Sable Aradia's Blog, page 46
February 15, 2018
Star Wars’ Vice-Admiral Holdo and Our Expectations for Female Military Power
By Arkady Martine
A vast and detailed selection of spoilers follow—if you haven’t seen The Last Jedi, go see it and come back to this one afterward.
The first time we see Vice-Admiral Holdo in The Last Jedi, we see her through the eyes of Poe Dameron: hotshot flyboy, recently slapped down twice in the Resistance’s scramble to evacuate their compromised base. The first blow to Poe’s ego and stability is his demotion from Commander to Captain by General Leia Organa herself, a suitable reprimand for spearheading the devastatingly costly bombing run which provides the film with its opening set-piece. No sooner has Poe processed this—if indeed he has processed it—than he’s knocked further off balance by the loss of all of the Resistance high command save Leia, who is comatose and out of commission. In this state—stripped of his expected personal authority, with the usual structures of command which he relies on decimated—he looks at the new leader of the remaining Resistance fleet and says incredulously to another pilot: “That’s Admiral Holdo? Battle of Chyron Belt Admiral Holdo? …not what I was expecting.”
Read the full article at Tor.com.
February 14, 2018
Spaceships Could Use Pulsars as a GPS
OXON HILL, Md. — Future spacecraft could navigate by the light of dead stars.
Using only the timing of radiation bursts from pulsating stellar corpses, an experiment on the International Space Station was able to pinpoint its location in space in a first-ever demonstration. The technique operates like a stellar version of GPS, researchers with the Station Explorer for X-ray Timing and Navigation Technology experiment, SEXTANT, reported at a news conference January 11 during a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
Known as pulsars, the dead stars emit beams of radiation that sweep past Earth at regular intervals, like the rotating beams from a lighthouse. Those radiation blips could allow a spaceship to find its location in space (SN: 12/18/10, p. 11). It’s similar to how GPS uses the timing of satellite signals to determine the position of your cell phone – and it would mean spacecraft would no longer have to rely on radio telescope communications to find their coordinates. That system becomes less accurate the further a spaceship gets from Earth.
Read the full article at ScienceNews.
February 13, 2018
Two Steps Forward, One Step Back
This is my community. I am appalled.
So, no names, no packdrill. This is one of those rare personal experience posts I do for POCGamer, concerning a recent experience and the realities of being Black and a content creator.
View original post 958 more words
February 12, 2018
NASA Just Published the Farthest-Ever Images Taken in Space
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft just took the farthest-ever images from Earth, breaking an earlier record set by Voyager 1’s “Pale Blue Dot” image taken almost exactly 28 years ago.
In December 2017, New Horizons took these false-color images of objects in the Kuiper Belt, the farthest from Earth ever captured by a spacecraft. They’re also the closest-ever images of Kuiper Belt objects. (NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI)The new false-color images show objects in the Kuiper Belt, a donut-shaped ring that surrounds our solar system and is likely full of comets, icy dwarf planets, and asteroids. They were captured 3.79 billion miles (6.12 billion kilometers) from Earth in December.
Read the full article at Quartz.
February 11, 2018
Sword and Soul: Why Afrofuturism Matters
Afrofuturism is a cultural aesthetic encompassing film, art, music, fashion, and literature. It explores the experiences and concerns of the African Diaspora through a techno-cultural and science fictional lens. The term was coined by Mark Dery in 1993 in a series of essays.
Afrofuturism is hard to define. I’d done plenty of reading on the topic and the definitions are contradictory at best. Here is my take, and I may be wrong. Afrofuturism is a movement, a cultural movement. In a sense, it is more of an African American experience. One which explores the intersection of race and technology in interesting and compelling ways.
Nonetheless, do not take my word. Let’s go straight to the source.
Read the full article on Ingmaralbizu.com.
February 10, 2018
Scientists Adjust How Brains Control Aging
By Richard Faragher
If you are reading this and you don’t smoke, then your major risk factor for dying is probably your age. That’s because we have nearly eliminated mortality in early life, thanks to advances in science and engineering. But despite this progress, we still haven’t worked out how to eliminate the damaging effects of ageing itself.
Now a new study in mice, published in Nature, reveals that stem cells (a type of cell that can develop into many other types) in a specific area of the brain regulate ageing. The team even managed to slow down and speed up the ageing process by transplanting or deleting stem cells in the region.
Read the full article at Daily Accord.
February 9, 2018
My Work Board for 2018 (So Far)
When we finish something, we take it off the board and move everything else up. We save everything to a cloud so we can both access it, and have a couple of different folders: “Editing” (for stuff in progress) and “Stories” (for stuff that’s finished; unless it’s part of a series, in which case it goes in the series folder.)
Of course, none of this guarantees publication. The best way to see it all is my Patreon, because I give my Patrons first peak at everything I write as soon as it’s edited: before I publish.
Not shown in the picture is book 3 of the Toy Soldier Saga, Brothers in Arms, which I’m currently editing the first part of, and intend to finish writing by the end of the year. Realistically, that means the end of October, because of course NaNoWriMo is in November and December is usually rather busy.
Just a quick note to share some of my process with you!
February 8, 2018
Physicists Have Created an Artificial Gamma Ray Burst in the Lab
By Matt Williams
On July 2nd, 1967, the U.S. Vela 3 and 4 satellites noticed something rather perplexing. Originally designed to monitor for nuclear weapons tests in space by looking for gamma radiation, these satellites picked up a series of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) coming from deep space. And while decades have passed since the “Vela Incident“, astronomers are still not 100% certain what causes them.
