Edward M. Lerner's Blog: SF and Nonsense, page 20

Buy-a-Book Saturday redux

Regularly since 2010, at about this time of year, I've posted about Buy-a-Book Saturday. That's my personal variation on Small Business Saturday: a day (specifically, the second day after Thanksgiving, and one day after retail's infamous Black Friday) on which holiday shoppers are especially encouraged to patronize small businesses. The big-box stores and Internet giants will do fine this holiday season. But will your neighborhood, non-chain shops and boutiques?

Rara avis! Is that a book store...

2017 best reads

I read a lot: as research, to stay knowledgeable about the genre in which I write, and simply for enjoyment -- overlapping categories, to be sure. Once again continuing an annual tradition, I'm posting before the holiday shopping onslaught about the most notable books from my reading so far this year. When I mention a book, I really enjoyed it and/or found it very useful. Life's too short to carp about what I didn't find notable (much less the several books I elected not to finish).
 
Pre...

Telling (copy)right from wrong ...

Two troubling tidbits from the wild wild world of the creative arts ...

What part of the creative content of a CGI character resides in a movie's script? How much is attributable to the software that shaped the CGI character? If a copyright-able element of a character can reside in a programming tool, does that mean Microsoft has a copyright interest in stories and novels composed using Word? That Adobe has a stake in anything ever Photoshopped?

It turns out those issues are being litigated. Se...

When the Moon hits your eye ...

It may or may not be amore, but I do quite enjoy astronomy. (Dean Martin? Not so much.) So, in today's post, we'll consider a few recent and exciting bits of astronomical analysis and discovery.

A dominant feature of modern geological thought is plate tectonics. Tectonics is (in part) a mechanism for recycling Earth's carbon, which would otherwise have long ago become tied up in, for example, limestone and carbonaceous ocean sediments. A strong case can be made that without tectonics none of u...

Stranger than fiction?

Some situations are so implausible that it takes a Charles Dickens to dare put them into a novel.(*) Certainly, I try not to pull rabbits (or rodents of any sort) out of my authorial hat.
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(*) That's not only my opinion: "Dickens particularly resented the fact that his early novels were criticised for relying too heavily on coincidence. This criticism was certainly merited: In his first novel, Oliver Twist, the young Oliver is saved from the streets by pure chance and taken i...

Fleet of Worlds: The Tintinnabulation

On October 16, 2007, Fleet of Worlds was first published. That is: ten years ago to the day.

Larry and Ed at 2015 Nebula weekendThis epic space opera, a collaboration with Larry Niven set in his Known Space future history(*), remains my most popular title. Fleet of Worlds has been translated into eight languages. It was selected (by what was not yet called the SyFy channel) as a Sci Fi Essential title, had a slot as a Science Fiction Book Club featured book, and was a finalist for a Prometheus...

Wave like a nice black hole ...

I have posted enthusiastically several times about gravitational-wave detections by LIGO (that's the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) beginning with Leggo my LIGO, in February 2016. Gravitational waves being very weak, only cataclysmic events -- such as the collision of two black holes -- are (so far, anyway) detectable by the gravitational waves they emit. Of course black holes colliding are very cool events to be able to detect.

In breaking news, the Nobel Committee also...

The coming software apocalypse

I have railed on occasion in this blog about crappy software. The software I most often use, whether on my phone, my PC, or even in the cloud, is not life critical. The sometimes buggy, sometimes horribly designed, apps may frustrate me -- but they don't endanger me.

Down the rabbit holeBut what if mission- and life-critical apps are as buggy and as poorly designed as the stuff we use every day? The truth of the matter is: most apps are. We're talking about apps with millions of lines of code,...

Astronomy, old and new

We're accustomed to news of exciting celestial discoveries made by American (meaning here: of the USA -- a useful clarification because of other topics to come) observatories and astronomers. It turns out, and I was surprised to read this, that American interest in astronomy goes way back.  
JQ Adams: astronomy geekThe Atlantic had a recent fascinating piece about that history. To wit -- archaic wording chosen with malice aforethought ;-)  -- "The Surprising Space Ambitions in Coloni...

Hacked off *still*. You should be, too.

So. The passage of several days has done nothing to alleviate my pique. At what? That the "Equifax security breach leaks personal info of 143 million US consumers: Criminals snagged info including names, social security numbers and more." If anything, as the details emerge, I've gotten angrier.

What details?
That this huge credit-reporting corporation / juicy target appointed a music major as its chief security officer. And that after this major security breach, company officers sold $1.8...