Dispatches since 2005
The journal
Announcements, new editions, travel, diving, cooking and the working life of a novelist — 268 entries, all of them here in full.
September 30, 2010 · 310 words
You Mean Jesus Was Jewish?
A new poll reveals that Americans, while religious, know very little about religions, including their own. (And we also learn, from the footnote, that the New York Times doesn’t know how to spell “Teresa.”) On average, people who took the survey answered half the questions incorrectly, and many flubbed even questions a
Read entry →September 29, 2010 · 57 words
Fox News Destroys World!
Our friends at Fox News, in the person of writer John Brandon, are interested in the end of the world. They asked me how it could be done. I told them. They quoted me a lot, along with John Barnes and a number of prominent scientists. Want to know how the world ends? Check it […]
Read entry →September 27, 2010 · 600 words
Cyberwar. No, Really. Cyberwar!
So even Bruce Schneier, who is often dismissive of the Security Armageddon of the Week, is alarmed about the Stuxnet Worm: The Stuxnet worm is a “groundbreaking” piece of malware so devious in its use of unpatched vulnerabilities, so sophisticated in its multipronged approach, that the security researchers who tore it
Read entry →September 27, 2010 · 398 words
Oreka Tx
We’ve spent the last couple nights at the Globalquerque music festival, featuring three stages of mad fun entertainment from every corner of the globe— and I’ll post about all that later— but I thought I’d mention the act that was the most fun: Oreka Tx. The name is Basque, and I won’t venture a guess [&hel
Read entry →September 25, 2010 · 77 words
Talk About Irony
CNN reports this story about a Polish Neo-Nazi couple who went digging into their genealogy and discovered they were, well, Jewish. Oops. So what did they do? It must be admitted that they showed more flexibility than you expect from Nazis. They embraced their new identity and become active in their local synagogue! Mu
Read entry →September 25, 2010 · 559 words
Franklin v Mesmer
In what might have been the world’s first double-blind study, Benjamin Franklin, Antoine Lavoisier, Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, and a group of elite French scientists examined the scientific claims of Anton Mesmer . . . at the express command of Louis XVI, no less. (That Dr. Guillotin’s humane execution machine later sepa
Read entry →September 24, 2010 · 416 words
Preening
I am soooo preening now. I just read Russel Letson’s review of The Green Leopard Plague. The nine stories in Walter Jon Williams’ The Green Leopard Plague cover a decade’s worth of his work and display a mastery of genre possibilities and a considerable range of emotional effects. In one of the authorial afterwords, Wi
Read entry →September 23, 2010 · 900 words
Well Beckoned
Saw an interesting Paris Review interview with French slipstream author (and Lovecraft scholar) Michel Houellebecq. I was interested in part because the guy’s process is so different from mine. I wake up during the night around one a.m. I write half-awake in a semi-conscious state. Progressively, as I drink coffee, I b
Read entry →September 20, 2010 · 392 words
Moby Dick. The Musical?
So the other night we went to see Moby Dick: the Musical. No. Really. Though in my defense I didn’t know it was a musical when I said I’d go. The production was held in a former filling station on Barelas, which was the neighborhood I lived in when I was just starting out and […]
Read entry →September 17, 2010 · 157 words
Dating Writers
Via Janice, a corrective providing reasons not to date a writer: Writers will romance you with words. We probably won’t. We write for ourselves or for money and by the time we’re done we’re sick of it. If we have to write you something there’s a good chance it’ll take us two days and we’ll […]
Read entry →September 16, 2010 · 607 words
Sino-Science
I recall being told just yesterday how many Chinese scientists were being trained, as opposed to USAian scientists. Vastly more. Hugely more. We are doomed. The Chinese scientists are going to come over here and pick our dead, bleached bones for the useful bits of DNA. Though, as The Humanist points out, Chinese scienc
Read entry →September 15, 2010 · 576 words
One Great Big Lego . . .
Today’s New York Times article on 3-D printing brought up an idea I had in this blog some time back— using a big 3-D printer to build a house. (I was mocked, I do believe.) Dr. Behrokh Khoshnevis either read my blog or my mind, or came up with the idea himself— and now I […]
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