I debated attempting to be the first to post in this thread, but decided that no one actually cares.

At least you're not shouting "Frist!"

These days, "Frist" is never enough -- it requires a lead-in of a couple of well broken in words with deep Anglo-Saxon roots.

FIRST PO -- Oh, wrong weblog.

Apropos the topic on books for writers, while I'm recovering from this-here nose/throat bug I picked up on the flight home last week, I'm hors de combat from serious work ... but would folks be interested in seeing my first take on a Tough Guide to Singularity-land?

I'll take "righteous anger" for $200, Alex.

Charlie, and here I speak as a fangirl, I'll read anything you care to write.

FWIW, I almost kicked off this open thread with "Green sky at night, hacker's delight."

I was tempted to post 8 urls and see if it made it past the filter.

Just checking in.

Charlie, yes!

Remember the "which SF writer are you" thingy that y'all analysed to within an inch of its life? Well I did it and it said I'm Chip Delaney which I'm not (although I am like some of the other folks who got the same answer...). Anyway, instead of analysing the thing, I went back to put in my ideal-person answers and it told me that I was my favourite SF author. Which makes sense (if you give the quiz any credit at all). Something kept nagging away at me and I realised that it's this:

Why aren't any of my favourite SF author's favourite SF authors in my top ten favourite SF authors?

I enjoyed writing that sentence sooo much more than you're gonna enjoy reading it ;-)

And yes that's favourite author as in favourite read not favourite person. Ideas? Similar mystifying questions? Or am I on my own with this one?

Greg, I'm so surprised to hear that.

Charlie, yes. Definitely yes.

Spiral, I'm not fazed by your sentence, but your question is one of the deep mysteries. Sometimes it's because your favorite SF author is putting on airs, but often their choice of favorites is honestly inscrutable. FWIW, J. G. Ballard was a great admirer of A. E. Van Vogt, Heinlein was a fan of John Barth, and Henri Rousseau wanted to paint like Ingres.

An clever borderline scam:

I recently learned that an idea I filed with Oracle's patent-farming office worked its way through the bureaucracy. Not from Oracle, or a patent attorney, or the patent office, but via an official-looking piece of junk mail. The congratulated me and offered me . . . a plaque. Or certificate, if I was feeling cheap.

I did some digging. The patent was issued 5/10; the mail postmarked 5/12. That's pretty fast. Especially considering that the patent office website page for the patent lists my address from three years ago.

The colorful pamplet features a proud geezer posing with his plaque.

Boggling at Rousseau wanting to paint like Ingres. Who did Ingres want to paint like?

I suppose that our individual responses to art are one of the deep mysteries of cognition, and the number of possible variables of style and content in a work of fiction must be almost unquantifiable, but I'm always in hopes of hearing Great Thoughts or adding to my store of inscrutable examples and intriguing questions.

If Rousseau wanted to paint like Ingres (quelle horreur!) and Ingres wanted to paint like... does artistic influence then become a sort of six degrees of Kevin Bacon game? And, if so, who is SF's Kevin Bacon?

aw, Stef, I'll make you a certificate if you want one.

Will "invented a thingie" do or is there a term of art for this?

Patrick:
FWIW, I almost kicked off this open thread with "Green sky at night, hacker's delight."
What, you're starting already with it?

answer: He said democratic judges are worse than Al Qaeda, Nazi Germany or Civil War.

Pat Robertson, Bill Frist's Vice president for 2008.

Oooh, sorry, you didn't put in the form of a question.

Thanks, but my current employer will buy me a plaque. They have co-ownership of the patent.

Also, the junk mail had a handsome sample certificate which I could put in a frame from the Dollar Store!

John Ruskin was an ardent fan of Kate Greenaway.

I've been playing around with TiddlyWiki, and although there seem to be some weird bugs in my copy of it (never trust self-modifying Javascript!) I've got the first few entries hacked out at www.antipope.org/charlie/toughguide.html.

Yes, I think the Medium Lobster may have something to say about this ...

Ahem: make that very buggy.

To make the TiddlyWiki work (at least, in Firefox on a Mac) load the page, then select "close all" in the toolbar on the right, then click on "INtro" in the menu on the left.

Interesting, Charlie, but why does everything come up with floater tags that say "your name here"?

“Always remember this: that magic belongs as much to the heart as to the head and everything which is done, should be done from love or joy or righteous anger.”

Bah! It is humbug like this that has brought about the sorry state of magic in the blogosphere today. Mr. Strange's lyrical but nonsensical aphorisms, especially those references to the almost-certainly fictional Moveable Type King, have led many a comment thread poster dangerously if not fatally astray. I would urge the careful and thoughtful reader to refer to the work of Quinones*, most especially his analysis of the fifty-seven types of blogging magic.

* Arturo Quinones, A Preliminary Study of Blogging Habits, With Especial Respect to Emotional Approaches to Magic, 2002, Pew Center for Internet Life.

One of the interesting things that comes with being a historian...

You see a great deal of human nature, but you don't know where the limits are. Because there is nothing, literally nothing, that our species will not do.

People rape children. Sell their country. Destroy beauty. Wreck stuff. Torture others to death.

And just when you've decided that they're all hopeless nutcases and our only hope is that Cthulhu rises soon and eats us all to spare us more pain, you run across the other side of the story.

