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I’ve had a couple of days relaxation for a change, even though there are pressing matters, as always. Taking vacations, short and long both, is a good idea and keeps productivity high over the long run. I picked up a Microsoft XBox 360, however, which might be such a good idea that way. I’m planning on videogaming socially however (Rockband is the only game I have), and not alone very often. In that way games are like alcohol.
And the sushi?
Well, I went to eat sushi in Fort Collins. We don’t have a Japanese restaurant in Laramie at the moment, having lost a second on in three years a few months back when the sushi chef decided he couldn’t live in a place this cold any more.
Now, we ordered a bit more to eat than we needed to, but there was no danger of not finishing off all the tasted rolls and nigiri. Sushi cannot go to waste. The couple at the table next to us didn’t understand this though. When they left, they had half a dozen untouched pieces on their plate, and we were in shock.
A cute waitress came and cleaned up their table, carefully setting all the dirty dishes and glasses on a tray. Then she grabbed the platter with the remains of the sushi and carried it off. She was back a minute or two later for the dirty dishes.
And her mouth was full and she was chewing.
She understood.
Originally published at Mike Brotherton: SF Writer. You can comment here or there. Tags: personal
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I was talking to a friend of mine at work a few days ago, and mentioned that I had a cat.
“Oh yes, that’s right!” he said, with some excitement. “I have some cat food I’d like to give you.”
That seemed like a strange thing to offer out of the blue. “Okay,” I said slowly, wondering why Sita was getting free food dropped on her.
He explained. “I thought they were just little cans of meat, which were on sale at a very good price. I bought a whole bunch, they were so cheap. I ate some and it’s good, like tuna, you know? But my friend told me it was cat food, so now I don’t want it. Sheba, it’s called.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Sita will be happy.”
Sheba?
Didn’t know it was cat food? Now, it wasn’t my Chinese friend who might have thought it was literally “cat food” the way that hamburger is a “beef food,” but I guess I shouldn’t complain. Sita will enjoy the wet food treats while they last (usually she gets a little Fancy Feast but never had Sheba) in addition to her staple of Science Diet. Yes, the scientist buys Science Diet for his cat. She likes it.
Originally published at Mike Brotherton: SF Writer. You can comment here or there. Tags: personal, popular events
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Between having a leaky water heater replaced yesterday, costing me a lot of sleep and money, and running a two-hour “Writing Science Fiction” session for middle school kids attending our Wyoming Astrocamp, it’s been pretty busy for being summertime without travel. As usual when this happens, I still get in some surfing time and friends forward links of interest. I think I’ll start posting these under the heading of “Starlinks” the way Jay Lake does his “link salad” posts. I’ll make some comments, but usually won’t do an extended response.
So what’s been going on in the world and heavens above?
Science
Cracked lists five superpowers you can have in this lifetime. Either great minds think alike, or it’s a ripoff of my list of ten superpowers you can have now. Well, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
A solar system is discovered with “a trio of super-Earths.” Krypton? Nah…
Nucleobases confirmed from space.
We have the summer solstice coming up next week, and a full moon tomorrow, which will make for an exceptionally good optical moon illusion Wednesday evening at dusk.
A thoughtful Atlantic article with the provocative title asking “Is Google making us stupid?” discussing how the internet is changing our reading habits, turning people into shallow skimmers, and changing the way we think.
An idea to build an evolution museum across from the Creationist museum. I’m of a mixed opinion about the wisdom of this. Isn’t every Natural History museum already an “evolution museum?”
Stephen Hawking speaks out against Britain cutting science budgets. Also, for what it’s worth, it’s revealed that Hawking has turned down a knighthood because he “doesn’t like titles.”
Science Fiction
Should the Hulk be the villian in the upcoming Avengers movie?
Entertainment Weekly writer defends himself after calling Blade Runner and Jurrasic Park “Sci-fi misfires.”
An 1881 science fiction novel rediscovered that anticipates space travel, space suits, and more.
