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I have so many thoughts on this article, "Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds," how changing our minds is vital to human survival, and some suggestions for how to achieve change.
* In my teaching and personal conversations, I repeatedly stress that the most important lesson anyone who wishes to become a better writer (or artist, or teacher, or scholar, or partner, or friend, or human being, or...) can learn is to work on developing one's empathy, on being able to see outside one's point of view. To follow the scientific method in everything we do.
* That means becoming less selfish, less self-centered. If, as this article argues, our form of "reason" evolved from the need to not be taken advantage of by others in our civilization, we need to evolve our minds beyond this inherent self-centeredness. Technologies like capitalizm reinforce it to such an extent that, combined with our primitive fears, bigotry, misogyny, and xenophobia - plus military, biological, computer, and other technologies - puts us on a perilous path toward self-annihilation.
* We need to admit we're wrong more often. Especially when faced with evidence that undermines our unexamined beliefs.
* More evidence that human intelligence is hella flawed.
* Evidence for where bigotry comes from.
* More reasons to worry that human civilization is doomed.
* This study also reinforces the importance of being a polymath, or at least of studying outside one's limited expertise, working across disciplines, and getting to know and understand a broad diversity of people who are also interested in expanding their POV.
* And, of course, it explains why reality has a "liberal bias" - progressive-minded people actively strive to see outside of their limited POV (at least they should if they want to call themselves good liberals or good progressives). Encounter a fact that counters what you used to believe? Well, if you seek human progress, that means you need to grow your POV to encompass this new information.
* Closed-minded people (extremist conservatives, extremist liberals - anyone unwilling to embrace a new POV or facts that counter their established beliefs) will ultimately be left in the dust... or reduce civilization to dust. Change is vital to the long-term survival of any species, especially one that is capable of utterly transforming its environment, as we do. If we cannot change, we'll perish. And - in reference to yesterday's post about how the Earth is going to try to throw us off in very short order - we better get right on that. Or we'll all be dwelling in the flooded rubble of our collapsed civilizations.
The question becomes: How do we create a fundamental shift in our social relations where listening to others is valued higher than winning arguments or disagreements? Where logic and the greater well-being of our people is valued over individual wealth or power? Where we are taught to exercise literal reason from an early age? Where we are taught from childhood to see the world from others' POVs, to embrace diverse thinking, to not fear the Other, to welcome those outside our tribal associations, to put the good of the species and our habitat above short-term acquisition?
These are huge – perhaps insurmountable – challenges. These shifts in perspective do not appear innate to the human mind. But, now that we've achieved a level of technological advancement that threatens our very survival, these changes are necessary.
Short of a YA-fiction-style apocalypse that wipes the slate clean, how do we get there from here?
The solution might not be as challenging as trying to transform the very basis of human civilization to something that feels too akin to socialism. Perhaps all we need to do is teach the scientific method. Actually teach it, from the very earliest moments when reason begins to appear in the child's mind. That's when we begin to shape our perspective on the world. Children are full of wonder, full of questions. When adults give kids unsupported information, they're passing on a mental disease.
But when we encourage them to explore the question to "Ask the next question" per Theodore Sturgeon's rule, we might be able to transform human reason into something useful, something non-destructive. We might transform humankind into a species that might be welcome into a galactic civilization, if such a thing exists. (Because you know any intelligent aliens would stay the hell away from a species as primitive-minded as ourselves, one willing to destroy itself in order to sustain its worst aspects out of fear and selfishness.)
Changing the adult mind in such a radical way is possible - I've seen it happen in my classes! - but way challenging, and requires dedication and effort on behalf of mentor and changee alike. But positively shaping children's minds in these ways from a very young age is far simpler. And ought to be the purpose of parenthood, anyhow.
The Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction's motto and mission is, "Save the world through science fiction." I've given a couple of keynote addresses recently, both of which centered around the notion that we all need to think like science-fiction writers. And that means thinking like good scientists. And that means using the scientific method in everything we do. The only way to do something better is to eliminate the flaws in our actions and our reasoning. The way to do that is to incorporate new information and new points of view into our understanding of the world and of ourselves.
We can do this. It'll take at least another generation of people who are dedicated to the hard work of changing our entire way of thinking, of raising a new generation of people who are better than we are. But we can do it.
It's imperative that we do. We owe it to our children. We owe them a world of possibilities limited only by their imaginations. We owe them a future.
- Chris
For decades, Christofascists and and other far-right extremist conspirators have been training and indoctrinating children to take over our secular institutions. (If that term is new to you - as it was when I woke up this morning - check out this wiki article about the totalitarian and imperialistic movement. tldr: The Christian parallel to al Qaeda.)
Most of us have heard of the "Quiverfull" and similar extremist movements before, people who are trying to overwhelm the nation through rapid breeding and homeschooling, but had no idea just how common such radicals are, nor how effective their training, until after meeting a growing number of escapees from that system in my classes.
This leads me to this article: "I Was Trained for the Culture Wars in Home School, Awaiting Someone Like Mike Pence as a Messiah."
The article, written by a woman who escaped the brainwashing, tells the horrifying tale of how this nation has come to the precipice over which we now stand shaky and about to fall. These cryptofascist "Christian" extremists have been methodically indoctrinating and training their rapidly growing agents - innocent children - in the tools and weapons of government to make them more effective combatants in political warfare. The most well-known example I can think of is the Phelps family, which was ruled by a dictatorial father who created an army of philosophically violent lawyers by using these strategies to train his children to use otherwise-reasonable rules against the very systems that operate on them.
Excerpts from someone who intimately knows the movement:
"They see Election 2016 as their moment. Pence, with his proven track record of legalizing discrimination and acting against women and marginalized people, is in the White House. The Right has given the tyrant Trump power and fame; he will do whatever they want in order to keep it. This way they can sneak Pence in on a piggyback while filling Congress with even more evangelical conservative Republicans
"Evangelical conservatives are convinced that their agenda will save the country from God-ordained death. Pat Robertson and many others believe that natural disasters are sent from God specifically to punish America for letting marginalized people have rights and be alive. This motivates them to do everything in their power to "save" the country from the ungodly – even, maybe especially – if it involves stripping others of the freedoms they deem to be against God's wishes. They don't care if their war for Christ hurts humans they see as living wrongfully, because they are capital "R" Right and that's what matters. Their Rightness, they believe, comes from God Himself. Their beliefs are callous and without empathy, prioritizing dogma over people. These beliefs are dangerous. Many of us who have come out as queer, trans, or even merely gone to college, have lost family because of this worldview. A single powerful person who is convinced of their own Rightness with no thought of introspection is dangerous. We now have a government full of them."
With the election of the Trump administration, Christofascists have begun their coup in earnest:
When the "Senate Confirmed Dangerous Christian Extremist Mike Pompeo as CIA Director," we see how the administration installed someone who believes the US is at war with Islam as the head of our intelligence services.
"Betsy DeVos and God's Plan for Schools" describes how she plans to use school vouchers to strip funding of public schools and support religious training.
Trump's top strategist, Stephen Bannon shares the vision of a threatened Christendom: "I believe the world, and particularly the Judeo-Christian West, is in a crisis," he said in 2014. What crisis? "...of our church, a crisis of our faith, a crisis of the West, a crisis of capitalism." Here's an article worth reading to understand Bannon: "President Trump's right-hand man Steve Bannon called for Christian holy war: Now he's on the National Security Council."