People save children. They throw themselves into a river to rescue others. They willingly expose themselves to malaria to figure out how it works so they can find a treatment. They rescue orphans, people entirely unrelated and unknown to them. They write love poems on their 91st birthday.

They do things that are to virtue what the crimes of Nero are to vice.

There is, literally, nothing that humans will not do.

But somehow the scale runs higher on the side of virtue.

speaking of magic, does pounding the wall until my knuckles bleed and the nuclear option reaches a compromise count? Or is that just magical thinking? I can't remember anymore.

Zbaraschuk, hey man, thanks for that. Now I don't feel like the most cynical man on the planet anymore, just the second most cynical man.

And all the diodes on one side still ache.

Charlie Stross, that roughguide is shaping up to be something special and very useful, as I've been puttering about with a Singularity for some time, and looking for a resource to help give it shape.

> I'll take "righteous anger" for $200, Alex.
>>Greg, I'm so surprised to hear that.

sorry, don't mean to spew on your blog. sometimes I just gotta vent somewhere that someone else will understand.

In case anybody is interested, I swiped a copy of what purports to be the Nuclear Option agreement from the Free Republic site.

I just noticed this update on Robert Sheckley's condition. Not as good as I'd hoped, not as bad as I'd feared.

I think I need to bone up on my writing skills. That wasn't meant as an expression of cynicism, but of optimism.

Hey, does anybody here own a Roomba? I'm dying to get one of those, but I'm scared. Literally. So, I need some opinions.

Try it this way: for any given act (that is physically possible under the circumstances obtaining), there exists a population of human beings that will perform it.

I have tried and tried to put that sentence in a neater form, but failed. It has to be ass-backwards like that, or else it sounds like I'm saying that the same population will do all the possible acts.

tony, the "rape" and "torture" bits pretty much threw me down a dark tunnel. The bit about "throwing themselves into a river" wasn't enough to bring me back to center, let alone to the side of optimism.

It could be, however, that I started so far down the cynical side that even Mary Poppins couldn't bring me back.

I have had a lot of days like that lately.

Greg

I've added my thoughts on the lady who claims they ripped off her screenplay to make both the Terminator and Matrix trilogies here. The brief reply: what else have you written, o Master?

In the tough guide, positioning the mouse over the ArtificialIntelligence topic produces a help tag that says "ArtificialIntelligence doesn't yet exist". I like that. It is so true. (By definition, if something exists, it can't be real AI.)

Is anyone going to WisCon?

SF's Kevin Bacon is probably either H. Beam Piper or James Schmitz; possibly Christopher Anvil. Good solid B-rank author, not followed by most folks but dearly loved by a core. I'm purposefully not including living folks in this list because some of them read here.

Fantasy: John Myers Myers, Mervyn Peake, or possibly Hope Mirilees or William Hope Hodgson. Fantasy's hard in this. It might be Clark Ashton Smith. Same comment on no living authors. I'd want to know that they interpreted being listed as a compliment before mentioning names.

Mystery: Fredric Brown. Possibly Craig Rice, but Brown is much more likely.

Someone else will have to take horror and romance.

Spiral:

"SF's Kevin Bacon?" Isaac Asimov. See my month-obsolete LiveJournal, which Making Light points to. I'd say more, but that LiveJournal is all that prevented Teresa & Patrick's bandwidth from being devoured by my Social Network analysis, for which obsessive rudeness I apologize again.

I'm in Philadelphia at the moment, at a brother's house, preparing for the funeral of my father, the major editor [see Open Thread 40]. SFWA will soon put the same obit (hopefully correcting a couple of my typos) on their obit page, and sff.net will post (or already has). Then I have to do rewrites for MWA, WWA, the harvard journal and the New York Times.

Skipped the last day of my 33rd college reunion. Several Nobel laureates spoke at the official Pasadena unveiling of the already-released Richard Feynman postage stamp. Barbara McClintock, on the same sheet, was a postdoc at Caltech, so we actually scored 2 points. The von Neumann and Gibbs stamps are closer to first drafts, because they had no family to suggest graphic reworkings to somewhat unclutter the Feynman diagrams, and jumping-gene diagrams, respectively. But the von Neumann looks like a real guy wrote stuff on a real blackboard. Feynman's daughter and sister did not object that I made Richard P. Feynman the amateur sleuth in the forthcoming novel "Axiomatic Magic." Now I just have to finish the last 2 chapters and submit the manuscript somewhere. Pitch: Harry Potter meets A Beautiful Mind.

I'm eager to see Charlie's guide to the Singularity, but the big bucks will still be in The Dummy's Guide to the Singularity, and to the game spun off from it on massively mutiplayer networks of Sony Playstation 3s and XBox 360s. Those are teraflop boxen, folks!

Randall:

A couple of friends bought Roomba. Overall impression was something like "eh!"

* It's a sweeper, not a vacuum. It does touch-ups, not clean-ups.

* They die young.

Asimov's way too big a name to be a Kevin Bacon. Too many folks would want his success without being able to write like him.

Roomba comes from a fantasy world where socks always land in the hamper. Oh irony of ironies, I'm not tidy enough for an automatic vacuum cleaner.

