Category: Miscellaneous
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AmazingCon Continues!
The online SF convention AmazingCon continues all this weekend. Tomorrow, June 14, I'll be doing a panel at 10am on Worldbuilding. It should be a great show, as the lineup of panelists is pretty impressive: me, Paul Levinson, Rosemary Claire Smith, and T.B. Jeremiah. We'll be talking about how to make convincing and unique science…
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This Con Will Be Amazing!
This weekend Amazing Stories is sponsoring a virtual science fiction convention: AmazingCon! It features readings, panels, special events — all the good parts of a convention without the hotel food and travel expense. I'm doing two events: a reading from my work in progress at 3pm on Friday, June 12; and a panel on Worldbuilding…
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Historical Perspective
Like most of the rest of the world I've been thinking about diseases lately. What I've been thinking about is how mild the coronavirus epidemic has been. No, stop shouting at the screen and look at some numbers. The Spanish Flu: the post-World War I influenza epidemic caused 17-50 million deaths; I've seen the…
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New Story at the Decameron Project
Seven centuries ago, the Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio wrote a series of stories, presented as tales told by a group of travelers seeking refuge from the Black Death in a house near Florence. The tale-telling takes place over ten nights, giving the work it's title: The Decameron. In the present era, our plague isn't quite…
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Big Podcast News!
My short story "Treatment Option" will be the lead episode of the new DUST studios podcast series Flight 008, which releases tomorrow, March 25. You can listen to it here. There's even a nifty trailer video! This project began as a Web-based fiction collection, Seat 14C, which was part of an XPrize Foundation look at visions…
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Non-Political Coronavirus Post
As an SF writer my thoughts naturally turn to the future. What will be the long-term effects of this pandemic? Telecommuting: This may be the tipping point for telecommuting and working from home. A lot of businesses have resisted the idea much longer than they should have — chiefly, I think, from a nagging sense…
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Hamiltonian Musings
A couple of weeks ago the Crack Team launched an expedition to the distant isle of Manhattan. We toured the museum ship Intrepid, saw an exhibit of clockwork automata at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ate some fancy food, and saw a matinee of Lin-Manuel Miranda's famous hip-hop musical Hamilton. Quick summary: it's good. Just…
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Very Sad News
Freeman Dyson has died. He had a long, productive, and apparently happy life, so it's not really sad news for him. It's sad news for the rest of the species, which will have to get by without one of the modern era's foremost intellects. He was one of those scientists who are better science fiction…
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Signs of the Times
Things I've seen in the past few days: • Disposable plastic gloves now get a listing on the supermarket aisle sign. • Big displays of disinfectant wipes at the front of multiple stores. • No dust masks at any hardware store. What have you noticed?
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Meta-Political Post
No, I'm not talking about politics. I'm talking about talking about politics. I recently read a couple of interesting essays. The first, by economist Robin Hanson, is "Respectable Rants" — his standards for good political rhetoric. Note that he's not trying to limit politicians to a Rain Man style recitation of facts, nor is he…
The Cambias Digression 