At the heart of the Christian far-right's response to this imagined crisis is its "apocalyptic conviction that extreme measures are needed. There is nothing conservative about this agenda; it is radical. Gutting public education will be just the beginning."
We need to stop them before it's too late.
We're in a fight for the survival of our democracy, but only one side seems aware that it's at war. Right-wing extremists literally call this "the culture war," and have spent generations preparing for this. The rest of us - the majority of this nation - must immediately organize to fight this existential threat. Moderates and the Left have been piss-poor organizers. We're only just starting to figure out how to work together for an extended period.
There's no time to prepare for this. We don't have generations to train, as they did. The war has already begun. Flags should already be flying upside-down. As the utopian Culture in Iain Banks' novels (which starts with Consider Phlebas) had to do when faced with religious extremism bent on war, all we can do is organize, defend our present freedoms, train for this form of battle, arm ourselves in the ways that Christofascists have spent generations building up ideological arsenals, and hold the line against aggression until the day we can realistically expect to start pushing them back.
If we are to save this democracy, and (because the US is still the world's dominant military power) the Earth itself, we need to immediately stop wasting time and resources fighting ISIS and other daesh militants. They're only a minor threat, and their only big PR victory in the US took place 16 years ago. You deal with small bands of criminals through police actions, not by mobilizing national militaries or stirring up primal fear of The Other. The only thing studying ISIS and daesh attacks has been useful for is as training to combat our real threat: home-grown Christofascism and far-right terrorism.
Make no mistake: As soon as they begin to lose, they'll resort to terrorism, just as their Islamic brothers-in-philosophy have in the Middle East. The only reason the Christofascists' attacks have been limited so far to small-scale murders like at Planned Parenthood clinics or Canadian mosques is that they're winning.The winning side doesn't need to use terrorist tactics. Their position as the dominant force, by itself, puts them into position to create all the terror they need to control the minds of the masses. And that puts them in de facto control of our nation.
In the same way that moderate Muslims are in the best position to fight Islamic extremism, moderate Christians - those who follow the words of Jesus - need to stand up to Christofascism. They're on the inside, and the only way to change an institution (short of destroying it) is to clear out its toxic influences and work within the system to rebuild something healthier.
Fight Fascism in all its forms. Restore the separation of church and state. Restore and expand personal freedoms - and that must include children's freedom from dangerous and destructive cryptofascist indoctrination and brainwashing.
We're in the midst of ideological war. The enemy doesn't need to murder the entire US government (as in The Handmaid's Tale) to create the Republic of Gilead.
They already are the US government.Stand up. Speak out. Protest. Create change. And do it now, because time is running out.
"ultimately i think kindness is the most radical thing you can do with your pain and your anger. it's like, you take everything awful that's ever been done to you, and you throw it back in the world's teeth, and you say no, fuck you, i'm not going to take this. you say this is unacceptable. you say that shit stops with me.
"humans are fucking terrible and this awful world we live in will fucking kill you but if you are kind, if you are brave and clever and try really hard, you can defy it. you can impose on this bleak and monstrous structure something beautiful. even if it's temporary. even if it doesn't heal anything inside you that's been hurt.
"i'm gonna sleep and i'm gonna wake up and i swear by everything in this deadly horrible universe i'm gonna make someone happy."
This is why I've dedicated so much of my life to doing what I can to help make the world a little better for at least some people.
Because fuck you, world. You don't get to ruin us! You don't get to decide who we are when that's not who we are! If you try to beat us down, we come back stronger and smarter, better able to avoid your next attack. We teach one another how to fight, how to survive and thrive. We work together to make the future a better place, because you can't divide us. Not as long as we love and care for one another! Not as long as we try our best to empathize with those who also try to do the same with us.
Radical kindness wins when enough choose it. Choose love. Choose life. Be kind. Spread the word. Teach others.
But never surrender. Wherever you encounter it, fight the forces of evil, so we can survive long enough to win this war. So far, humans have always lost to the worst in us in the end: Fallen cities lay in our wake, beauty burned to ashes, freedom crushed to rubble, greed consuming nations, languages lost, civilizations evaporated in the heat and erosion of time, hate devouring the minds and lives of countless generations.
Choose to succeed. Failure is not an option. Fight for a better future by using the forceful power of love, unity, education, and discovery. Together we'll win. Isolated and alone, helpless and hopeless, we'll lose.
I finally did a little astrophotography again last night, experimenting with my new Meade LPI-G color Solar System imager. This is the best shot I could manage, though I took four long-ish videos (yes, it takes live vids!) that saved in a weird format I can't figure out how to open or edit, so that'll be later.
Talk about a series of challenges, though! I wanted to use my apo refractor, because those are optimal for bright objects like the Moon, but when I pulled it out, I remembered I'd swapped its mount for a much sturdier iOptron… and the seller still hasn't sent me the new controller and cables to make that function (and the mount is now in use with my solar telescope). OK.
So I put that away and grabbed my handy-dandy 12″ Schmidt-Cassegrain. I'd forgotten that I'd taken it apart to install a big equatorial wedge (so it can better track the night sky), but discovered while trying to install it that the wedge expects a slightly different pattern of holes drilled (too old, perhaps?), so I'd loosely re-assembled it. So I had to reassemble it, then haul it out into the yard. It's a big puppy, btw.
Anyhow. So now it was set up, and I plugged in the extension cord and power supply, got it aligned properly so it could track the stars, and set it to show the Moon. Handily, the mount tracks for crap, and the Moon slowly drifted across the field of view. Which was WAY too high-magnification (another reason I wanted to use the much-smaller refractor: Without an eyepiece, the focal length of a telescope and its focal-ratio determine the magnification of an object, and a 12″ f/10 SCT acts like a REALLY powerful telephoto lens.
So now I went inside to grab my f/6.3 focal reducer, almost halving the magnification, so the Moon only sort-of overfilled the field of view. Ready to go!
Next, I slid the little astro-camera into the eyepiece holder, plugged it into my laptop, and WOW! Live, streaming images from space! Except it still drifted across the field of view pretty quickly. *sigh* Well, at least Moon shots don't need very long exposures, so you can get pretty sharp images even when the mount doesn't properly track.
Forgot to mention it was frakkin' COLD. What stopped me from continuing to take images or try to improve the mount's tracking is that my fingers were getting too stiff to work properly.
Anyhow, here's one of the shots I got. The neat software that comes with the camera has some nice processing tools that also allowed me to sharpen the image a bit:
Oh, and despite the ridiculousness of trying to take a deep-sky photo through a telescope on a problematic drive on a moonlit night, I also tried my hand at photographing the Great Orion Nebula. I think this little camera will be AWESOME once I get to use it on a properly footed telescope. Check it out!
The Moon shot, at least, is not too bad for my first time doing astrophotography in years, and the nebula shot shows great promise, especially considering I took this through a telescope that wasn't tracking correctly while freezing to death and using new software I don't really yet know how to use!
BTW, if the images don't become higher-resolution by clicking, I also posted this to my blog on Tumblr:
More to come!
I got this in email:
I see you posted one of my photos, without consent or attribution, on [link to one of my reblogs].
I am a member of the Professional Photographers of America and Image Rights International and this was stolen from my blog at [the contactor's site].
I am really surprised that you, as a writer and knowing copyright laws, would use a "lifted" photo.
Please remove.
[Name Withheld]
[Research Institution]
[Work Website]
I saw that as an invitation to write this little essay that I urge all creatives to read:____
Dear [xyz] -
I'm really surprised that you contacted me about this. I didn't post anything - that's most of what you'll see on social networks like Tumblr. Usually what people reblog is reblogged from others who, themselves, reblogged it from original sources, sometimes three or more deep with responses and comments about the original work.