Some image lists of Old School Toys and Bad Movies. Some nostalgia there. I’m miffed that the second list starts with Barbarella, however, which is marvelous for what it is and has perfect 1960s charm. Several science fiction movies on the list, some of which (e.g., Ed Wood’s Robot Monster with its “Billion Bubble Machine”) are much better choices than Barbarella. I’m a little offended that Soylent Green is on the list at all though.
Originally published at Mike Brotherton: SF Writer. You can comment here or there. Tags: education, personal, popular events, science, science fiction
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I missed my day to blog at www.sfnovelists.com yesterday, but did jump in today with “Getting Things Write.” I’m reproducing it here below. If you’d like to comment, I suggest doing it over there.
I’m primarily a writer of what’s referred to “hard sf,” which of course means what I write is really difficult science fiction.
That’s baloney. Ok, something a little harder than baloney. Salami, or a nice summer sausage.
What I write is science fiction with plausible science. I try to get all the science right, and while I certainly speculate plenty in my work, I won’t put something in that violates science as we understand it. We’ll certainly learn more in the future, but everything that happens shouldn’t violate the laws we know already. Einstein, when developing relativity, made sure it agreed with Newton in cases where Newton was known to apply.
I have bachelor’s degrees in physics, electrical engineering, and a doctorate in astronomy. That makes it easier for me, at least when it comes to getting the physical science right, but I include a lot of other science in my work and I have to get that right, too. I have more than a few bookshelves for the writing hard sf.
Now, not everyone agrees with me on the topic of getting the science right. Over at sfsignal.com, there was a recent discussion about this, which I have previously responded to. Now, I agree with the dissenters in this sense: a writer should know what’s right and what’s wrong in their work. There are entire branches of fiction about intentionally getting things wrong to great purpose, e.g., fantasy, alternate history, etc. Still, I’ll make these admonitions. If you’re writing science fiction, get the science right. If you’re writing historical fiction, get the history right. If you’re writing crime drama, get the police procedurals right. Get everything right you possibly can, from the spelling to the quantum physics, because the writer is the only one responsible in the end.
If you don’t, you risk the greatest threat to fiction writers, a threat greater than poor characterization or limp prose or anything else. You risk losing the suspension of disbelief. The suspension of disbelief is critical to the entire enterprise of fiction, and when it’s gone, you’ve lost the reader, perhaps forever. Bad writing or weak characters risk this too, of course, but having a reader stop and think, with regard to an important plot point, “I thought penguins were at the south pole, not the north,” and then wait for a payoff that never comes…well, that’s a crime against readers.
I have a couple of authors I won’t read again because of errors not much more subtle than this. Now, it doesn’t have to be a crisis. Larry Niven got to write entire sequels to books based on subtle problems with the original (see Ringworld and the Ringworld Engineers). Still, my guess is that he would have preferred to have gotten things right the first time.
You have to have authority in the reader’s mind, based on the words on the page, in order to keep that disbelief in suspension. The best and easiest way to get that authority, much easier than writing sterling power-infused prose, is to be an authority. Know your world and know how things work in it. Do the research.
Research can be fun, and it doesn’t have to come from books (although most writers I know love any excuse to read an interesting book). If you’re writing a story set an observatory, go visit the place and set up interviews with real astronomers who work there. The internet and email makes this sort of research incredibly easy today, and websites like google make it trivial to get maps or see what an area looks like. I’ve met few astronomers who minded taking a little time from their day to answer questions. Likewise for world-experts in all sorts of fields who rarely have the audiences they (think they) deserve.
For one of Michael Swanwick’s award-winning stories (I think it was “Radio Waves”), he researched what it was like to die in a parking lot. He went out and laid down and took note of the things around him. In two minutes he got details he wouldn’t have imagined given hours to think about it.