*humbly* so sorry if I'm missing an obvious reference here, but may I ask where the lovely quote comes from? it sounds vaguely familiar but I can't place it. *humble and frustrated*

I'm not tidy enough for an automatic vacuum cleaner

Filed in the same place I admit that on the rare occasion we hire some help cleaning this house I "pre-clean."

What is: USPS scientists stamps

and what might have been: Friends of Tuva fantasy stamps

It's almost enough to make one want to believe in the many worlds hypothesis.

Juli Thompson: I'm going to Wiscon. Yay!

MKK

Now that we have another Electrolite open thread, I want to note the case of double vision I had recently.

I followed the link to "The Time Is Not Yet Right to Hate Islam Karimov." I noticed that it was posted by one Jonathan Schwarz...that "A Tiny Revolution" (which is on Patrick's blogroll) seemed to be his personal blog. I wondered to myself, "Is this that Jonathan Schwarz?"

So I looked at the "about" link. Lives in Chicago, work used on "Saturday Night Live", friend wrote a Harry Potter parody...yes, it turns out to be my Katie's brother. Sometimes the Internet is an oddly small place.

I have a theory on who is building the Singularity machine.

Chris Anderson recommends the Roomba for social-engineering children into tidying.

Well, she may not be everybody's Kevin Bacon but she's mine: Isak Dinesen.

And about this: "John Ruskin was an ardent fan of Kate Greenaway." I think he considered himself more her eminence gris. (Or however that's spelled!) He wrote her dozens of letters critiquing her artwork and treated her like a child artist instead of an artist who drew children.

Jane

Best Quote on a blog today.
I stopped menstruating three years ago - and then I began femstruating.

Randall - I can highly recommend a Dyson. It's not automatic, but it is strong enough (and stays strong enough) to bring new meaning to the phrase "cat vacuuming."

Stefan, are those the initials "PA" on your junk mail? Any relation to those other scam artists we know?

But somehow the scale runs higher on the side of virtue.

It's always been hard for me to calibrate that scale. When, like Tony, I'm in the dark tunnel of cynicism, I tend to think there are a few individual acts of evil that pretty much cancel out any virtuous thing anybody has ever done, and put the whole human species into the "morally better not having existed" category.

There was some philosopher once who argued that the Nazi Holocaust removed humanity's collective right to exist. That, prior to that event, the extermination of the species would have been a worse horror than the sum of the evil done to all the individuals involved; but that afterward, this was no longer the case, and the evil would be equivalent to the sum of the individual acts of murder alone.

Speaking personally, the only way I can get out of this hole is to stop thinking about my own life's worth in terms of a universal collective Good/Evil Meter.

Hey there, fellow readers! Do any of you have a good tip or two on how to get back to the same place in a thread on returning to it? I'd as soon not do it by leaving a meaningless post and then searching on my name, and I'm not looking for something the NHs would have to do for me; just the least-work way of finding my way back. Post-it notes don't help. T'anks!

Thanks for the extensive Kevin Baclone suggestions Tom. I'll need to investigate some of those names. You're spot on with Mervyn Peake's influence on fiction but perhaps spec fic even more than fantasy. I understand about not naming living authors as I too deliberately avoided naming my favourite author and favourite author's favourite authors.

Jonathan you're too cryptic for me today. Sometimes my brain catches up after a few days.

Ruskin could be seen as a Baclone in his own right because of his, thankfully often hidden, influence on subsequent culture.

Perhaps one should begin any search for a Kevin Baclone of SF by defining parameters. I was thinking of the person who seems to be connected by a short chain of influence to everyone else.

Apropos of nothing my friends and I were playing six degrees of separation a coupla years ago when we had the bizarre revelation that all 19th & 20th century English culture is closely related in one way or another to Margaret Murray.

Beware the robothoover:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/24/killer_dyson/

Kip -- I guess one way would be to click on the permalink for the bottommost post you read in the thread -- then next time you come back you can scroll very quickly down -- the one you read will have its posting time colored different from the other ones. This is kludgy but I think useful.

Hey there, fellow readers! Do any of you have a good tip or two on how to get back to the same place in a thread on returning to it?

When you go to read new comments in a thread, go there by clicking the newest comment entry on the left-hand side list of recent comments on the main page. Then scroll back to the last comment that you read, which will have a different color permalink (the date/time field).

On that note, can I request a stronger contrast between the colors of clicked and unclicked hrefs? Old Making Light had a very nice contrast, but the Electrolite color scheme uses blue and slightly lighter blue.

There was some philosopher once who argued that the Nazi Holocaust removed humanity's collective right to exist.

Not to downplay the Holocaust at all, but it was hardly the world's first attempted genocide. Possibly not even the most successful attempted genocide.

Myself, I am cautiously optimistic about humanity. Yes, I know people do horrible things. I have been on the receiving end of some pretty awful behavior. But . . . what amazes me is that people still manage to keep a sense of right and wrong. Sometimes they get it totally backwards, but I do believe that people are usually trying to do the right thing.

The NY Times reviews the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame (weblog safe link).

Slightly on-topic (with regards to optimism about humanity's future and all that) -- anyone know of blogs or groups that discuss partnership models vs dominator models and all that?

Did you folks all know about this project by Zak Smith, about which I just found out? One illustration for each page of Gravity's Rainbow! Kicking myself for not having found out about it last year, when it was in the Whitney; now it's in Minnesota somewhere. But it's also on line so available for a long, leisurely perusal.