Sometimes the work a person originally posts is not attributed, despite being their own, and sometimes it is, whether it belongs to the original poster or not (say, as on a fan blog, or most social networks).
One of the delights of social networking for creatives is how it drives traffic to your website and where they can buy your work and learn about what else you do. That's a massive honor for someone to love your work so much that they want to promote you to their friends! That's what's called, "word-of-mouth advertising," the most powerful kind.
The first time my work was pirated, I was upset for a few hours or days. Until I realized how much unexpected benefit I derived from someone sharing without my explicit assent. Had I remained upset and expressed that upset with the world, I would have lost fans. No one in today's creative climate can afford to come across as "anti-fan." It's not a way to keep existing fans and especially not a way to gain new ones, not to mention that it's just good business sense to not get upset and instead use the interest to your advantage.
So, no, I don't disapprove as a creative myself when my work is shared online without my explicit approval, because it's earning me new fans.
I should also say that I'm not the one who originally blogged that. I assumed it was put out into the world by its creator or with the assent of its creator. Absolutely I always try to cite sources when I post things, and include source information in an image where that's available! I assumed this image was put out into the world by its creator, or with the assent of its creator.
No one who uses the Internet is going to research everything that passes through their social networks. That would stop all human interaction and replace it with research! As interesting as that might sound to you and me, it's also unrealistic to expect of the vast majority of those who use the Internet just for fun. Oh, and I should add that I often add sources when I see a post that's missing attribution and looks like it might not belong to the poster.
If I haven't convinced you and you still would like to take down your work wherever it's appeared on the web, there are standard procedures for doing so by contacting the site that hosts them (in this case, Tumblr). I can't take it down, because I didn't post it and don't host the website, like almost everyone else who reblogged it. You'll waste an immense amount of time by trying to contact everyone in the reblog chain (currently 74,000 or so on that one thread on Tumblr alone!), and needlessly antagonize a lot of potential fans. I'm not antagonized, because I'll be using this as a teaching moment for my students and my online followers (no worries, I'll remove the specifics about you or the work, and no one will figure out it was you, because a lot of social networking posts get that many notes, or higher).
A more positive way to reach out to your fans (and those who reblogged that image are fans of your work!) is to jump in to the discussion with a "Thank you!" and a link to your site or where they can buy your work. Win-win all around!
I hope this helps. Thanks for reaching out! I hope you [and you readers - especially creatives - of this on my blog] find this exchange useful!
PS: They then wrote back with a note indicating they don't understand how most social networks function, so I added:
If you haven't used Tumblr before, the way you see who originally posted something is by looking at the Notes or finding the link to the original poster in the reblogged item. Everyone else was just sharing what they think is a cool item, or responding to it.--
Follow-up from the person who contacted me about this image she found only on my Tumblr in a Web search:
"First of all, a scholar asked to used my image for her dissertation, and of course, I said yes. I share. Then out of curiosity, I did a reverse Google search and found my image on your blog. I sent out a quick note to have it removed. Apparently, though, you didn't post it. Someone else did. Note that I don't 'go after' everyone who steals my images but I did sign up for Image Rights International after my photo - registered with the U.S. Copyright office - went viral. I've seen it on coffee cups, posters, t-shirts, mouse pads, CD albums, cell phone covers and in companies' advertising campaigns. It's also being sold on PhotoBucket, Flickr and other sites. Not by me. This is the cover of my next book and I plan to donate any proceeds from my favorite charity."
My follow-up response:
I see! Then definitely you want to go after those businesses that are profiting from the image, and there are legal tools for that. Contacting every individual reblogger who liked it but who aren't profiting from it would take you a million years and gain you nothing but negativity all around.
This year, the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction's usual Campbell Conferenceserves as the academic-programming track for MidAmeriCon II in Kansas City. Want to attend some of those? *Full academic-track program schedule here(.pdf)* Don't miss this one, because we'll have hors d'oeuvres for 200 and a cash bar:
And here's McKitterick's MACII Program Schedule:
Thursday Aug 18, 2016
12:00 noon - 1:00pm: Kaffeeklatsch
Convention Center, 2211
Kathleen Ann Goonan (Georgia Institute of Technology) | Bill Higgins | Christopher McKitterick | Brianna Spacekat Wu
7:00pm - 8:50pm: Campbell & Sturgeon Awards Ceremony
Convention Center, 2501D
Join us as the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction honors the winners of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best science fiction novel of the year and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for the best science fiction short story of the year. These awards are unique in that they are selected by incredibly well read authors and scholars in the field. This process side-steps the politics of other award methods. Tonight we will announce the winners and honor their talent with a brief reception.
Friday Aug 19, 2016
5:00pm - 6:00pm: Autographing
Convention Center, Autographing Space
William Dietz | Derwin Mak | Ian McDonald | Christopher McKitterick | Martha Wells | Sheila Williams
Saturday Aug 20, 2016
9:30am -10:45am: Campbell Conference Round-Table: "The World of Tomorrow is Today: John W. Campbell, Astounding, the Futurians, and the Legacy of the Golden Age"
Convention Center, 2201
Kij Johnson | Christopher McKitterick | Michael Page | Dr Gregory Benford (UCIrvine) | Elizabeth Anne Hull | Joe Haldeman | Robert Silverberg | Sheila Finch | James Gunn | John Kessel | Elizabeth Bear
This year's Campbell Conference round-table discussion, as part of the MidAmeriCon II academic programming, considers how the Golden Age shaped science fiction (including this convention) and contributed to the shaping of the present world at large. We will discuss how the legacy of the Golden Age (especially the legacy of the namesake of this conference) continues to provide inspiration, discussion, and criticism among the writers, scholars, and fans within the field; and how contemporary science fiction extends from (and sometimes diverges from) that legacy. We will also consider in what ways the World of Tomorrow envisioned by the Golden Age writers exists in the World of Today.
Sunday Aug 21, 2016
10:30am -11:00am: Reading: Christopher McKitterick
Convention Center, 2203
Hope to see you there!
когда я стану большим и взрослым... наверное с этого будет начинаться всякое предложение большого и взрослого меня.
"The Addicted Generation: Did we fail our kids by relying on prescription medication to treat ADHD?"
Articles like this piss me off to no end. Sure, I understand the danger of prescribing drugs to children. Heck, making kids sit quietly in a classroom all day is a ridiculous notion. If we really want to solve classroom disruptions, better than prescribing ADHD meds to bored kids, let them run around outside instead! Allow them creative outlets for their energy! Give them one-on-one tutors to ensure maximized, personalized learning!
But short of paying for that kind of public service (hello, anti-taxxers), I doubt we'll clearly identify who's really suffering from ADD or ADHD in childhood, or who's just a bored kid with too much physical and creative energy to submit to the mind-deadening boredom that comes with school as it is today.
However, kids aren't the only ones dealing with the disorder. Adults benefit from ADD and ADHD medications, too - perhaps even more so than kids.
I wasn't diagnosed with ADD until my 40s, and taking Adderall has made all the difference in my health and happiness. Ask anyone who knew me before-and-after.
Before medical treatment, I'd struggle with trying to track, say, a dozen or more trains of thought running simultaneously through my mind... but, after starting the meds, it's down to just a few threads of attention - or even just one, when I'm really involved. The difference between medicated and not-medicated is NIGHT AND DAY. (I take the bare minimum that's medically effective to avoid developing physical resistance, and to easily clear my system over, say, a frustrating weekend of not taking any meds.)
