Category: Science
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When Metaphors Attack!
Science Fiction has a problem. The problem is that it is (among other things) a literature of prediction. Writers extrapolate future worlds and new technologies. A huge part of the genre's appeal is simply seeing what the future might be like. The trouble with predictions is that either they come true, or they don't, and…
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Off the Launch Pad, Day 6
On the final day of the Launch Pad workshop we straggled into the lecture hall later than usual and took our seats for Dr. Schmidt's account of What Not To Do in science fiction stories, based on his years in the editor's chair at Analog. He discussed the difference between obviously made-up science and just…
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Off the Launch Pad, Day 5
Friday began with a lecture by Mike Brotherton about galaxies. He began with a little history, about William Herschel's attempt to determine the Sun's position within the Milky Way galaxy by counting the stars in different portions of the sky. This gave a decent rough approximation of the shape, but vastly underestimated the size and…
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Off the Launch Pad, Day 4
Instead of going to class in our beloved basement lecture hall, on Thursday morning the Launch Pad workshop members got some fresh air and sunshine. We drove out to Vedauwoo Rocks east of Laramie for a three-mile hike. It was quite pretty. The rocks are ancient granite, cracked and eroded into mysterious almost-familiar shapes. Around…
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Off the Launch Pad, Day 3
We reconvened in the familar windowless basement lecture hall on Wednesday, to hear Dr. Mike Brotherton give us a long and detailed lecture on Newton's laws, Kepler's laws and how combining them gives us the basics of orbital mechanics. We also discussed Lagrange points and transfer orbits, all good crunchy stuff. After the lunch break…
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Off the Launch Pad, Day 2
On Tuesday things moved into high gear. Mike Brotherton kicked off the day with a long lecture about the electromagnetic spectrum, photon energies, emission and absorption, and how telescopes work. After a lunch break we resumed with a talk by Dr. Danny Dale on infrared astronomy and dust in space. Jim Verney followed that with…
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Off the Launch Pad, Day 1
Today was the first session of this year's Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. I'll give my impressions in roughly chronological order. Laramie itself is a nice place, somewhere on the borderline between "town" and "city." The University sprawls across the eastern side of town, there's an immense railroad yard…
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Ozblogging: Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, Part 3
Un-Player-Character-Like Behavior The Black Pit isn't actually a pit, it's more of a tunnel. The Mangaboos wall our heroes into it with glass boulders, so Dorothy, Zeb, Jim, Eureka and the Wizard follow the tunnel to see where it leads. They go up for a long way and finally emerge in a "delightful valley" with…
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Ozblogging: Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, Part 2
Humbugs and Humanoid Plants The Sorcerer of the Mangaboos is named Gwig, and unlike the rest of those people he's not eerily handsome. In fact, he's all covered with thorns. Gwig, it seems, is a bit of a humbug, because after the first Rain of Stones he promised there would be no more. He gets…
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Rolling My Own (b)Log
New post up at Science Made Cool, about the arsenic-based "alien bacteria" found by NASA researchers.
The Cambias Digression 