many atmospheres of water pressure could do to you.Mythbusters had an episode that illustrated this very nicely, and Carrie kindly pointed out the relevant video on YouTube.They stuffed a dead pig in a hardhat diving suit, dropped it to 100 meters depth, then drained the air pressure from the suit, subjecting Mr.

Amazon Sez . . .

Amazon has announced that it's now selling more Kindle e-books than hardbacks, and that this is a huge milestone in the history of publishing. Several grains of salt need to be taken with this message. No raw numbers are provided, only a percentage (143 Kindle sales for every 100 hardback sales). It's not clear how many of the Kindle sales replace hardback sales, and how many replace paperback

A False-Color Image of Your Very Own

Behold a false-color image of Messier Object 27, better known as the Dumbbell Nebula. False-color images of astronomical objects are not unusual, of course, but what's unique about this one is that I created it my ownself, while noodling around on software the final day of LaunchPad. And the absolutely cool thing is that you can do this too, because the software is free for download, and is

Trapped With Astronomers in a Hot, Airless Room!

So I am back from Laramie, where I spent a week at LaunchPad, the workshop designed to cram as much astronomical knowledge into your skull as can possibly be accomplished without the use of a mallet. I filled an entire legal pad with notes. I wonder if, a year from now, any of it will be decipherable. I would have typed the notes into my laptop, except that my word processor doesn't do

Stellar Types

So I've been living and breathing astronomy for four whole days now, and it's producing conversations like this:ME: I've been observing the Wal-Mart parking lot, and I've noted twelve Class O supergiant vehicles, fifteen Class B giant vehicles, eight Class G vehicles, and nine Class M dwarf vehicles.CARRIE: What conclusion do you derive from your observations?ME: Big pickup trucks and Wal-Mart

In Wyoming

I am in Laramie, Wyoming, attending Launch Pad, which is an astronomy workshop for SF writers and other creative people, intended to give us sufficient astronomical knowledge so that our fiction won't embarrass the professionals.Hosting is writer/astronomer Mike Brotherton, ably assisted by astronomers Jim Verley and Kevin R. Grazier, who is the science advisor to Battlestar Galactica and Eureka.

Pawns of the Plutocrats

The Royal Society for the Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce (RSA) has been sponsoring lectures for 250 years. But only recently have they been producing a series of brilliant animations of the lectures themselves, including this one illustrating a talk on the financial crisis by controversial anthropologist and geographer David Harvey.The analysis is frankly Marxist. I'm inclined to think he's