21 Jul 2010

More Flying Subs

posted in: Flying, quirky, science fiction, technology | 0

I can’t decide whether I’d rather have a flying car or a flying submarine. Both seem right up my alley. Last week’s New Scientist has another article about progress toward a flying sub. (I know I’ve written about this before, but I can’t find my own post on the subject!) Some of the possibilities being considered: use of jet turbines both for air and underwater propulsion (the underwater use being powered by electric motors, rather than jet combustion), the use of air/hydrofoils for both flight and forced submersion. Of course, the work at this point is being pursued on behalf of the military, but I’m rooting for a civilian version, too. I’d link to the article, but most of it is behind a paywall for subscribers, unfortunately. 

All this puts me in mind of Tom Swift, Jr.’s diving seacopter, from the juvenile novel of 1956. That handy invention used an atomic-powered central rotor in the middle of a flying saucer. To fly, it spun to force air downward. To submerge, it reversed to force water upward. I wonder if the folks at DARPA have given any thought to hiring Tom. Here’s what the Ocean Arrow looked like…

14 Jul 2010

“About:robots” Answers

posted in: quirky, science fiction | 0

Okay, time’s up.  Here are the references in the page you get when you enter “about:robots” into the URL box in Firefox:

  • From the page title (in the top bar):
    Gort!  Klaatu barada nikto!
    From original movie The Day the Earth Stood Still. Spoken to the robot Gort by Patricia Neal’s character, translated roughly as: “Gort! Don’t destroy the Earth!” or possibly, “Stay your hand!”
  • Robots may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
    Isaac Asimov’s First Law of Robotics.  Somewhat observed by Roombas, not so much by unmanned aerial killer drones.
  • Robots have seen things you people wouldn’t believe.
    From the movie Bladerunner.  Spoken by the homicidal Nexus 6 robot shortly before he dies. 
  • Robots are Your Plastic Pal Who’s Fun To Be With.
    Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
  • Robots have shiny metal posteriors which should not be bitten.
    Bender, from Futurama
  • And they have a plan.
    The Cylons in Battlestar Galactica, of course       
  • And finally, the button “Please do not press this button again”
    Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

8 Jul 2010

Mozilla Easter Egg: Zort!

posted in: ebooks, quirky, science fiction | 0

If you have Firefox on a Windows PC, type this into the URL window:

    about:robots

Just that. (It didn’t work on my daughter’s Linux netbook. But it seems to work in Windows and Mac.)

I’ll send a free Chaos Chronicles ebook collection to the first person to identify all six references, plus mine in the title of this post!

Do you know of other Mozilla Easter eggs?

7 Jul 2010

Readercon!

posted in: personal news, science fiction, writing | 0

This weekend, my favorite SF convention takes place in Burlington, Mass. Readercon is a great gathering of writers, editors, artists, and most of all, readers—people who really love to read, think, and talk about books. I’ll be there Friday and Saturday, available for a kaffeklatch on Friday, and signing books Saturday at 3 p.m. If you’re there, please say hello!

7 Jul 2010

Flying Car-a-chute

posted in: Flying, quirky, technology | 0

What better way to start the holiday weekend (or end it, since I forgot to post this after I wrote it) than to see a flying car fly! This I-TEC Maverick Sport Model is different from the Transition and the Switchblade that I’ve written about before. It’s more like a car/ultralight. Drive it like an open jeep, then pop a chute, start up the propeller, and take off in just 250 feet. Awesome. 

Read about it and see the video here.  (Warning–the video starts with a lot of superfluous racing around like a dune buggy, so you might want to fast-forward to the flying part.)

2 Jul 2010

Writing Sitrep

posted in: personal news, Sunborn, trains, work in progress, writing | 0

Promises, promises. I swore I’d keep you informed how work was going on the new book, which in case you’re forgotten is called The Reefs of Time, fifth volume in the Chaos Chronicles. The answer is: slowly, but steadily. Life continues to get in the way sometimes. Especially life with kids and a mortgage. But I’m solving problems with the book one by one (story problems, I mean), and it’s getting there. This time I’m dealing with time travel—yes, in the Chaos universe, which is the same as the Starstream universe introduced in From a Changeling Star and Down the Stream of Stars. The starstream itself comes into play in this book, as well as the center of the galaxy, where the Survivors lurk. It’s my first real foray into time travel, and I’m finding that possibilities and complications pop out of the woodwork every time you turn around.

