The Cambias Digression

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

  • A Christmas Tradition

    Long-time readers of this 'blog know that I like to put up a link every Christmas to my favorite holiday-themed Web site in the whole world: the NORAD Santa Tracker. This year, think a moment about the people who created that site. Their normal job is air defense. Three hundred and sixty-four days a year…

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  • Confederacy of Dunces: Ahead of Its TIme

    I recently started re-reading John Kennedy Toole's great comic novel A Confederacy of Dunces. For a New Orleanian, it's kind of like Scotsmen reading Burns. It's our "national literature." It's also a very funny book. And, for the first time, I realized it's a prescient book. The main character, Ignatius J. Reilly, spends most of…

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  • Wizard Hygiene

    This past Sunday I took my family to see The Hobbit at the multiplex. I'm not going to give a full movie review here — the blogosphere is full of self-appointed cinematic geniuses explaining how they would have done things better. (I even do that myself sometimes, just not today.) If you're interested: I liked…

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  • Real Steampunk Airships, Part 4: The Man Who Counts

    The real Golden Age of airships arrived in 1900, when Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin launched his Luftschiff Zeppelin 1 from a floating hangar on Lake Constance in southern Bavaria. Zeppelin was from a very old and influential family in the small German kingdom of Wurttemberg. His sovereign sent him to America as an observer during…

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  • Real Steampunk Airships, Part 3: Robida’s World!

    It wasn't until 1884 that a really practical airship took to the skies. La France, built by a pair of French Army Captains, Charles Renaud and Arthur Krebs, is generally considered the first truly dirigible aircraft. It was 165 feet long, with an overall weight of about 2 tons. Most of that weight was taken…

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  • Real Steampunk Airships, Part 2: Dirigibles!

    Balloons could get you up in the air, but they weren't steerable. Various inventors tried to build powered airships which could fly anywhere the pilot wished to go, but during the first half of the 19th Century they were stymied by the massive weight and enormous fuel consumption of available engines. Turns out railroad technology…

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  • Real Steampunk Airships, Part 1: Balloons!

    This little blog series is based on a talk I gave on August 18, 2012, at Pi-Con in Enfield, Connecticut. About a dozen people showed up, which was very gratifying, and I think all of us had a good time. Airships are the signature technology of steampunk and alternate-history stories. If you look up in…

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  • Radical Evolution, by Joel Garreau

    (I've also posted this on Goodreads.) Radical Evolution is a look at how rapid and fundamental advances in technology could produce enormous changes in human life and even in what we define as "human" in a relatively short time. It's by Joel Garreau, a Washington Post writer who wrote two books I enjoyed immensely: The…

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  • Guest Blogger: Sarah Hoyt!

    Today I'm proud to introduce the first guest post on this blog, by the redoubtable Sarah Hoyt (who normally blogs at According to Hoyt). Riffing off my blog title, she tells us what sorts of things she says when it's just the caffeine talking, and her new book: It’s Just the Caffeine Talking About two…

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  • A Dwindling Resource

    Look at today's date. It's October 11, 2012. So if you're writing a check or dating a homework assignment, it's "10/11/12." (Unless you're a European, in which case you are doing it wrong.) Mildly amusing, yes? The numbers are in sequence. What you probably don't know is that time is running out on that particular…

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