As far as I know, Riane Eisler invented the concept of "partnership vs. dominator" societies.

She does not appear to have a blog, but this is her web site.

Googling on "riane eisler blog" produces a bunch of results - this one looks like the most relevant.

I am not linking to the blog post which featured black text on a dark brown background, because I don't believe in encouraging that sort of thing.

Over at SLAC, they're shooting synchrotron-light X-rays at the Archimedes Palimpsest.

Seems they had a way to image tiny traces of iron in biological specimens. Four pages of the document are painted over with fake Byzantine icons; these were more difficult to penetrate than the other pages, but the X-ray method can reveal the Archimedes text.

Kind of a cool connection between modern physicists and their illustrious prececessor.

For some reason the trees want to put a stop to this.

Juli Thompson & Mary Kay: I'm going to Wiscon too. See you there!

Antukin: the opening quote is the first line of a story called "The Ladies of Grace Adieu," published in 1996 (in my anthology Starlight 1) by a then-unknown writer named Susanna Clarke. Alex Cohen, that clever lad, spotted it right away.

On a different subject, Teresa misremembers slightly. It's Isaac Asimov who's extravagantly admired by J. G. Ballard, who claims to be emulating Asimov's brilliantly-nuanced prose style. (Mind you, Ballard may be indulging in that venerable British indoor sport, the straight-faced piss-take, but if so he's been remarkably consistent about it over the years.)

Oh and, no Wiscon for us, alas. Say hi to my excellent assistant Liz Gorinsky.

Thought I had posted this late last night, but, well, I guess it was later than I thought: Elise and I will be at WisCon, and as per usual, she'll be in the Dealer's Room.

Hey there, fellow readers! Do any of you have a good tip or two on how to get back to the same place in a thread on returning to it?

Click on the permanent link for the comment (for example, May 24, 2005, 09:45 AM) and bookmark it.

In the browser/OS I'm using, I can click on the link and drag it to the desktop, and it creates a bookmark file. Double-clicking on the bookmark file, or dragging it onto a browser window, takes me back to that location in the web page. For me, this is a good approach for temporary bookmarks, because it's easy to delete them.

In the URL "http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006343.html#82230" the "#82230" refers to the anchor tag for the comment within the page. Once you are on this page, you can go to the address bar in your browser, replace any "#whatever" at the end of the URL with "#82230", hit return, and it should scroll to that comment.

Currently there's some issue with going directly to an anchor tag in my browser. It loads the page but remains at the top. If I reload the page it goes to the right location.

Kip W.: "Hey there, fellow readers! Do any of you have a good tip or two on how to get back to the same place in a thread on returning to it?"

I just bookmark the last message in any thread I'm following, and save the bookmarks in a folder called "comments."

Working on the tough guide today. The version linked to at the URL above is now workable; another couple of hours and all the nodes should be in place for version 0.1.

Comments?

NB: I'm using AD&D first edition rules for the monsters. (Channeling my inner fifteen-year-old.)

Charlie Stross:

I like the SIngularity, but I can't seem to find any toughness. It's all rapture.

Patrick:

Both Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein used to insist, straight-faced, that they had no "style" and never took a course on writing, or read a book on how to write. Each claimed to merely be using straightforward English prose as transparently as possible. They were both lying through their teeth, of course, as any number of critics have demonstrated. The style which appears stylelessness is one of the hardest to attain. Isaac told me that he wished he'd been more like his namesake, Isaac Newton. Horrifying thought, especially for folks like me who can't read Latin.

Heinlein's last novels seemed to be toying with Barth / Pynchon metafiction rather openly. Who knows where he wanted to go with that?

Arthur C. Clarke, in his collaboration on the Rama sequelae, was partly trying to emulate the depth of characterization that Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy had. Gave it up as hopeless, of course.

And does Benford really channel Faulkner?

A colleague is off to a conference in Amsterdam, where he's going to present a paper called "All XML Databases Are Equal" (meaning they're not).

Presumably this conference will have attendees from all over Europe, as well as other countries. I don't know whether Orwell is read much outside English-speaking countries. Any idea how many of them are likely to understand the reference, anyone?

Teresa Nielsen Haydent ::: (view all by) ::: May 23, 2005, 09:04 PM:

I didn't realize the changes around here would be so drastic!

Laura: What part of "if it wasn't for those meddling computer science professors I could still be writing about Pixie Dust" did you miss? :-/

(I'm channeling my inner 15-year-old, the one who used to write AD&D modules -- just like the kids who'll be writing GURPS SINGULARITY modules in another year or two, if they're not already doing so.)

I did just leave a message in the last Open Thread, before recalling there's a new one (And probably for the better, considering I was perpetuating a topic that should be dropped), but I thought this message was better left here than there:

Jonathan Vos Post - My condolences on the loss of your father. You make him sound a fine human being.

Charlie Stross asked: What part of "if it wasn't for those meddling computer science professors I could still be writing about Pixie Dust" did you miss?

Maybe my interpretation of that statement is wrong. To me it sounds like "If I could, I would ignore scientific plausibility altogether." I don't think that DWJ's original Tough Guide would include a statement like "if it wasn't for those meddling veterinarians I could still be writing about horses which can travel all day with no feeding."