Sure, the appetite-suppressant side-effect is real: I need to watch the clock to know when it's time to eat. But when I think about eating, I realize I'm hungry. With kids, that's probably more of a challenge, so they probably need a reminder to help them remember when it's time to eat... but do you know any kid on ADHD meds who doesn't have a smartphone close at hand? There's apps for that. Better needing to remember when to eat than to go through life with the kind of serious disabilities that come with untreated ADD or ADHD.
Do the ableist a-holes who self-righteously decry "addiction" to ADHD medication say the same thing about heart meds for those in danger of heart attack? Insulin for diabetics? Hearing aids for those who need them? Eyeglasses?
If you can't do the research, writer (that is, interview those most affected by the topic), talk about something you know or STFU.
Okay, I guess I have some feelings about this. /rant[[MORE]]
EDIT: Need to add this comment by "Heather!" that showed up right after I posted:
First of all, I just need to address how ridiculous it is to conflate ADHD symptom relapse after medication cessation with dependency and addiction. ADHD is a developmental disorder with biological origins in the pre-frontal cortex. Some people's brains eventually catch up developmentally by adolescence or adulthood, some never do. Medications control symptoms by helping the brain function like normal brains function. Like other developmental disorders, there is no cure for ADHD, and medications are not going to make the brain normalize. They are an aid, like insulin is for diabetics or glasses are for people with myopia.
If you quit taking a medication that controls symptoms caused by inefficient biological processes, those symptoms will return, which is what is happening in the anecdotes mentioned in this article. This has nothing to do with dependency. Research shows that ADHD medication is not habit-forming when taken as directed. In fact, medication treatment before adolescence significantly reduces the risk of drug abuse and addiction in people with ADHD.
Can you imagine someone complaining about the dependency and addiction potential of insulin because high blood sugar resumes with cessation in diabetic patients? That's how ignorant this argument is.
Besides that, this article is overloaded with myths and unsubstantiated assumptions about ADHD diagnoses, treatment, and outcomes.
Russell Barkley, PHD, has devoted his career to studying ADHD since the 1970s, has authored many studies that are used by organizations cited in this article, and has actually read all of the research and medical literature written on ADHD since the 1700's (yes, 1970's). He has addressed the myths perpetuated by the media, including all the myths in this article, over and over again:
"If you were to average across all of these figures, it appears to be that somewhere between about 1.5 percent and about 2.5 percent of school-age children are taking medication right now for ADHD. Now, you have to look at that figure in the context of how much ADHD is there. It's the only way you can answer the question of over-medication, and that is, what's the reference point? We know that approximately 5 percent to 7 percent of school-age children have this disorder. If we use the conservative figure of 5 percent, and we know that about 2.5 percent of individuals may be taking medication, there's your answer. We don't have over-medication. Only about half of all ADHD children are ever taking medication for their disorder.
"There is controversy about ADHD, I believe, partly because we are using a medication to treat the disorder, and people find that to be of concern. But there's also concern because ADHD is a disorder that appears to violate a very deeply held assumption that laypeople have about children's behavior. All of us were brought up believing, almost unconsciously, that children's misbehavior is largely due to the way they're raised by their parents and the way they're educated by their teachers. If you wind up with a child who is out of control and disruptive and not obeying, that that has to be a problem with child rearing.
"We can thank Freudian thinking and Watson's behaviorism, and other ideas that are part of our common knowledge, for making us believe that behavior problems are learned. Well, along comes this disorder that produces tremendous disruption in children's behavior, but it has nothing to do with learning, and it isn't the result of bad parenting. And therefore it violates these very deeply held ideas about bad children and their misbehavior.
"And as long as you have this conflict between science telling you that the disorder is largely genetic and biological, and the public believing that it arises from social causes, you're going to continue to have tremendous controversy in the mind of the public.
"Now, there is no controversy among practicing scientists who have devoted their careers to this disorder. No scientific meetings mention any controversies about the disorder, about its validity as a disorder, about the usefulness of using stimulant medications like Ritalin for it. There simply is no controversy. The science speaks for itself. And the science is overwhelming that the answer to these questions is in the affirmative: it's a real disorder; it's valid; and it can be managed, in many cases, by using stimulant medication in combination with other treatments.
"Saying that we're not sure about the safety and the long-term use of the stimulant medication is nice to say. But the fact is that we know more about the stimulant medications than just about any other medication
that's given to children in medicine... All of the research we have indicates that these drugs are some of the safest that we employ in the field of psychiatry and psychology. That's not to say that we know everything about them. But we know a lot more than we know about cough medicines and Tylenol and aspirins and other things that children swill whenever they come down with a common cold. Nobody asks those questions about those over-the-counter medications, yet we know substantially less about them."
If you need to see yet another "OH NOES! ADHD MEDS IZ ROONING UR KIDZ!" article, here's what I was responding to: x
The older I get, the more it becomes clear that most of humankind's problems stem from intentional ignorance: Choosing to hold onto problematic beliefs despite evidence that shows these beliefs lead to harm, or could, or when they're simply no longer useful or relevant and get in the way of building a better future.
If you know something causes problems for others or for our shared environment, yet you continue to support that harmful thing, you're not "following your heart," being moral, or such. You've become part of the problem. Traditions and heritage are not always good. They're history. It's okay if obsolete beliefs stay in the past.
Resist intentional ignorance. Don't be the problem. If you learn something that changes your perspective or challenges your beliefs, follow Theodore Sturgeon's advice: Keep asking the next question. When you discover that you were ignorant of the facts or of others' feelings, embrace the new thing you learned. Grow, become a better person. Be part of the solution. The better world you'll live in is yours, too!
Isn't that kind of the Golden Rule? That seems like a good one to follow.
But seriously, any super-intelligent, super-powerful, godlike being that wants to keep its people in ignorance is a slavemaster or malicious asshole. If Earth's god-worshipping religions are based on such beings, well, to hell with those alien jerks!
Sure, humans as a whole can be terrible monsters, but intentionally keeping us in ignorance isn't making things better. I'd only forgive them if they were to appear this afternoon and say, "Sorry, our bad. We've been reinforcing your ignorance and self-hatred for too long. Now that you're approaching the Technological Singularity, it's time you learned the truth."
...I mean, we're about to become really dangerous - not just to ourselves, but to the rest of the galaxy. If some awful group of tech-savvy industrialists or terrorists - or some gov't seeking ultimate power - builds an intelligent nanoweapon that turns Earth to gray goo, it's not just us that's wiped out. Those self-replicating machines could consume everything on Earth, float past the now-all-nanos atmosphere, between the planets, and into interstellar space. Mars? Nano-goo. Jupiter? Supermassive ball of nano-goo. Oort Cloud? All the planets in our part of the galaxy? Nano-goo. Everything they touch will be destroyed.
So keeping us down might make sense on a galactic scale. But if that's the case, just TELL US it's in everyone's best interests to keep humans down until we're not so dangerous. TELL US that we're simply too monstrous in our mental composition to be allowed to progress. TELL US that we need to grow up, eliminate our bigotries and hatreds and other personality flaws, before we're allowed to keep moving into the future.
Because humans will do it regardless, and then what? They'll just wipe us off the face of the planet before we're too dangerous? That's terrible resource management. If there's anything worthwhile in the human species, show us the error of our ways and help us cast off our inherited memes and epigenetics. Help us learn how to be better people.
