"The Eskimos may have 27 words for snow, but the Americans have 56 words for money."
(and it's true*). I've wanted to post that for a while, but I hadn't seen a good place.
*according to Roget's Thesaurus.
If you assume that around one in four of the natural candidates for nominees is a woman (which I estimated by looking at the Locus Recommended Reading List), I think that one in twenty female nominees is easily within the range of statistical fluctuation. I suspect nobody is going to believe this explanation, though. But statistically, you can't conclude anything from one year because of the small sample size ... somebody should calculate the multi-year statistics to see whether the percentage of females nominated for the Hugo is consistently substantially less than that on the Locus Recommended Reading List, or whether this year was an anomaly.
Of course, this leaves open the question of whether the Locus Recommended Reading List is biased. But let's not go there unless we get the statistics.
Way back when in New Jersey, it used to be really risky to drive through certain towns at the end of the month. This is because the local police had quotas for the number of tickets they had to issue each month, and the officers who were behind on their quota would set speed traps on the 29th and 30th ...
Since then, NJ has outlawed traffic ticket quotas as a really bad idea. You don't think the Boston police department would be stupid enough ...?
It's off-topic, but there was another fascinating "debunking" of one of Diamond's just-so stories in a recent American Scientist. According to the author: the real reason that the Easter Island was denuded of all its trees was not deforestation by the Polynesian settlers, but rats. The rats came over with the Polynesians, and found the nuts of the native species of palm trees very tasty. So no new trees grew to replace those that died or were cut down. He also says that there's no archaeological evidence for the huge population boom that was theorized in order to postulate enough people to cut down all the trees; the population was apparently fairly steady until the Europeans came (at which time there may have been a few stands of palm trees left).
pnh says "Props to any writer who can make a story fly. None of us use our own dirt."
Kipling said it too:
When 'Omer smote 'is bloomin' lyre,
He'd 'eard men sing by land an' sea;
An' what he thought 'e might require,
'E went an' took -- the same as me!
Is this really about literature? Or could this possibly be an anti-evolution law disguised as an anti-pornography law? Maybe I'm being overly suspicious, but if you get a few fundamentalist students to take courses on biology and demand alternative materials any time the professor mentions evolution, I suspect this will really be disruptive. And even in Arizona, being anti-pornography is probably a much more popular stance than being anti-evolution. I wonder what group originally wrote this bill.
Getting back to science fiction, the international date line (or rather, the lack of it, since both of these works were written before it existed) has figured prominently in two SF-related works that I know of. The more obscure one is Lewis Carroll's A tangled tale, and the dateline seems to have had Carroll completely baffled. It's online here; see knot 10, the middle part: "change of day," starting with
“It changes from Wednesday to Thursday at midnight, doesn’t it?” Hugh had begun.
“Sometimes,” said Balbus cautiously.
“Always,” said Lambert decisively.
“Sometimes,” Balbus gently insisted. “Six midnights out of seven, it changes to some other name.”
The less obscure one, of course, is "Around the World in Eighty Days," by Verne, which was written earlier.
Any self-respecting Dragaeran would not think of reading Brust's books in any other order than that of the cycle (that's Taltos, Phoenix, Dragon, Lyorn, ..., Athyra, Phoenix again, and finishing with Demon, or whatever Brust calls his 19th book). This order is not recommended for us mere Easterners, however.
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