Or are you referring to some kind of conversion experience, in which Pixie Dust suddenly stops being enough?

Right. I meant to say to JVP: I'm sorry for your loss. And thanks for writing that stuff about your father. It's clear he was an interesting and substantial person, and very important to you.

"GURPS SINGULARITY"

Years and years ago . . . whenever WorldCon was in New Orleans . . . Steve Jackson told me his idea for simulating the Singularity in a RPG. It involved introducing new rules more and more frequently, having the players fill out new character sheets, introducing increasingly boggling new in-game technologies, and other things to disorient the players.

Finally, the GM would collect all of the character sheets and hand out quartz crystals, and before they have a chance to wonder what the hell is going on announce: "Game over. You won."

By the way, it's probably occurred to Charlie Stross already, but lots of people following his wiki link are probably sitting there looking at a seemingly blank page and wondering if this is some kind of Zen put-on. I was for quite a while, until I finally figured out I needed to click on "timeline" or "all".

You need to go back to the two column layout. The center is so squeezed it goes way down past the stuff on the left, not to mention past the stuff on the right.

Put particles first, then the right stuff, then the left stuff as all one col, then the text in another. Please!

Patrick: there are instructions (or should be!) in the Intro paragraphs that display automatically when it loads.

(Pause to test it in another browser ...)

Yup, slap-bang in the middle of the screen, called out by a side-bar.

I guess this is the problem with using an unfamiliar medium (in this case, Real hypertext, like Wot Ted Nelson invented) rather than old-fashioned HTML.

Stefan Jones: sounds a little like a game I used to play at University, which was called Mao. It's a card game in which none of the rules are explained to the players before they begin playing, and new rules are introduced frequently throughout the game. Generally speaking, without any explanation.

An intriguing idea, although I prefer Penultima, which is a variant of chess in which the players don't know the rules of how the pieces move when they start playing; only a set of adjudicators who watch the match know the rules (typically for just one piece each) and tell the players when they've made an illegal move (at which point the player loses their turn). And potentially make side effects happen after a move has been made.

It can be very surreal.

I'm delurking with this comment, on the advice of friends. I've been reading and enjoying here for a while.

What's good and relatively recent sf that deals with a familiar combination: space explortion, describing aliens, and developing unusual human social developments? I've been looking at my bookshelf and thinking of books from the past decade, even back twenty years. Bruce Sterling's Shaper/Mechanist stories, Linda Nagata's Deception Well and Vast, Vinge's recent Deepness in the Sky. Charlie Stross, Singularity Sky. Greg Egan's finest novels, like Diaspora and Distress. Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars. CJ Cherryh's Faded Sun and Downbelow novels. Ken Macleod's Fall Revolution quartet. Iain Banks, the Culture novels. Greg Bear, Eon, or Haldeman, Forever Peace (and the older Mindbridge).

These are stories where humans explore parts of space, like new planets or objects. These are also often tales about aliens, which are as close to alien as we can get. At the same time these are stories about humans in unusual cultural configurations, based partly on the conditions making space exploration and alien contact possible, as well as on other advances in technology (not regressions, like post-apocalypse). I'm not looking for action thrillers, but mysteries which explore ideas.

I don't have a label for what I'm trying to outline here. Posthuman or transhuman stuff covers some of this ground, as does space opera, but neither would automatically count. Some military sf could work, but not necessarily.

On my list of titles and people to explore so far: Wil McCarthy. The Charlie Stross I haven't read yet. Some Melissa Scott - would Dreamships or Burning Bright be a good one for this query? (I've loved her cyberpunk, like Trouble).

Many thanks for any responses, and apologies for bursting out of the lurkosphere so abruptly -

I'll be at WisCon as well, and if you folks want to volunteer a couple of hours to help your fellow members in the computer area, contact me. I still need people to help Saturday morning, Sunday afternoon, and Monday.

If you're blogging about WisCon, link back to Technorati in your post so that people can find all the convention related posts on one page:

<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/wiscon" rel="tag">wiscon</a>

Trip reports, restaurant reviews, plugs for your panels, reports from panels, party reports, complaints, praise, etc. are all fair game for tagging.

The TiddlyWiki is a Good Thing.

Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

Charlie: Looking at your Wiki now. Is there any particular reason why most of the entries have two initial capitals in their title?

Relating back to the discussion on people-eating aliens, digestive issues, prions, and the like: perhaps those aliens just need to switch to Hufu!

Jules: multiple capitals in a single "word" is a common way to get a Wiki to recognize a word as a TopicTitle.

I'm not up for doing all the work, but it strikes me that there's a perfectly good Master's thesis in exploring the influences of Kipling on Heinlein and Robert E. Howard. CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS is an absolutely classic Heinlein juvenile in form, and the influence of KIM on CITIZEN OF THE GALAXY is very clear. Similar to Kipling's is Howard's use of doggerel, and sense of rhythmic word use.

JVP writes:

Isaac told me that he wished he'd been more like his namesake, Isaac Newton. Horrifying thought, especially for folks like me who can't read Latin.

The elder Isaac wrote his Opticks in English, not Latin, as a favor to you.

Charlie says: "Patrick: there are instructions (or should be!) in the Intro paragraphs that display automatically when it loads."