I have an even better idea: Why not just fix our problems ourselves? Why don't we as a species work on becoming better people so we don't need to worry about theoretical godlike aliens exterminating us. If there's no such thing as godlike aliens, why in the ever-loving hell do we hang onto obsolete and harmful memes from our ancient past? It's like someone with peanut allergies continuing to gobble bags of peanuts, fully aware that the next mouthful might be their last. If Earth holds the only intelligences in the galaxy, we have a responsibility not to exterminate ourselves.
Be part of the solution, not part of the problem.
I just realized that losing my religion as an early teenager led to a lot of troubled times throughout my teens and even into my early 20s.
I'd actually believed this religious stuff before then. I'd been raised as a Christian, and everyone I knew was a church-going Lutheran or Catholic (though the latter was eyed with suspicion), with a couple Evangelical Free friends. As I begin drafting this late at night, after pondering this article (about how Religious children are meaner than their secular counterparts) and this debate on the Facebooks, I can clearly recall being really emotionally moved by hearing certain sermons or reading stories about Jesus and salvation through love and sacrifice. About how, after He came along to burn down the authoritarian patriarchy, we could throw away all those old hateful bigotries and prejudices, and look forward to a utopian future based on love - if only everyone would just believe in Him!
What ruined this for me was when my confirmation teacher forced us to say that the unbaptized go to hell. (It was a fundamentalist strain of Lutheranism that no longer exists, closest to the Missouri Synod.)
"What about babies born in areas where they could never have heard of Jesus?" I asked, trying to fit this logically into what I'd studied about this religion's eponymous founder.
"It's tragic, but that's the Lord's law," she said.
This bore no relation to anything I had come to believe about Jesus, or the very foundations of what I believed Christianity to be. So it couldn't be right. But this religious teacher - and the pastor's wife embodying the Church itself! - was insistent this irrational notion was true. When I asked my Mom about this, she said to do what I was told (ah, the underlying virus of religious authoritarianism) and "just say the damn words! You don't have to believe them."
But if that were true, what was the point of the Church (in its broadest sense), the most-massive and enduring undertaking in all human history? If we simply recite the words but don't believe in them, how can we call it "faith"? More importantly in the societal sense, if we don't need to believe what we're told or what we say, what's the purpose of organized religion at all?
The existentially horrifying part of all this is that seemingly everyone in America (where 83 percent identify as Christian) was part of a conspiracy of fear ("You'll burn in Hell for eternity if you're a disbeliever!"), or else consciously trying to suppress reality - and trying to infect the minds of their children with this mind-virus. So it seemed that either everyone was aware of the lie and complicit in its perpetuation, or they were dangerously out of touch with reality, allowing fear to control their minds so they could accept blatant untruths, or some mix of scary-unhealthy world-views. Or all of these.
So on that day, like the clouds parting for the first time to let sunlight illuminate what used to lurk unseen in the shadows, it became lucidly clear that my faith in the teachings of Jesus as told in what I'd thought of as historical documents bore no relevance to what humans had hammered into doctrine.
Worse, what if this thing that had consumed so much of human creativity and ingenuity over the millennia had merely been a tool for authoritarian oppression devised by men seeking to control a populace who appear willing to swallow nonsense and spout things they don't even believe? And who continue propagating the lies and delusions, forcing their children also to blindly obey?
This was terrifying. Remember the movie THEY LIVE? It felt like that, as if I were surrounded by threatening aliens. How could the people around me not see them? Certainly pre-teen me couldn't be smarter or more insightful than the vast milling masses of adult church-goers. So were they collaborators in some vast alien conspiracy to take over the minds of children?
Which is worse?
Regardless, this is the moment I point to, when I lost my religion and my faith in anything. From here on out, unless I see verifiable evidence of something bandied as truth, or morally right, or real, I disbelieve. Just because some authority says something is so doesn't mean a thing, because clearly authorities were fallible, all the way back to the dudes responsible for founding the early Christian church - and obviously those who created early superstitious religions were wrong: Not only are we taught this by the leaders we're told to believe and obey, they're falsifiably incorrect. I mean, only the most protean animistic religions bear any relation to the real world, because we can see how lightning causes fire or how animals behave in the face of storms. Only the philosophy-based religions seem to offer anything useful to their practitioners, yet look at how even Buddhism has been twisted by the patriarchy.
Before this revelation, I had seriously considered pursuing a career (or at least an avocation) in religious work. During my years of crisis, I spent a great deal of time and energy researching religious systems, seeking to piece together a core set of universal and rational beliefs in an attempt to construct a religion relevant to our times. Something I could believe in, something that might help make sense of a world that otherwise seems intentionally insane.
Nothing came of the search except a deeper appreciation of the universe. I've never lost my spiritual connection to nature - the animals who've inhabited this world far longer than we've built cities, the planets where such beings can live, the stars that provide the energy to fuel our lives, and the rest of the universe, which provides the soil for everything else to grow.
But that wasn't enough to soothe my existential angst. I suffered pretty traumatic and turbulent teenage years, and barely made it out of then alive. Because this is also when I lost faith in human beings. I mean, if the single greatest communal effort to build and maintain something in all of human history - the Church in its diversity of manifestations - was either a lie, or a delusion, or a shield against fear, how could we hope for a better future? If people choose ignorance, accept on faith things that are verifiably untrue, and oppress those who do not believe mutually incompatible articles of faith, there's no hope for a long-term human future.
I just now also realize that my rejection of Christianity (and organized religion in general) is probably a big part of why my Mom treated me so much worse than she treated my brother. For whatever reason, and despite her powerful intelligence and terrible childhood, she was deeply religious. She's the one who forced child-me to go to church every Sunday and holiday, and to attend Sunday school and Confirmation classes. When I was an adult, she forwarded me so many hateful, bigoted, racist spam-mails that I had to filter out most of her messages (once such capabilities appeared). These were indications that she was probably one of those hateful Christians who now rule the American discourse. She probably hated me for rejecting her God, and her Church (she did every so often tell me that she hated me). Despite her strong advocacy of feminist concerns, I know she hated how I reject out of hand all forms of authoritarianism. She was always a leader in everything she did - work, church, friends - which was an outstanding trait for a woman in the 1970s. But it was still authoritarianism, and she still served the patriarchy.
So when my brother told me at mom's funeral that my childhood experience under Mom was nothing like his, it makes sense. He went to church, and Sunday school, and Confirmation. He accepted authoritarian rule. He continued to say the words that he was supposed to say; he might not have believed them, and I know that in his heart he was not obedient to authority, but he pretended to be. And that seems to be all that really matters to religious extremists.
To Mom, my brother was one of Them, or at least a willing conspirator, whereas I was loud and determined in my rejection of the entire enterprise. Burn it all down and start fresh!
As a boy standing alone in the dark beside my telescope, I remember calling out to the starry sky, begging benevolent aliens (for what other type would visit such a flawed world yet not eradicate us like vermin?) to take me away. I drew spaceships that I could imagine piloting far away. I dreamed of exploring the moons of Jupiter alone, far from the insanity of Earth, of the coming changes that would transform our society and ourselves into something worthy to endure into the future. I wrote stories about these things, and the fall of adult civilization, and imagined a world where I could bear to live.
See, this was also the time during which I discovered most of my friends and many of my closest relatives had endured horrifically abusive childhoods. What kind of species tortures their young? The same kind that holds them down and injects cognitive retro-viruses into their brains.
