Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 231

On The Beach

The Dutch artist Theo Jansen has been building odd wind-powered beach creatures for years now, intending that eventually they will live and roam in herds, independent of their human creators. Here's a video of Jansen explaining the method behind his madness. [via Bob Norton.:]

Your Brilliant Writing Career Awaits!

Amazingly, applications for Taos Toolbox are still open! This means you can still have that brilliant writing career you've been dreaming about!All you have to do is go to the Taos Toolbox web site, and follow the instructions thereon! If you're accepted, you'll join me and Nancy Kress and Carrie Vaughn in Taos next summer for an intense two-week master class in the writing of science fiction and

News Hour

Just some news tidbits that flew my way.#1. Why economists are skinflints. In recent research, University of Washington economists Yoram Bauman and Elaina Rose found that economics majors were less likely to donate money to charity than students who majored in other fields. After majors in other fields took an introductory economics course, their propensity to give also fell."The economics

Getting Elfy-Welfy With It

What to Icelanders do during those long winter nights?Elves, apparently.[thanks to julien:]

Grand Masters

A video featuring all the Grand Masters of the Science Fiction Writers of America (through 2000, anyway).The video features a lot of voices that we can no longer hear.There's a kind of prequel to this video featuring Jack Williamson, which for some reason is not available for embedding in such untrustworthy sites as this, but you can find Jack here.

Go hang a salami; I'm a lasagna hog!

Today is National Palindrome Day.

Not Thinking in Years

I've noticed that a lot of other bloggers are posting year-end summaries. Top ten news stories of 2009, favorite books of 2009, New Year's resolutions for 2010, favorite blog posts of 2009, favorite 2009 blog posts by the owner of the blog. This is all fine, except maybe the last, which is kind of like one of those episodes of a sitcom that's nothing but clips from previous episodes strung

Where's Jesus? (A Holiday Game)

I picked this game up from Boing Boing, and discovered that it's a perfect way to waste a cold winter afternoon, particularly during the holiday season.Go to Wikipedia. Click on "random article" (on the left side, under the globe). Of the various links on that random page, click on the one most likely to lead you to the article on Jesus. Then continue following the links until you actually

Beaker/Beethoven

Beaker's Ode to Joy.Note that it would be illegal for students at Danvers High School in Salem to attempt this.

Black Hole Created! Sorta.

Scientists have created a black hole in a Bose-Einstein condensate. Well, an acoustic black hole. Not a real black hole.But they may get some perfectly genuine Hawking radiation out of it, so it's still cool. One of the many curious properties of Bose-Einstein Condensates (BECs) is that the flow of sound through them is governed by the same equations that describe how light is bent by a