Here on the latest Firefox on WinXP at work, nothing displays automatically except for the somewhat cryptic sidebar. To the untrained eye it looks like nothing so much as an incompletely-loaded web page.

Scorpio says: "You need to go back to the two column layout. The center is so squeezed it goes way down past the stuff on the left, not to mention past the stuff on the right."

I'm afraid I'm don't quite understand what you're describing. Perhaps you could try again? Or email me a screenshot, along with which browser you're using on what kind of OS.

Elanor wonders:

". . . are those the initials "PA" on your junk mail?"

They are, but in this case PA stands for "Patent Awards." (www.patentawards.com)

They are legitimate, in that they sell what they say the sell.

What boggled me is the speed with which they got in touch, and the lack of a disclaimer that they are *not* the patent office.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden: By the way, it's probably occurred to Charlie Stross already, but lots of people following his wiki link are probably sitting there looking at a seemingly blank page...

Patrick, Charlie probably knows what you're talking about, but I just followed Charlie's homepage link http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blosxom.cgi link from his Making Light post, and it has a TOughGuide link http://www.antipope.org/charlie/toughguide.html that starts out with the ToughGuideIntro tiddler displayed, with enough navigation clues to get started. Does the wiki link you mention link elsewhere, or are you having trouble with the places I found? Or should I just butt out and let you work it out with Charlie?

But this tiddly stuff is a little differently organized. Like how do you get a permalink? I try "copy link location" in Firefox, and I get a URL that would be <a href="javascript:;">stuff</a> if I dared to put it in a real link.

Jules:... Is there any particular reason why most of the entries have two initial capitals in their title?
Christopher Davis:Jules: multiple capitals in a single "word" is a common way to get a Wiki to recognize a word as a TopicTitle

I don't know if I'm revealing my age or flaunting my geezerhood, but I was thinking someone had reinvented StuDlycAps.

Bryan Alexander:

If you haven't, read the second and third books in Robinson's Mars trilogy: Green Mars and Blue Mars.

I'm just finishing Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon The Deep and A Deepness in the Sky. Not new, but certainly not to be missed.

Dan, if you mouse over the title of one of the Tiddlers, a menu should fade in to the right, containing entries like "close, edit, permalink, references". There's point help popups to tell you what these do, but "permalink" is the thing you need. ("edit" only works if you've jumped through the hoops to save a copy of the TiddlyWiki application on your local system -- your browser "Save As..." function doesn't work properly because we're not just dealing with JavaScript here, but self-modifying JavaScript. The horror, the horror ...!)

Bryan Alexander: one less well-known book I've enjoyed along those lines recently is Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen's Wheelers. Particularly the aliens' names. I continued enjoying those for quite a while after I finished the book.

Self modifying javascript is, of course, the first step to a self-aware Internet. All it then needs is some kind of negative feedback mechanism and a browser security bug and it can take over the world.

As an aside, I wrote this in TiddlyWiki (a) as a learning exercise, (b) because TiddlyWiki is a Neat Toy, and (c) because it generates self-contained HTML/JScript pages that execute their code in the browser.

I'm about to do something that will almost certainly result in my server being repeatedly slashdotted and generate outrageous numbers of downloads, I want to delegate all the processing I can to the users. Static content is a lot lighter on the server than running Wiki software fronting a relational database, and TiddlyWiki is static (from the server's point of view).

Next week I will be in NYC and in planning my days, have come to the shocking conclusion that despite several years working in bookstores in the city, I have retained little knowledge. Is there a good SF bookstore in the city? Any borough is fine, so long as I can get there by subway.

Also, is the Planetarium as cool as it looks, or am I better off hanging out in the Egypt wing of the Met?

nerdycellist - Depending on how much time you have, I'd suggest supplementing your vist to the Met's Egyptian wing with a trip to the Brooklyn Museum's Egyptian collection. Take the 7th Ave IRT, #2 or 3 to Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn Museum. If you go, walk down to Grand Army Plaza and check out the Brooklyn Public Library's amazing facade.

I'd also balance visiting the remodeled MoMA with the cost ($20) and the crowding. The museum itself is very nice, if a bit generic, and a great deal of the collection is on display. But, when I went a couple of weeks ago, the crowding was so severe that I really couldn't enjoy the art. I nearly lost it with the tourists standing in front of Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon snapping digital self-portriats with their cameras held out in front of them. Grrr.

Unfortunately, I don't know anything about SF bookshops in the city. Forbidden Planet used to be OK, but it's been years and years since I've been there. I'm sure someone else can help you with that, though.

Have a great trip!

What Larry Brennan said. The Brooklyn Museum is lovely and quite worth the side trip.

Sadly, there are no great SF specialty bookshops in New York City.

I just noticed that the link to the Prattle in the left-hand sidebar (under Globally useful:
Friends And Relations) is to the old URL. It is now http://www.prattle.net/.

Fixed.

nerdycellist -- also if you are going to be here on a weekday (so the crowd is bearable) you ought to consider going to the American Museum of Natural History to wander through the new dinosaur exhibit -- it sounds to be quite spectacular -- I have not gone yet because I can only do it on weekends, so am waiting a bit first. I believe you have to buy separate tickets for the exhibit but don't know how much they cost.