I spent a great deal of my teens and early 20s in deep depression, suicidal on occasion but mostly fearless of death, because how could it be worse than having to dwell in the shadow of the monsters who rule our world, whom we must obey - or at least pretend to obey? I've never been any good at pretending such things.
Under such rule, there can be no bright future. There can be no utopia.
Ever since I discovered it, science fiction has served as my primary existential comfort, and it remains so. SF needs no gods, and if it has religion, it can illuminate what's wrong with how we do it. It offers visions of futures where things can be different.
It taught me that change is good. That it is, in fact, necessary for growth, healing, learning, and everything else that is positive in our lives. If we're not changing, we're dying. (Huh, I just realized something else: This is what The Galactic Adventures of Jack & Stella is all about, and where its themes come from.)
Only by finally letting go of desperately clinging onto the plague-ship of religion was I able to restore my faith in humankind. Only be letting go was I able to imagine futures without hate or bigotry, where we can build something instead of expend all our energy dragging along the toxic casks from our past.
I sometimes joke that my religion is the Church of Science Fiction. Looked at in the right light, SF does serve that purpose better than any church I've ever encountered, in that it also offers stories about the Big Questions, about our origins and our ultimate end, what's right and wrong, transformations and transcendence. It's a space where we can identify flaws in our world today and envision possible futures where those things have either gotten worse or where we've solved them. It needs no gods but those within us and around us and illuminating the sky. It does not demand faith; it rewards knowledge and imagination and creative re-envisioning. Like science itself, it questions everything and accepts nothing that cannot be verified. Best of all, it's a community and an ongoing conversation. It's a family.
And SF is more true than any religion could hope to be.
Organized religion almost killed me. Science fiction kept me from falling into the abyss. I survived to become a science-fiction writer, a teacher of SF literature, and - like long-time friend and SF writer Frederik Pohl - a science enthusiast.
The only way our species can survive is to transcend as a whole the self-perpetuating, outdated, and damaging authoritarian structures we drag along from our past, which hold us back from reaching for the future. Science provides the tools and methods to determine what needs to be changed, and science fiction provides the safe laboratory where we can test-run alternate visions of ethics, societal structures, and an infinity of other things, including ourselves.
So, yeah, if I retain any semblance of religion in my personal life, it's definitely science fiction.
EDIT: I neglected to point out that I simply refused to say the words I didn't believe and got confirmed anyhow! When the teacher realized how stubborn I was about these convictions, she said she'd pass me if instead of answering in a way I had problems with during the test, I could just recite the Lord's Prayer.
Of course, this made it clear even to barely teen-me that her compromise was a bogus and cynical CYA move - she didn't want to be exposed as a failure and a fake! Hypocrisy doesn't inspire the numinous.
So I guess that's a pretty important part of this transformation, too.
So why buy such a thing? For one, I already have two wonderful reflectors. But they're both pretty large to lug around (90 and 150+ pounds). I also knew (academically) that, compared to a good refractor, the quality of the image in a reflector suffers because the secondary mirror (and holder) get in the way of the incoming light, and at high powers produce issues at the edge of the field (except in very expensive, multi-optic hybrid designs). On the other hand, a cheap refractor's image only suffers when it disperses the light passing through its lens into various color components, because those different wavelengths of light usually separate, like this:
It turns out that the refractor I bought is pretty kick-ass. The optical design of my 'scope is an "apochromatic ED." Unlike an low-cost but decent "achromatic" refractor, an apo converges all the frequencies of light at the same focal point (or close enough for the human eye). Less expensive "achromatic" telescopes do not use the best glass, failing to converge blue-through-violet light very well, so that range of light appears as a fuzzy halo around the object you are viewing (and usually suffering in sharpness, as well). This is less of an issue with dim objects like globular clusters, nebulae, or galaxies, but it becomes a nuisance with brighter objects like the Moon, stars, and planets. Also, the colors dispersed are lost information, subtracted from the resolution of the object, thus reducing the image quality, thus defeating the entire point of a refractor over a reflector.
To combat these issues, an apochromatic objective uses multiple glass lenses mated together to converge the various frequencies of light, thus managing the refractive dispersion through the elements. Sometimes apos use rare materials (like fluorite or other low-dispersion glass) in the lens composition. As you might imagine, these are expensive propositions - simply adding a second or third lens doubles or triples the cost, and if the glass used costs, say, 10x as much... well, you get the idea. The very best, observatory-quality refractors use a combination of both strategies, and the price for such an instrument is astronomical (ba-da-boom, tsch!).
Mine achieves apochromatic quality by using two lenses, one of which is made of extra-low dispersion (hence the "ED") FPL-53 glass (made only in Japan) to provide super-sharp images with no false color. Mine isn't the top of the line, but it's pretty close. Sure, if it used fluorite instead of FPL-53, it might be slightly better. Or if both lenses were that kind of glass, or if it were a triplet (three lenses). But telescopes like that are MUCH more expensive, costing around $3000 - I got mine, complete with a dual-drive equatorial mount, for about $600. But why? Objects in my 'scope are free of false color (chromatic aberration), sharp, and don't lose any light to dispersion, either.
I've used this 'scope for a couple of years now, mostly because it's so convenient to drag in and out of the house, but never knew all it was capable of. It required a team effort. The real eye-opener for me was how much difference a great eyepiece makes. I've always used decent eyepieces, but these new Explore Scientific eyepieces are frakking amazing! Here's my new case for my 2" eyepieces (the new ones are those with yellow-green spots on the side):
HOLY WOW! The widest field-of-view eyepiece I've ever owned is my William Optics Swan 33mm (it's the one in the photo with the orange bottom cap). It offers 72° apparent field of view (how wide an angle the view in the eyepiece looks to you, the observer), which I thought was pretty amazing. It's still my lowest-power eyepiece (magnification comes from dividing telescope focal length by eyepiece focal length - my 100mm has a focal ratio of f/9, meaning 900mm focal length), offering up a magnification of 27x in this 'scope, with a true field of 2.7° of the sky (about 5 times as wide as the full Moon). Pretty nice, I thought! Sure, the quality of the image at the edge is imperfect, and the sharpness could be better, but it was as nice as I ever used.
Enter the 30mm Explore Scientific 82° wide-field eyepiece of joy.
I started last night's observing session with the Great Orion Nebula, directly overhead in Kansas at around 11pm. The first eyepiece I dropped into the focuser was the most massive once I've ever used, a 30mm with 82° (apparent) field of view. The huge swath of sky it provided was simply astounding - especially when it caught a meteor streaking across the belt of Orion! I didn't bring any astrophotography gear (I was just in my front yard, after all), but here's a nice drawing of about how it looks to the naked eye in a telescope of about this light-gathering power:
This puppy is about the size of my fist and weighs 2.2 pounds (!). Its field of view is so ultra-wide that I had to move my head around to get the full view, making the experience feel like I was looking out through a spaceship's porthole rather than through a telescope eyepiece. Even though the magnification is greater (30x), its true field was wider than with the 33mm! It also has a very large 6.7mm exit-pupil(how wide the cone of light coming through is), which is even larger than some eyes can dilate. It's difficult to explain just how amazingly immersive such a view is until you try it.
