Alexander Jablokov's Blog, page 17

Me and Readercon

A couple of months ago, my wife Mary scheduled me for a family reunion in Indiana--the same weekend as Readercon. I notified Readercon that I could not attend.

Then a family health problem cancelled the reunion. So I will be at Readercon after all, but as a paying guest, not a program participant. If you want to find me, I will have no cool ribbons or anything and will have no fun quote for Meet the Prose on Friday night.

I hope to see you there.

The plight of the secret teacher's pet

SF has a lot of tropes, that is, standard plot devices, character types, or backgrounds that are used to move stories forward.

A genre is itself just a trope writ large, so it should come as no surprise to find that SF is completely trope-ridden. It's not a bug, its an exoskeletal alien.

I've been trying to read more SF, particularly in its short forms, than I usually do. The result is a kind of queasy feeling of getting overstuffed with tropes.

One I've encountered a couple of times recently is...

Do second weddings count?

As you might know, I'm a big fan of the BBC radio show In Our Time, which I get as a podcast and listen to while running. The most recent show, on the invention of radio, contained a discussion about how little credit Marconi ever gave to anyone else, among other personality flaws, and included this exchange:

Simon Schaffer: This is a man whose best man at his wedding was Mussolini.

Elizabeth Bruton (quickly, seeking to set the record straight): Second wedding.

Panoramas and viewsheds at Gettysburg

Here, (via The Dish) an interesting interactive article by Anne Kelly Knowles, from The Smithsonian, showing what commanders could and couldn't see during crucial points during the Battle of Gettysburg. It's really fun, and well worth a look.

We're used to seeing God's-eye-views of battlefield diagrams which show everything, and also know how things worked out, so we get a skewed sense of what it was like then.

The article shows panoramas, which lets you scan across a generated image of what th...

The graph that shows why healthcare costs aren't coming down

Via Derek Thompson of the Atlantic:

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: unless you understand healthcare provision as a jobs engine, you don't understand what's driving it. Yes, look at ridiculous billing practices, unnecessary procedures, gold-plated equipment purchases, etc. All those are important. But not as important as jobs.

Thompson says non-healthcare job growth over the past 10 years has been....0.2 percent per year. Yow! Most of my employment over the past decade has been heal...

Waterworks

Thanks to a suggestion from reader John Redford, this weekend I took a bike ride over to the Metropolitan Waterworks Museum in Chestnut Hill, Boston, for a look at some heroic public works.

If you like Richardsonian Romanesque public buildings containing some behemoth steam engines, all spruced up and ready to go, this is the place for you.

Quite the popular style, until suddenly it wasn'tBut it's what inside that makes this place great. Three multistory steam engines, two of them triple expans...

Buzzkill in the NY Times

Today's Science Times had two nannyish articles, in the category of "it's 'science' if it gives you evidence that makes you behave in a more socially useful way".

First was "Designated Drinkers" (I don't see it online). Apparently occasionally the "designated driver" in a group has a drink early in the evening. A study showed that 65% of those identified as designated drivers had no alcohol in their blood, 17% had .02 to .049%, and 18% had .05 "or higher" (the article coyly refused to say how...

Why do recommendation algorithms suggest other movies with the same actor?

Isn't that like recommending other books printed in the same font?

Release of The Other Half of the Sky

Today is the official publication date of Athena Andreadis's and Kay Holt's anthology of space opera stories featuring strong female characters, The Other Half of the Sky. I'm pleased that my story "Bad Day on Boscobel" is one of them.

Aside from me, the anthology includes stories from Melissa Scott, Nisi Shawl, Sue Lange, Vandana Singh, Joan Slonczewski, Terry Boren, Aliette de Bodard, Ken Liu, Alex Dally MacFarlane, Martha Wells, Kelly Jennings, C. W. Johnson, Cat Rambo, Christine Lucas, and...

Some long ago reading: House of Rain, by Craig Childs

When I was in Moab a few months ago, after my hike through the Maze, my friend Paul and I stopped by the wonderful Back of Beyond Books on Main Street and I picked up a copy of House of Rain, by Craig Childs. It is about the Anasazi, whose territory we had been hiking through. I meant to write about it then, but it has been sitting on my desk since, and it's about time it moved from there to the shelf where it belongs.

Ah, that term, "Anasazi". Paul was immediately suspicious. It's an obsolete...