What?I The entire opening weekend over and no Making/Incorporating/Light posting about the general reactions to Star Wars: ROTS?!

: D

Strangely enough, we haven't seen it yet. Joss Whedon is our master now.

I just got my brother the Firefly DVD set for a birthday present. He's got three kids under four; I figure he might welcome something he can watch in 40-minute bites when the kids are in bed and he actually has some free time.

He's a total non-sf-fan, a complete mundane. I put on the card: "This is something you wouldn't have gotten for yourself. You probably think you won't like it. But I think you will. And if you don't, you can always re-gift it."

Oh, dear, requests for NYC tourist advice.

The Forbidden Planet in New York is no longer a bookstore. (Yeah, I know, that's like saying that Peter Luger's has gone vegan.) I don't think there -is- a specialty SF shop in Manhattan any longer.

There is, of course, still the Strand, though it isn't a place you can just walk into and out of, at least, not if you are the sort of person who hangs out here. If you are interested in Japanese material, there's Kinokuniya in Rockefeller Center; the English-language books are in one corner of the downstairs.

As far as museums that might not otherwise come to mind, I would speak highly of the Frick Collection, which is about a ten-block walk down Fifth from the Metropolitan. And the Cloisters, though it's a long way from anywhere else you're likely to be. There's currently an exhibit on "Extreme Textiles" at the Cooper-Hewitt, which is unfortunately not about wuxia knitting but "engineered" high-tech fabrics -- the C-H is small and a bit out of the way, but you do get in free if you're a Smithsonian member.

We will stop now, precisely because we could go on.

I see that Charlie's Singularity wiki is now the 14th most linked-to site from del.icio.us. Hope the servers are up to the load.

I hear The Nomadic Museum is a marvelous thing to see in NYC, through June 6. On Pier 54, west side of midtown.

Pier 54, er sorry, not midtown. I guess it's at 13th Street. That would be yer Greenwich Village, of course.

Nerdycellist, we're short on good independent bookstores, and have lost all our specialty SF bookstores.

If you're any sort of gardener and you contemplate visiting the Brooklyn Museum (which is well worth the visit), you'll be right next to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, just in time for the first explosions going off in their spectacular rose garden.

I second Mike's opinion of the Frick: not a huge museum, but it's entirely made up of the stuff you'd particularly rejoice at having seen after visiting a much larger museum, and your feet won't hurt as much afterward.

The Egyptian wing at the Met and the Rose Planetarium are both darn swell. One way to plan your visit there is to get an advance ticket for the Rose for right around the time your feet will be giving out. Don't miss the Studiolo. And the cheap refreshments are sold from vendors' carts out front.

The Museum of Natural History is way, way cool. The dinosaurs are great, but IMO the Pleistocene megafauna are equally good. They're all on the top floor. Take the elevator up, see them first, then work your way down. Some personal favorites: the dioramas in Peoples of Asia. The African and European animal exhibits, which qualify as art in their own right. The gems and minerals, which are simply fab. And the basement cafeteria, which is alway Rugrat Central, sells Chicken McNugget-style tidbits shaped like dinosaurs.

The Museum of American Immigration on Ellis Island is fascinating, dense with story, and more substantial than you might imagine.

I hear the Tenement Museum is well worth a visit, but every time I've been down there, there's been a significant wait to get in, which I suppose speaks for itself.

Jules: multiple capitals in a single "word" is a common way to get a Wiki to recognize a word as a TopicTitle.

It's also remarkably annoying. Probably because it's one of my most common failure modes as a typist, and the DOuble CApital makes my fingers itch to correct the mistake.

Isn't Books of Wonder still around? Not an SF specialty store, but kids' books, and seriously worth the visit if one is interested in one of the liveliest aspects of SF and fantasy (as evinced by PNH being a co-editor on a teen SF/fantasy Best of the Year anthology).

I have a theory that one of the main reasons Wikipedia took off was that its wiki software abandoned the intercaps-to-make-a-link convention.

Some people seem to be interpreting Charlie's Tough Guide as far more contemptuous of the subgenre than I thought it was.

Nerdycellist (I love that name, BTW):

What to do in NYC? Here's another vote for Books of Wonder, on 18th St., just west of 5th - - but not solely for its intrinsic qualities. One of its key attractions is that it's next door to Academy Records, one of this planet's best sources for cheap CDs.

Academy is a worthwhile destination just for their classical section - - AND their stock is used and review copies (many still shrink-wrapped), so their prices are typically less than half of retail. (Armloads of stuff in the $2-$7 range, occasional like-new major label releases running up to $9-11.)

(I presume from your name that you'd be interested.)

Both stores are a short walk from the Strand, which of course is not to be missed. (It's a noticeably longer walk once you have a few shopping bags of books and CDs, though.)

Have a fun trip.

Thanks everyone for your advice! Every one of these places are exactly what I'm interested in.

I lived in NYC for about 4 years (UWS and Washington Heights) in the mid-to-late '90s, so I'm not totally at a loss for what to do when in town; quite the opposite. For once my time budget is tighter than my money budget.

The Cloisters was one of my favorite places to just *be* - beautiful, tranquil and educational. It was there that after giggling about the various implements whose only purpose was to remove the Host in case it was dropped/vomited, I really came to understand how Catholics experienced Holy Communion.

