The Cambias Digression

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

  • 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…

    jamescambias

    ,

  • 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…

    jamescambias

    ,

  • 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…

    jamescambias

    ,

  • 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…

    jamescambias

  • 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…

    jamescambias

    , ,

  • Thrilling Days of Yesteryear

    My wife and I recently watched the movie RED, a Bruce Willis actioner based on the comic series by Warren Ellis. It's about a retired CIA agent suddenly targeted by assassins who has to figure out who's trying to kill him and why. In the process he gathers up his team of now-retired old spooks…

    jamescambias

  • Genre and Plot

    Diane and I went to see Super 8 this past Friday, as one of our mostly-weekly date nights. She was really excited about it — I was less so, but only because I've been cruelly disappointed by movies too many times in the past decade. (Capsule review: The Goonies Meet Cloverfield. Four out of five…

    jamescambias

    , ,

  • Soaps Vs. Self-Contained Episodes

    I recently joined Brian Rogers and Tom Ladegard to playtest the character creation system for the Smallville roleplaying game. It was an interesting experience. Smallville (the game) is of course based on the TV series Smallville, about the teen years of one Clark Kent and his pals in a small Kansas town, including the angsty…

    jamescambias

    , , ,

  • Favorite Science Fictional Worlds, Part 2

    Science Fictional Worlds I'd Like to Live In This turned out to be a much more difficult list than the previous one. The reason is pretty simple: settings that are interesting to read about are often horrible places to actually live in. I don't actually want to share my neighborhood with alien conquerers, reality-devouring cosmic…

    jamescambias

  • Favorite Science Fictional Worlds, Part 1

    I've been working on revisions for Star HERO lately, and my editor, the brilliant Steve Long, asked me to contribute lists of my favorite SF films, short stories, and novels for the bibliography. As I made up my lists it struck me that a lot of stories take place in settings which aren't very good…

    jamescambias

    ,

The Worldbuilding Index