The Cambias Digression

Notes and thoughts on everything from what I had for breakfast to the fate of the Universe.

  • Arisia 2021

    This weekend I'll be appearing at the venerable Arisia science fiction con. Normally it's held in Boston, but this year it's happening right on your computer. You can join it here: https://www.arisia.org I'm doing three events this weekend. On Friday evening at 10:00 pm (EST) I'm doing a reading from my forthcoming novel The Godel…

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  • The Lost Manuscripts of Lemuel Gulliver, Part the Second

    A couple of weeks ago I posted about the exciting discovery in Oxford's Bodleian Library of unpublished notes and drafts by the 18th Century explorer and naturalist Dr. Lemuel Gulliver. That first post included Gulliver's discussion of how the difference in scale affected the architecture and habits of the Lilliputians. This excerpt is concerned with…

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  • Thoughts on That Christmas Movie

    A lot of people think they've watched the movie It's A Wonderful Life but either haven't actually seen it, or have forgotten most of it. This leads to a lot of misunderstanding. When my family watched it this past Christmas my son was astonished to discover that a good two-thirds of the film's run time…

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  • Happy Boxing Day!

    The perfect day for a strong Yuletide Punch!

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  • Hanson on Fermi

    I've posted at great length on the Fermi Paradox — the simple question "Where are they?" in regard to extraterrestrial civilizations. One element of that paradox is simply that the time it would take for an expanding civilization to spread across the Galaxy is relatively short in geological terms. Or so we assume. Now Robin…

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  • A Servant of the Empire

    My lost Star Wars story can be read here.

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  • My First Story

    Back in the 1990s I wrote some adventures and sourcebook material for the legendary Star Wars Roleplaying Game published by West End Games. Some of the worlds and plot elements I put in those pieces actually worked their way into the "canon" of the Star Wars universe, and I got paid, so I was happy.…

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  • The Lost Manuscripts of Lemuel Gulliver, Part the First

    Historians and students of literature were tremendously excited by the recent announcement by Oxford University that several volumes of unpublished notes by Lemuel Gulliver had been found in the Bodleian Library.  Dr. Gulliver was a little-known 18th-century explorer, the first European to visit Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, and other lands of the Pacific. His accounts of…

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  • Son of Great Filters

    Robin Hanson, who invented the term "Great Filter" in the first place, comes back to the topic in his own blog for a look at a couple of neglected aspects of the topic. You can read his whole post here. One of the key issues he raises is whether or not a given planet (for…

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  • Safety Last

    I was recently reading about the legendary silent comedy star Harold Lloyd, and learned the interesting fact that he did his famous comedy stunts despite having lost the index finger and thumb of his right hand (he used a glove with prosthetic digits to hide the injury). Here is Wikipedia's account of how Lloyd lost…

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The Worldbuilding Index