That’s a bit subtle. Not so subtle is a reading exercise I developed while I was really working on the craft and realizing the importance of this issue of research. I started reading books of the type that I wanted to write, and as I read each page I asked myself if I could have written that page without doing any research. Sometimes I could, when it was a passage involving the characters and internal monologues, but more often I realized that I’d need to look at a map, or a website that provided annual temperatures or local wildlife, or pull out a calculator to get an orbital velocity right.
Nobody knows close to everything about everything. All you really have to know is when you’re not sure about something, and go check it.
For Spider Star, I went hang gliding, even though I didn’t really want to. I really wasn’t as relaxed as I looked. I didn’t wind up changing much if anything in the book as a result of the experience, but I also knew for sure I hadn’t made any major mistakes. I could have gotten someone else who had hang glided to read what I’d written, but the first-hand experience is sometimes critical.
One of the best one-sentence pieces of advice about writing professionalism I got from Octavia Butler. She said that you shouldn’t ever send something out that had mistakes in it that you knew of. You were ultimately responsible and a professional didn’t send out something with errors.
Perhaps your editor will forgive you, and your audience too, if the error makes it into print. But perhaps not, and that may be the only chance you ever get with them.
If you’re going to be a serious writer, you need to get things write. I mean right. You know what I mean, but a writer shouldn’t count on it.
Originally published at Mike Brotherton: SF Writer. You can comment here or there. Tags: personal, science, science fiction
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In order to secure high-quality guest instructors for anything with a substantial time commitment, you need to book way in advance. I’ve learned this the hard way by getting turned down by very interested people because their schedule starts to fill up a year in advance, or more, depending on the season. I should have already gotten someone for Launch Pad for next year, but I haven’t. I’m going to try to remedy that situation very soon, before this year’s workshop, and I’d like a little help.
The goal of the Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop for Writers is to increase the quality and quantity of astronomy/physics reaching the public by using writers already reaching large audiences. We educate them in a week-long crash course in astronomy, and our NASA funding let’s us pay for everything. The idea behind having a guest instructor, who we pay a $2000 stipend, is to bring in some expertise we don’t already have locally and to make the workshop more appealing to a broader range of writers who may not have heard of Mike Brotherton or thought of Wyoming as an astronomical mecca. Jerry Oltion has been our guest instructor so far, and he’s done a terrific job. My vision is to have a different guest instructor in different years to help appeal to different writers.
To that end, I’m soliciting some input in the poll below. Pick up to three names from the list that you think would be the most appealing to writers. While I originally envisioned this workshop for science fiction writers, I’m very open to writers of all types for whom a better understanding of astronomy would enhance their work, and editors are welcome to apply as well. Many of the people listed have expressed some level of interest in being a guest instructor in a future year, schedule permitting. They all bring strong expertise in astronomy and/or in communicating astronomical science to the public. If you have a strong preference for someone I haven’t listed, please leave a name in the comments.
Thanks!
 Loading … Again, vote for up to three. Be encouraged to suggest other names in the comments.
Originally published at Mike Brotherton: SF Writer. You can comment here or there. Tags: education, personal, popular events, science, science fiction
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I had a post over the weekend where I claimed that life on a planet around a type M star (see classifications here) would be like living in a red light district. Not the sex part, just the red light part. M stars are cool as stars go, around 3000 Kelvin or a bit less, and put out most of their energy in the near-infrared, invisible to humans. What visible light is emitted is heavily skewed toward long wavelengths — red light. Simple physics, right?
Well, James Nicoll reminded me of something I had conveniently forgotten. Your typical old-fashioned light bulb operates at about 3000 Kelvin and emits a spectrum an awful lot like an M star. They look white, don’t they?
Well, yeah. That’s true. But I have also looked at M stars through telescopes and those suckers sure look red.
I’m calling this the “light bulb paradox.” Why doesn’t light from a light bulb look red? Should it? When doesn’t a spectrum correspond to the color of an object?
I’m not completely certain, but I think I’ve got some insight and an explanation, although it’s a little outside my expertise.