Other cool features of this eyepiece: It's O-ring sealing and argon-purged. This makes it completely waterproof, prevents internal fogging, keeps the interior dust- and fungus-free, and makes it easier to clean (no risk of cleaning solution getting trapped inside). It'll stay clear for a lifetime - guaranteed. Its 21mm of eye relief provides unvignetted (no darkening around the edge) views a full inch beyond the lens closest to your eye - this is not only great in general, but makes it easier for eyeglass wearers to observe without removing their glasses. Of course, doing so would mean missing out on a lot of the potential field of view. Its six-element optical design uses low dispersion and high-refractive-index lenses (same benefits as in a telescope's objective) in four groups. All the lens surfaces are fully multi-coated as well, and the lens edges are blackened to improve contrast. All of this adds up to the highest contrast, highest resolution, sharpest resolution, and flattest ultra-wide field of view I've ever seen.
Then I moved to the next-smaller Explore Scientific eyepiece, a 24mm (also 82° FOV), which provided 38x and a true field of view of 2.2°, so wide that even the hugely wide Orion Nebula only took up the center of the image. AMAZING! I spent some time with this eyepiece before moving to the next-higher-magnification unit....
Enter the Explore Scientific 14mm 100° apparent-FOV eyepiece. This puppy is just about as large as the longer-focal-length unit (almost 2 pounds), though with a narrower and longer barrel to accommodate nine optical elements of rare-earth glass. Though 100 doesn't seem that much larger than 82, those extra 18° provide nearly 50&percent; wider FOV. So the 64x magnification this one provides still offered up nearly 1.6° of true field - that's three times as wide as the full Moon! This is truly astounding to someone whose prior experience is mostly having used what I thought was a nice Plossl 24mm with 52° FOV - that's less true FOV at much lower power.
So, I asked myself, what will the highest-magnification Explore Scientific unit offer? It has 9mm of focal length, providing 100x... but because of the huge field of view, this high power was still a full degree - twice as wide as the full Moon! I had no idea that a high-power eyepiece could be so comfortable to use, or provide such a "spacewalk" sensation, or offer up such crisp, high-resolution to-the-edge views. Man, now I wish I'd ordered the mega-power 5.5mm that was also on mega-sale! It would have provided 164x while still offering a FOV slightly wider than the full Moon! *boggles mind*
At the end of the night (pretty late by now - after 1am, I'm afraid), I noticed that Jupiter was just starting to peek out from the trees, so I thought why not? Sure, I would be looking a lot of humid atmosphere, over the neighbor's house, and through branches, but it's my fave planet. My apo plus 9mm SOOPER EYEPIECE did not let me down. Four Galilean moons and stormy Jupiter all served up as nice as through a cheap eyepiece looking directly overhead. Just wow.
Oh, and surprise! All these eyepieces turn out to be parfocal, meaning you don't need to do significant re-focusing when shifting from one to the next. That's a major bonus when swapping eyepieces, especially when moving to high magnifications (which also magnify your bumping the 'scope whenever you touch it), where you can lose an object and have to start over finding it at a lower power.
And the best part? We live in an age when you can get incredible eyepieces like this during online, pre-xmas sales for just a little more than the price of a so-so eyepiece (I bought all four for about the retail price of just the 14mm.
We'll start with Washington, D.C. and work south.
Ron Miller
Rings over Washington D.C.
From Washington, D.C., the rings only fill a portion of the sky, but appear striking nonetheless. Here, we see them at sunrise.
Ron Miller
Rings from Guatemala
From Guatemala, only 14 degrees above the equator, the rings begin to stretch across the horizon. Their reflected light makes the moon much brighter.
Ron Miller
Saturn's rings from Earth's equator
From Earth's equator, Saturn's rings are visible edge-on, appearing as a thin, bright line bisecting the sky.
Ron Miller
Equinox at the equator
At the March and September equinoxes, the Sun is positioned directly over the rings, casting a dramatic shadow at the equator.
Ron Miller
Tropic of Capricorn, midnight
At midnight at the Tropic of Capricorn, which sits at 23 degrees south latitude, the Earth casts a shadow over the middle of the rings, while the outer portions remain lit.
Gallery assembled by Jason Davis for the Planetary Society.
- Wed, 20:32: RT @doctorow: AIDS-drug-gouging hedge-douche reneges on promise to cut prices for Daraprim https://t.co/nBL8c0KfpW https://t.co/Ddwp2aqJDl
EBOOK GIVEAWAY CONTEST!In the new original anthology Mission Tomorrow, science fiction writers imagine the future of space exploration with NASA no longer dominant. Will private companies rule the stars or will new governments take up the call? From Brazilians to Russians to Chinese, the characters in these stories deal with everything from strange encounters, to troubled satellites and space ships, to competition for funding and getting there first. Nineteen stories of what-if spanning the gamut from Mercury to Pluto and beyond. Edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt.
Stories by:
Robin Wayne Bailey
Ben Bova
Michael Capobianco
Curtis C. Chen
Jaleta Clegg
Brenda Cooper
Michael F. Flynn
James Gunn
Sarah A. Hoyt
David D. Levine
Jack McDevitt
Angus McIntyre
Chris McKitterick (yrs truly!)
Mike Resnick
Lezli Robyn
Alex Shvartsman
Robert Silverberg
Jack Skillingstead
Jay Werkheiser
At the publisher's request, the ebook is sold without DRM. (The paperback edition comes out on November 3.) And because Baen Books is cool in a lot of other ways, too, they're letting the contributing authors give away copies of the ebook. So...
Because my story takes place near Jupiter, I'm making my contest simple.So, want to win a free copy of the Mission Tomorrow ebook? Here's how:
- Share your favorite image, video, story, or other cool thing about the planet Jupiter. Can be science-ey, science-fictional, or whatever most toots your horn. I embrace multitudes.
- Post on a social network we both use. I'm on Dreamwidth, Facebook, Goodreads, Google+, LiveJournal, Tumblr, and Twitter.
- Mention the new anthology of space-exploration stories, Mission Tomorrow.
- Tag me in your post so I get a notification (and can therefore see your post!). My day-job combined with a writing career and running the Gunn Center makes me perilously busy, so unless I'm tagged I miss tons of great stuff.
How do you know if you've won? I'll tag winners here or on whichever social-network we share! Then just drop me an email and I'll send you your free copy.
So, let's see some awesome Jupiter stuff! I wanna give away some FREE EBOOKS!
Picture by Wuxi on Flickr
Feeling like you're drifting all alone in the once-fun-but-now-too-quiet pool of LiveJournal? Not to worry! silviarambles is running a friending meme!
Friending Meme for LJ Survivors - 2015 Re-edition
Please remember that friending frenzies work only if you spread the word, so - even if you're not looking for more friends - would you mind doing me a big favor and pimping the meme on your own journals?
A few words on the results of this year's Hugo Awards, and how it was a win for science fiction.
It's science-fiction's job to point out the problems of the world. When we see the dominant paradigm as harmful, we seek change. We're subversive and transgressive.
Hierarchical, conservative, or privileged people and organizations don't like to hear what's wrong with them or the status quo. People who don't like having problems with the world pointed out don't respect science fiction. Academia can be one of the most like this, which is why for so long the study of SF – and still, in most places, the graduate study of SF – has been discouraged, blocked, or disrespected. Organizations that fear and loathe change really don't like having colleagues whose job it is to study and point out what's wrong with the status quo, and elaborate on how to fix it. Especially if the fix means they'll lose power.
On the other hand, this aspect of SF is a big part of why disempowered, disrespected, and disenfranchised people have always been attracted to SF. For them, life is always difficult. The world is not kind to the disempowered. SF offers critiques of the world-that-was and visions of the world-that-can-be.
We need to attract more people of color, women, disabled, and so forth into the SF community. We need to support and welcome those who are disadvantaged or oppressed by society at large. Their perspectives are vital to the SF conversation. Fresh new voices offer novel critiques of the world (and our community) and new visions of ourselves and the future, and if that isn't what SF is all about, nothing is.
