Derek > Recent Status Updates

SF about archaelogists should really strive to limit the anachronisms: e.g. stating that Shellac records were designed to play with a diamond stylus.

I had some problem with "Metatron" which seems like such an improbable name for an angel - but apparently he really has his roots in Jewish scripture.

I get offered a lot of free books, daily. The first attraction of this one is it doesn't say "Book 1 of..."

if you can't understand a story and relate to it, figure out how you fit inside it, you're not really alive at all.

Let me be straight: I don't much like zombie stories.

Let me confess: enjoying this!

Fascinating foray into the concept of "power corrupts". When you find that a practice you have always believed exists to root out and destroy corruption is corrupt itself, do you tear it down and throw out the baby with the bathwater? Do you eliminate everyone and everything to do with it, at any price - even your own corruption? Who is good, and who is bad? Define Evil...

Thomas Nagel asked "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?", shortly after it became apparent that bats "see" via echolocation. Horowitz makes a big deal about how important that is - that we really can't ever understand another species - and yet, in recent years, we _have_ people who "see" via echolocation: see Daniel Kish, and we have cameras that convert video to audio-scans - and the user "sees"! Are we so different?

How about that! My last review, of The Weeping Empress was pretty hard. So, imagine my surprise, after all the recent discussion about authors behaving badly, to find it "liked" by the author. No complaints, no attempt to enter a dialog, just an implication that I made some good points. Classy author move, Sadie.

"Sheila Maid"????

omg. Kimono dragons probably aren't quite as fearsome as she intended.

I'm not sure how valid her comments on dogs-as-pack-animals are. She claims feral dogs do not hunt cooperatively - perhaps because she's never lived in a small northern town. Coyotes don't hunt in packs,either, when small game is plentiful. In winter, they pack to hunt larger game - just like dogs do.

Belyaev: aiui, he was looking to breed fur-bearing foxes that were safer to handle - she fails to mention that he failed, as the gentler foxes had valueless pelts

I used to love listening to CBC Radio's "Between the Covers": basically audio-books created specifically for radio. I've just discovered that it isn't gone - it's just moved to Sirius and podcasts. Get the podcasts here.