First, some reference material. Spectra of M stars, which, except for the very coolest M8 star do put out some blue light and do resemble the spectrum of an incandescent light bulb. For good measure, let’s also have the efficiency of the human eye as a function of color, the spectra of the sky and sunset (and light bulbs, tungsten and “full-spectrum”). Finally, a nice discussion of the perception of color.
OK, that’s a lot of stuff to get through. The key to understanding the paradox lies in the perception of color. The eye has different cells that respond to different colors (red, green, and blue, with some overlap equivalent to the bandpasses of filters we use in astronomy). When all three are sufficiently stimulated, the color is regarded as “white.” Light bulbs are intense enough that all three are sufficiently stimulated and they look white, even though the spectral shape of the tungsten filament is very similar to that of an M star in a telescope or a sunset, both of which definitely appear as shades of red. The red-detecting cone cells in these fainter light sources send a much stronger signal than those from the red and green cone cells.
So the key to the paradox is the intensity of the light. Saturating all the varieties of color-detecting cone cells results in white.
So what of our hypothetical planet orbiting an M star? It’s going to depend on the particulars of how bright and large the star appears in the sky. Let’s take an Earth-sized planet with Earth-type temperatures, ballpark. Let’s take a typical M star with half the temperature and half the radius of the sun. That will make the star emit only about 1/32 as much energy as the sun (see discussion in wiki blackbody article). This will mean that the planet has to be much closer than the distance from the Earth to the Sun (an astronomical unit). Because the radiation follows the inverse square law, it’ll have to be about 1/6 (square root of 1/32) of an AU orbital radius, and the star will look about three times bigger across than the Sun in the sky (it’s about half the size, but six times closer). Now, that’s not the only large effect, however, even though it does affect how intense the light will be as it will be spread out over an area ten times larger. Another large effect is that the spectrum is peaked in the near-infrared, and the ratio of visible light put out by the M star to that of the sun is very small (governed by Planck’s Law, again see the wiki blackbody article). Based on some plots, I’m estimating another factor of five or so, largest in the blue.
This means that the M star’s visible light surface brightness will be approximately 50 times fainter than the sun, with a larger factor at shorter wavelengths.
The discussion here suggests that the Sun at sunset is seen through 6-10 magnitudes of visual extinction at yellow colors, which corresponds to factors of a few hundred to a few thousand, order of magnitude, compared to the Sun at noon. I can look at the sun at sunset and it looks pretty dang red. If we let it get ten times brighter, that’s somewhere approaching sunset and I think the sun starts to look red before it gets all the way to sunset.
So, having said all this, I think it will come down to specific details. This order of magnitude estimate seems to put us on the boundary between what’s going to look white and what’s going to look red. The colors of plants and things and the quality of the sky and general lighting should be equivalent to what we see on Earth approaching sunset, but not quite there. It should look different, but probably not quite as different as I indicated in my original post.
Let’s call living around an M star as the “almost sunset” district.
Apparently, James, I will do other people’s homework when they disagree with me! You’re on your own for the moment with the Jovian moons.
Originally published at Mike Brotherton: SF Writer. You can comment here or there. Tags: education, general, personal, science, science fiction
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Spacedaily has run a slightly edited version of last Monday’s press release, and there’s a story on physorg, too. Also over at The Future of Things (TFOT). I talked to an astronomy.com reporter who was planning on making a slideshow of our Hubble images, but I wasn’t available to do a commentary, so maybe it isn’t happening, or just a little more slowly. Oh, and finally here’s an article in German, another in Russian, and one in Dutch (from a cached link)! These may be my first translations, at least that I’m aware of.
I’m still working on a follow-up to the post about the M stars and what it would look like under their light. It’s actually pretty complicated and I’m not certain I know the right answer just yet. It’s not as simple as I or James Nicoll thought. Hope to solve it and post Monday.
Originally published at Mike Brotherton: SF Writer. You can comment here or there. Tags: personal, popular events, science
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