Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 221

New This Week!

Tor Books has done an amazing job of publishing two of my friends on the same day! First up is my former student, Ian Tregillis, who is a Los Alamos physicist, and who in his spare time wrote a trilogy that has me clenching my jaw with bilious envy. Bitter Seeds is the first in the series, a harrowing tale of espionage, treachery, and darkest magic set in an alternate World War II. You can tell

The Truth . . . about Popcorn Lung

I just found out that someone I know has popcorn lung, an irreversible lung disease caused by inhaling the buttery aroma of microwave popcorn, or specifically diacetyl, the chemical used to produce the buttery taste in the absence of actual butter. Diacetyl is also found in candies and wines. [In interests of fairness, I would like to point out that this is not April First.:]Why have you never

Des Imperiums

The Praxis is now available in Germany. I advise you all to buy lots of copies for your German friends.

Watch the Skies!

While in Portales I got to admire Steve Gould's new iPad, which I have to say is a lovely, shiny toy that for the most part does nothing that other platforms can't do better and cheaper. It's an awkward size and my cargo pants would have to be completely redesigned if I were to carry one around. (And it won't run Flash, and because it doesn't have a phone you can't call for pizza, so what's the

Political Idiocy Week, #-2

Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who as the Vatican's secretary of state is Number Two among the Catholic clergy, was asked yesterday about a pedophilia scandal involving a priest having sex with a large number of underage girls. Cardinal Bertone's answer: blame the gays!"Many psychologists and psychiatrists have demonstrated that there is no relation between celibacy and pedophilia. But many others

Political Idiocy Week, #-1

Oklahoma Tea Party types along with conservative legislators are planning to create a new, state-sponsored militia to stand in arms against the federal government, and particularly against the new health care bill.In other words, Oklahomans are planning to give arms, ammunition, and explosives to the same sort of people that blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City just 15 years ago

Euromos

A year ago today I was in Euromos. We were driving from Bodrum to Selcuk, and on the map, alongside the highway, there was a little star on the map indicating an ancient site.The road wasn't well marked, but we managed to find it and bump along a rural two-rut lane until we came out of the trees and saw what was probably the best-preserved temple of our journey. Euromos was a polis created when

Launch Pad

Hey, I get to go to Laramie and hang out with some cool people for a week!How cool is this?

Political Idiocy Week, #1

Let's not assume that this week's political idiocy is committed only by politicians. John Derbyshire of the National Review, the once-respectable publication founded by noted racist William F. Buckley, has been carrying the flag of white supremacy ever onward!Derbyshire, given the opportunity, to speak before the Black Law Students' association of the UPenn Law School, spent his time lecturing

Political Idiocy Week, #2

With Congress on a pointless hiatus, the leadership isn't able to ride herd on its membership, which means that they're all off in the boonies, demonstrating their general stupidity and uselessness.John McCain is faced with a right-wing challenger in the primaries, one J.D. Hayworth, and so far McCain's been running scared, claiming among other things that he was never a maverick, that he's