One of the problems has been that until now, scientists have been unable to study gamma ray bursts in any real capacity. But thanks to a new study by an international team of researchers, GRBs have been recreated in a laboratory for the first time. Because of this, scientists will have new opportunities to investigate GRBs and learn more about their properties, which should go a long away towards determining what causes them.
Read the full article at Universe Today.
February 7, 2018
Writing Space Opera According to Ann Leckie & Cat Rambo
Cat Rambo, President of the SFWA, features some awesome SFF authors in On Demand classes available from her website. Her latest featured Ann Leckie on Space Opera. Leckie’s space opera novel Ancillary Justice won just about every award in the SFF field a couple of years ago. The following quotes Cat Rambo’s Twitter thread featuring highlights of the class:
Brian Aldiss on
#spaceopera: “Science Fiction is a big muscular horny creature, with a mass of bristling antennae and proprioceptors on its skull. It has a small sister, a gentle creature with red lips and a dash of stardust in her hair. Her name is Space Opera.”While that’s got a funky gender essentialism to him, there’s also some truth. Ann’s definition: “Space opera is beautiful and glittery and fun and that’s kind of the point.”
Creating the space opera backdrop: planets are not monocultures. Our own Earth has thousands of cultures. Can’t go w/ “planet of the hats” approach, i.e. “On this planet everyone wears big hats.”
Research tip: go to museums and look at objects. Their physicality, their textures, their material consideration and dimensions. Use those details in creating your world(s).
Not the original gif, but close.
In a room, include things for your char to put down and drink and eat and throw, As characters interact with objects they acquire emotional and perhaps thematic significance.
You don’t need to frontload everything in the story. Provide it as the reader needs it.
Repetition of an object can provide a sort of structural support for the work.
There’s nothing wrong with a good infodump. Make it beautiful and interesting and entertaining.
Doing an exercise right now where people think of one assumption about their world and then develop three things that would grow out of that. I.e. an all-ocean world might have more difficulty restricting travel than a mountains one.
Another example: what did the first colony on this planet look like and how did they shape history after them? Different groups might have different foci, intentions, priorities.
The future isn’t necessarily logical.
Reasons to have multiple worlds: indicate vast scope, create space for a physical journey, play around with cool stuff, worlds constructed to be eyeball kicks and sources of wonder.
Not the same gif.
Everyone has had so much fun with this class exercise; it is awesome.
Space opera that Ann has been reading lately includes Yoon Ha Lee’s Raven Strategem, upcoming Arkay Martine’s A Memory Called Empire, and martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries.
When working in a thing that’s not your own experience, you may or may not want to think about sensitivity reader. You don’t want to inadvertently punch someone in the face, metaphorically or not.
Tracking all the details of worlds in space opera – what do you do when wall post-its fail? Ann uses Tiddlywiki – https://tiddlywiki.com/
How many POVs is too many in
#spaceopera? The answer is: how many can you, personally, handle without getting lost or confused or tied up?
But it’s also perfectly fine to use a single POV.
One thing Ann wishes is that more newbie writers would realize that omniscient point of view is a possibility. But omni POV has fallen out of style.
“Avoid head-hopping” is advice for handling third person POV, not omniscient. Omni POV can help create that wide scope you want in
#spaceopera.Omni is not “anything can go down on the page.” It is its own type of narrator.
Establishing POV: establish the strategy up front and the reader can go along for the ride.
You don’t have to explain everything. You can mention a thing and leave it hanging. You don’t have to describe how every light switch works.
Ann on revision and critiques: Look at what your beta readers are telling you the problem is versus what you are trying to convey on the page.
Ann’s finishing by talking about ht get better and the idea of intentional practice, looking at one aspect carefully and perfecting it. i.e. “My visual details are lacking, so I’m going to focus on those, write some, and look at how other writers have done it.”
“Analyze, and then steal.”
Ann’s pointed us at a particular random name generator here:
I’ll finish up with a video clip from the on-demand version talking about that original Aldiss quote, if you’re interested.
If that intrigues, here’s a coupon for 25% off that on-demand one, good thru next month. https://catrambo.teachable.com/p/to-space-opera-and-beyond-with-ann-leckie/?product_id=222346&coupon_code=JANINSPACE …
If you want to make sure you find out next time Ann offers the live version, signing up for my newsletter or watching the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers FB page is your best bet. Thanks & I hope this was useful!
February 6, 2018
‘Hypatia’ Stone Contains Compounds Not Found in the Solar System
By Jay Bennett
The Hypatia stone is only a few centimeters across, broken into pebble fragments, but it may very well be the most interesting rock in the world.
Named for Hypatia of Alexandria, the first prominent Western woman astronomer and mathematician, the colorful rock was found in 1996 in western Egypt by Aly Barakat, a geologist working for the Egyptian Geological Survey. Barakat was studying Libyan desert glass, which appears to be similar to sea glass from the ocean, except geologists believe it might have formed roughly 28 million years ago in a meteorite impact.
Barakat immediately recognized the unique significance of the glossy stone, lined with microscopic diamonds, and he suspected that it did not come from Earth. In 2013, geologists studying the Hypatia stone confirmed the rock was of extraterrestrial origin. Unlike any known meteorite, researchers originally believed the Hypatia stone was the first sample of a comet nucleus.
Read the full article at Popular Mechanics.