The AMNH is probably my favorite museum ever (the breathtaking armor exhibit at the Met keeps me from being completely certain). I am especially fond of the arcane animal dioramas, which may be completely incorrect and are sometimes gruesome. It's like a zoo, only dead! The highlight of the museum for this grown up girl who used to spend hours trying to find trilobites in the rockpile is definitely the dinosaur wing. I instantly reverted to a nine-year-old when I found they had an Actual Dinosaur Bone you could TOUCH!!!

I left before the Rose Planetarium was open, and I am a total dork for star shows - not those fancy-pants IMAX dealies, but the ones with the Zeiss JX-528 or whatever, where you lean back in your chair and you feel like the room is spinning when they move the starfield. I may spend the day at the Rose and console myself with a dessicated puffer fish, or trilobite from Mandible & Maxilla afterward.

A trip to the Strand is already on the agenda (and I have budgeted for shipping, so I won't need a second suitcase for books) and I will be sure to check out Academy Records. I live a couple of blocks from Amoeba Records, which has a very good new classical selection, but not a whole lot of cheap used stuff. If I can find it cheaper, there are chances I might take on composers/ensembles I'm not sure of.

I had always wanted to visit the Brooklyn Museum, but I'm afraid my ticket to a matinee of Spamalot wipes out a good portion of an entire day. I assume it will still be there next time I visit.

Oh, and my review of Star Wars:

60% brilliant - someone give Ian McDiarmid a cookie!

40% the crappiest crap that ever crapped - George, you can't write realistic relationships, and Natalie Portman, you can't act.

If anyone knows of a fanfic equivalent of "The Phantom Edit" for the first two films, please point me in that direction. Otherwise I will have to take it upon myself to rescue the themes of redemption, corruption, loyalty and betrayal from the "Hey lookit teh kewl droid army! I can CG awesome ships and aliens!!!" with my own pedestrian prose.

Oh, and SERENITY NOW!

my ticket to a matinee of Spamalot

Nice drive-by gloat (as they say on the Woodworking lists).

Heh, you caught that gloat!

This is why I don't mind travelling alone; I don't know if I would have been able to get two tickets.

But for all Firefly fans who are also Python fans (why do I think there's a significant crossover?) please note that at the end of the year, Hank Azaria will be replaced with...
...Alan Tudyk!!!

Yay, Wash!

It's towel day!

http://www.towelday.kojv.net/

I used to love the Vanderbilt Planetarium when I was a kid, 12 or 13 years old. I'd bicycle up there with my friends. It was a fairly long bike-ride for a kid, up a steep, narrow, dangerous road with cars whizzing by at 50 miles an hour millimeters from your elbow. It'd usually be hot and muggy and summer when we made the ride.

Then, into Vanderbilt Planetarium in the lovely cool and dark. Quick trip over to the museum to say howdy to the mummies, and then back home, downhill, holding off on touching our brakes until we were overcome by fear.

I really worry about Overscheduled Kids These Days. When I was a kid, on a nice summer day, our mothers told us in the morning, "Get out of the house. I don't want to see you until supper." We learned to make our own entertianment.

We learned to make our own entert[ai]nment.

Exciting interactive explanations of the social and economic advantages of Centrifugal Bumblepuppy are now available as streaming video, Cable on Demand, and for all major gaming consoles (check out the Nintendo DS touchscreen "Caress 'n' Consume" version!)

Oh, and Nerdycellist, John M. Ford:

Be warned that they've refurbished (and cleaned up) the Strand. It comes as something of a shock now that the deeper you plunge into the Strand, the cleaner and nicer it gets. It's downright disorienting.

I always used to expect to turn a corner down into the basement and find myself in the bookstore equilavent of Finney's The Third Level. No longer.

I always expect to turn a corner in the Strand and find a sort of shelvish fish-trap, full of dead and dying bookies who squeezed their way in and couldn't wriggle out.

I think I ruined the Strand for my father. An hour wandering around in Powell's and you are never the same...

Some people seem to be interpreting Charlie's Tough Guide as far more contemptuous of the subgenre than I thought it was.

I'm surprised anybody would interpret it as contemptuous. The basic idea behind the entire "tough guide to " meme (as I see it) is to expose the cliches of a genre in a humourous fashion in order to give fans of the genre a good laugh and help writers avoid relying on those cliches too much. As such they can only really be written by someone who is both a fan of and a writer in the genre.

Could somebody help me? I saw the advert for Random Magic for Sasha Soren but it doesn't seem to exist on amazon or google (except her home page but that doesn't give any information about it being published). Am I missing something or being stupid?

The previous post was supposed to contain the text "<fictional subject>" between "to" and the closing quote in my second sentence. I forgot that MT eats unrecognised HTML, rather than turning it into text, which is the approach I favour.

I was just reading the "unfamiliar with the genre" particle. Very amusing -- I've read other interviews with Ms. Stewart before, but I think perhaps the writers of those wanted to be a little more subtle than this one.

>She scoffs at the idea that the Wachowskis, two white men, would have created those black
>characters. “What would they have to do with a black oracle and black super hero? They’re not
>activists,” she laughs.

So, presumably, George Lucas must be an activist, because he cast Samuel L Jackson as a leading Jedi Knight, a role that combines elements of both of these charac