For the curious reader of science fiction (scifi) and fantasy
And sending back pictures! Including a picture of its own shadow on Mars. That unbelievable Rube-Goldberg system of landing worked. Brilliant! What a happy looking crew at JPL. Well done!
Something to watch while you’re waiting for Mars to grow to full size in the viewscreen. Set it to full-screen mode and turn up the sound.
Nocturnal – Scenes of the Southern Night, Western Australia and Chile. from Colin Legg on Vimeo.
Tip of the hat to Astronomy Picture of the Day for this one.
I’m in my office, working. But Curiosity lands on Mars at about 1:30 a.m. Eastern time, and I don’t intend to miss it. It doesn’t seem that it’s going to be carried on any of the two thousand channels Comcast offers, so I have NASA TV set up via several different URLS, in different browser windows.
In Firefox, I’ve got a feed paused at http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/mars/curiosity_news3.html and another at http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/nasatv/
In Chrome, I’ve got http://www.ustream.tv/nasa set up. At least one of them ought to work!
Just to get in the mood, I rewatched the Seven Minutes of Terror.
That’s where you’ll find me, this Thursday evening August 2, from 9:20 to 10:00 Eastern time! The show is called The Author’s Corner, with host Elaine Raco Chase, at www.trianglevarietyradio.com. It’s a call-in show, and I’ll be talking about my writing and books, and pretty much whatever she asks me. So if you’d like to chat with actual spoken words—almost as if we were talking in person—check it out! Go to www.trianglevarietyradio.com, then click on blog talk radio (a silver bar, halfway down the page). You’ll find a phone number for calling in. Listen to the whole show, from 8 to 1030 p.m., Eastern time! (Forget the boring Olympics—they’ll be on your DVR.)
If you must watch adorable and athletic divers and gymnasts instead of listening to our scintillating conversation, podcasts will be available after the show. (But really, you aren’t going to watch the Olympics Sunday night instead of the Mars landing, are you? I didn’t think so. This is similar.)
Edit: You can listen to the interview as a podcast, by clicking this link:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/trianglevariety/2012/08/03/authors-corner-review-with-host-elaine-raco-chase
Several other authors precede me in the interview. My own section starts at around 78:30.
It’s not bad enough they fill my mailbox and harass my phone. Now they’re sending out their crap pretending to be me, by using one of my domain names as a “return address.” Yeah, I know, it happens all the time. The support guys at my hosting site (let’s hear it for sff.net!) say it’s a spam blast from a distributed botnet of compromised machines around the world, using my hijacked domain name. It’s not coming from my account or site.
But it’s still infuriating. I just want to let the world know: If you have been bothered by spam or scumware claiming to be from anything at [writesf – pointy symbol – com], it didn’t come from me. I’m sorry.
And there’s not a thing I can do about it.
But you know, there really ought to be a special level in Hell for spammers.
Mine, that is. The contracts have been inked, and I am now an Audible author! (In press, so to speak.) Nine of my novels, in the coming year or so, will make their debuts as Audible audiobooks. As I said previously, I’m a big fan of audiobooks myself. I often listen to books while I’m walking the dog, or working around the house. So on those grounds alone, I’m excited. Professionally it’s a welcome breakthrough, because audiobooks have grown to be an important part of the book market, and this will open my work to a whole new potential audience—just as ebooks did.
No word yet on who will be doing the narration, but I’ve made some suggestions of readers I like. So here, now, are the books slated for audio:
Seas of Ernathe
Panglor
Dragons in the Stars
Dragon Rigger
Star Rigger’s Way
The Infinity Link
The Rapture Effect
From a Changeling Star
Down the Stream of Stars
I just have one more thing to say about that: Yee-haw!
P.S. You don’t suppose I should be worried that the acquiring editor at Audible is a fellow by the name of Snape?
Naw…
America’s first woman astronaut died Monday at the age of 61, of pancreatic cancer. Sally Ride was an inspiration to millions, and not just girls and women. I remember what a triumph it felt to me, back in 1983, when she rode Challenger into space, ending once and for all the perception that American space travel was solely the domain of men. Nowadays, women fly missions all the time, and sometimes command them. It’s easy to forget that as recently as the early 1980’s, women were simply not part of the NASA equation. The Soviet Union had sent a woman, Valentina Tereshkova, into space twenty years earlier, but that had not signaled a general welcome of women into the Soviet space program. In the case of Sally Ride, it really was the shattering of a glass ceiling. After the loss of Challenger in 1986, Dr. Ride was named to the presidential commission that investigated the cause of the tragedy. She later went on to found Sally Ride Science, an organization devoted to supporting girls’ and boys’ interests in science, math and technology.
Here was a woman who made a difference. It’s sad to see her passing. Godspeed, Sally Ride.
A local news channel has this footage of damage in Arlington. Again, we were fortunate in having no damage to our own property (that I’ve found, anyway), but what you’ll see in the news report is the surrounding neighborhood. Our brand-new dog park is closed indefinitely, and the huge, beautiful tree in its center has damage at the roots and may or may not survive. The park’s new maintenance shed is in pieces, strewn toward Route 2. The bike path is blocked for a one-mile stretch by fallen trees.
So far as I know, amazingly, no one was hurt.
This is the second time in the last year or two that such a microburst has hit Arlington. I wonder if someone’s trying to tell us something.
Ironically, today there’s a town election on whether to uphold a town-meeting-mandated ban on the use of leafblowers by landscapers and cleanup crews.
My neighborhood, that is. At least that’s what people were saying it was. I haven’t heard an official report, and you know they’ll just cover it up like the aliens in New Mexico, anyway. But I think it was a microburst.
I was sitting in my third floor office, noticing with approval that it was raining a bit. God knows we need the rain (most of the country does), and we needed some cooling off. Then we got a couple of good cracks of thunder. Didn’t bother Captain Jack, but it made me jump. Then the wind started blowing and the house started shaking. I looked out the window and saw the big oak tree outside (just beyond our property line) whipping around, and I’m pretty sure I saw rain blowing horizontally. I was starting to think I should turn off the computer and get the hell downstairs to a more sheltered location. Being an idiot, I didn’t right away. Instead, I clicked weather.com to look at a radar map. By the time it came up, the storm was over. The map and my eyes both confirmed that the convective area was passing. It probably lasted two minutes, total.
When I went out a few minutes later with Captain Jack, I found the whole neighborhood out walking around. Our property was okay, but the neighborhood looked as if a hurricane had gone through. Here are a couple of pictures I snapped with my phone camera.
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| This one, around the block from my house, came down on the house across the street. Looked like it was being held up by the power and cable lines near the house. |
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| This grand old tree stood right outside our town’s new off-leash dog park. A brand-new maintenance shed in the dog park is gone altogether. This is just one of many trees that came down right across our bike path, where I do my rollerblading.
The force of nature is a powerful thing, isn’t it?
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Alert reader Tim Yordy sent me this hot tip on the residents of a town in Pennsylvania called Frackville. (As far as I know, it’s a real place. But I haven’t checked Snopes.) Here’s what Tim said:
Hey Jeff, given your involvement with Battlestar Galactica, I thought you would enjoy this. Go to the Wikipedia page about Frackville, PA and scroll down to the Demographics section and read the first paragraph.
I did. And you should, too. Read carefully. (Passing familiarity with BSG is required. If you’ve never seen the show, move along. You’re not the droids we’re looking for.)
I wonder if the other residents of Frackville know about this.
Edit: I have learned from alert reader Marco that not only is Frackville real, it is right down the road from Vulcan, PA!