The really good news is that I realized just this week that I was enjoying working on the book a lot more than I have for quite a while. That’s the best news of all.

Meanwhile, to help pay the bills, I’m working with another author on a nonfiction project (as a paid consultant editor-writer, not as primary author). It’s taking us into some interesting areas of the law—and, as it turns out, the BP oilspill. Eeesh, what a mess!

It’s nice sometimes to retreat to my fictional pan-galactic world. 

2 Jul 2010

Slight Change to the Blog

posted in: blogging, ebooks, personal news | 0

“Engineers! Always changing things!”  So said Dr. McCoy, in the first Star Trek movie.  Generally speaking, you can’t accuse me of doing too much of that with my website or my blog. But if you look to the right (if you’re reading this on the actual blog, and not on Facebook or through a feed), you’ll see one overdue change. That’s right—an ad for my books! I’ve got books in the Kindle store now, and lots of other stores, and it’s high time people knew about it. What a concept. Click through! Give it a try! 

My website has been due for a makeover for, oh, maybe ten years or so. Its appearance is pretty last century. I have lots of ideas (including switching to WordPress, maybe, and merging this blog into it), but little time. Several people have offered to help. But the problem is that it’s a big project that I need to oversee myself, and can’t just hand off to someone. So that’s going to wait a little longer.

I raised the question earlier of whether blogging was a good use of my time. I guess my answer is, I’ll continue to do it as the impulse seizes me, as I always have. So, yeah, you’ll still have this blog to kick around for a while. Think of it as a beat-up old glow-in-the-dark soccer ball. (I sort of like that image.)

26 Jun 2010

Students Shoot Down Disintegrating Spacecraft!

posted in: public affairs, science, space | 0

Yes, it’s true! (If you forgive my slight poetic license.) High school students from Brookline, Massachusetts shot a terrific video of Japan’s Hayabusa spacecraft coming down through the atmosphere and breaking apart in a fiery cascade over the Australian outback. The lucky students were aboard a NASA DC-8 aircraft, monitoring the reentry, which landed a separate reentry vehicle (visible to the right of the breakup in the video), bringing back samples of an asteroid.

I can’t find a way to embed the video (dang!), which might be just as well, considering how my last embedding effort turned out. But watch it here. And read the full story about these high school students who got a surprise trip Downunder in a NASA jet.

26 Jun 2010

What Drives Us?

posted in: public affairs, science, writing | 0

I first came across this video on Tobias Buckell’s blog. It’s a short animation of a talk about what gives us motivation, according to psychological studies. The speaker is Dan Pink, author of the book Drive. If you’re interested in which drives us more, money or satisfaction, take a few minutes to watch this.

(EDIT: That totally broke out of my template, and I can’t seem to make the screen smaller. So I took out the embedded video. But click the link!)

There’s a longer version of his talk on Ted.com. (And enough cool talks on Ted.com to keep you from your work for hours.)

I wondered how sound the actual science was, so I asked my resident expert, my brother Chuck, who happens to be a distinguished professor of psychology. The answer? “Go to selfdeterminationtheory.org. Deci and Ryan have been studying these things for…40 years.” Sound, in other words, but hardly new.

New or not, though, it’s something people all walks of life would do well to think about.

14 Jun 2010

Undersea Talk

posted in: personal news, public affairs, writing | 0

We’ve just passed the 100th anniversary of the birth of Jacques Cousteau, the famed underwater explorer who died in 1997. It was Turner Classic Movies that turned me on to this fact, by running a series of classic Cousteau TV documentaries, including Cousteau Odyssey and the Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau.

I practically idolized Cousteau during the period that these shows aired. In fact, as a college student who had taken up scuba diving (in chilly Rhode Island waters), I wrote to Captain Cousteau, basically asking for a summer job. To my delight, he wrote back, saying that he’d like to meet me the next time he was in New York. I waited, and didn’t hear from him. I wrote again, and heard back again. But unfortunately, the meeting never happened. (This was long before email or cheap long distance telephone, so the whole thing hinged on snail mail.) Despite that disappointment, I maintained my interest in underwater exploration. I even used it in my SF—with a novelette in F&SF, and later, with my novels Seas of Ernathe and The Infinite Sea.

I was feeling nostalgic for those days tonight, poking around online—and in the process, I came across this Ted Talk by National Geographic underwater photographer Brian Skerry. It’s a great talk, and is filled with phenomenal undersea images. Give it a look. 

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