Your motivations need not be altruistic. Excluding those best at keeping SF vital would mean missing out on a huge audience for our work. People rejected by SF will go elsewhere, seeking writers and publishers who listen to what they want.
This is why I'm so pleased to see how the Hugo Awards turned out. Though it's painful to see so many worthy people and works fall below the Puppy Hate-Slate, the voting proved that the SF community won't be bullied. It proved that we reject rejecting change. It proved that we want to be inclusive, that we still want to boldly explore the unknown, that we still critique the status quo – even our own.
But the war is not won. Those for whom the status quo provides privilege fear change, because saying things could be different suggests they're no longer entitled to continue running the world as it has always been just because that's the way things are. Change threatens the eternal, unchanging perpetuation of their power structures. If you're incapable of change yourself, change is scary. People who can't get past their fears come to hate what they fear. Change is dangerous and threatening.
But not all futures are dystopias.
SF's enemy is not just the entrenched elite and powerful, not just the Establishment. These last few years have revealed a sickness within the SF community. People like the Gamergaters and Rabid Puppies. Misogynists and racists and other types of bigots seem to be suddenly appearing all over SF's domicile. But they've always been there, festering in the back rooms. We turned on a light in a store-room and discovered cockroaches scurrying about. Many of us just weren't aware of them, oblivious and happily chatting with others like us on SF's light-filled patio. The patriarchy might not be alive and well in SF, but that roach-farm has certainly been energetic. Fear-mongers – all people who don't question their privilege and prejudices – will continue to fight change unless they can open their minds and embrace SF's core values: Question, Critique, Change.
Whenever we see it, we must immediately combat the attempts at exclusionism of such people. Keep shining lights into the dark spaces. Keep stomping out those cockroaches when they try to infest the kitchen.
This is not a war we can win through combat. We need to swiftly support the disadvantaged and make them feel welcome into the SF community. Because if we don't, we lose out on gaining valuable new members of our community. Fresh new voices with fresh visions. Losing them would mean weakening the heart of science fiction, while – to stretch the metaphor a bit – bringing in new blood only strengthens us.
Congratulations to those who managed to win a Hugo this year. Kudos to the brave, principled people who withdrew their names when it appeared the Puppies were your allies. I applaud you! And condolences to the worthy people who were disenfranchised by the Puppies' nominations slate. I can't imagine how much it must suck to know this could have been your Hugo, this year. They gamed the system in an attempt to force SF backwards in time. They threw their bodies at the windows as hard as they could, but they weren't numerous enough to block the light. I love alternate history as much as anyone else, but we're already familiar with the tired old genre-narrative they want to tell. It's been done. They lost this game, but they'll be back. Infestations are notoriously difficult to eradicate.
The results of the 2015 Hugo Awards proves that the SF community is far larger and more vital than those who operate out of hate and fear can imagine. Science fiction is the literature of the human species encountering change. We explore possibilities and push boundaries. We ask the next question, and then the one after that.
So congratulations, Science Fiction! You were the big winner at this year's Hugo Awards.
Friday 3:00pm: World Building - Creating Alien Languages.
Friday 4:00pm: ConQuesT Writers' Workshop.
Friday 7:00pm: Opening Ceremonies.
Friday night: Find me on the Party Floor!
Saturday 1:00pm: Writing For Younger Audiences.
Saturday 4:00pm: Reading - Ad Astra Road Trip (Book 1 of the Galactic Adventures of Jack & Stella).
Sunday 10:00am: True Heroines and Diversity in Speculative Fiction, hosted by Hadley Rille Books.
Saturday night: Find me on the Party Floor!
Sunday 1:00pm: AboutSF.
Sunday 2:00pm: Charity Auction.
Hope to see you there!
This one's the hero of our story:
Want to see all the best photos? Check out the Hubble Heritage Site for billions more: x
Scientists working with NASA's 230-foot-wide (70-meter) Deep Space Network antenna at Goldstone, California, have released the first radar images of asteroid 2004 BL86. (These are also the folks responsible for the New Horizons mission to Pluto, which arrives soon!)
The resolution on the radar images is 13 feet (4 meters) per pixel. It made its closest approach yesterday (January 26, 2015, 10:19 am Central time) just 745,000 miles (1.2 million kilometers) from us, about 3.1 times the distance as far away as the Moon.
Best part? The images reveal that asteroid 2004 BL86 has its own small moon.
The asteroid is approximately 1,100 feet (325 meters) across and has a small moon approximately 230 feet (70 meters) across. In the near-Earth-object (NEO) population, about 16 percent of asteroids larger than 650 feet (200 meters) or larger have one - or even two! - small moons orbiting them.
The trajectory of the asteroid is well understood. Monday's flyby was the closest approach the asteroid will make to Earth for at least the next two centuries. It is also the closest a known asteroid this size will come to Earth until asteroid 1999 AN10 flies past our planet in 2027.</p>
Asteroid 2004 BL86 was discovered on Jan. 30, 2004, by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) survey in White Sands, New Mexico.
NASA places a high priority on tracking asteroids and protecting our home planet from them, the most robust and productive survey and detection program for discovering NEOs in the world. NASA partners with government agencies, university-based astronomers, space science institutes across the country, and amateur astronomers, plus international space agencies and institutions working to track and better understand these objects. (I helped with the NEO search, too, back in the mid-1990s, as part of the Hobbs Observatory mission. That was frakkin' cool, except the part where I had to use an Apple II to run the telescope.)
Snips from a couple of amateur vids:
This tiny little world has a moon of its own! Space exploration is awesome.
Speaking of, The Galactic Adventures of Jack & Stella progress:
Have you ever seen anything more astounding or beautiful than Saturn's hexagonal storm system in its north pole?
The eye of this storm is about 50 times larger than the average hurricane eye on Earth. Winds are measured by following small clouds over a five-hour period. The winds at the inner ring are moving the fastest, at speeds of about 340 mph (550 kph) relative to the nominal rate for the planet established by NASA's Voyager spacecraft in 1980. These winds are four times the speed of the Earth's jet streams and more than four times the definition of a hurricane force wind on Earth. (Hurricane force winds blow at 74 mph, or 119 kph.)
The clouds at the very center are spinning rapidly - almost twice as fast as the planet itself, with a period just over six hours. The direction of rotation is counterclockwise, like a northern hemisphere hurricane on Earth, except there is no ocean underneath. A similar feature exists at Saturn's southern pole, and it spins in the same direction as that of a southern hemisphere hurricane on Earth. However, the hurricanes on Earth begin in the tropics and drift around. The polar hurricanes on Saturn are locked to their poles.
The bright clouds form a tightly wrapped spiral that traces a path toward the center as one follows it in a counterclockwise direction. This spiral could be a wave or actual particle motion toward the center from a disturbance further out. Or it could be the remnants of a compact cloud that got sheared apart by the higher angular velocity closer to the center. Choosing among these possibilities is the subject of ongoing research.
NASA also has a great little video of this massive, freakishly shaped hurricane here.
Source: NASA's Cassini mission.
Public appearancesOn October 25, I gave a short reading with two awesome spec-fic writers, Don Allmon and Benjamin D. Cartwright, from our novels-in-progress. At The Raven Book Store in Lawrence.
- The Future Is Now: How 2015 Stacks Up Against Predictions, where we talked predictions, inventions, and innovations that science fiction suggested would have happened by now, whether or not they have come to be, and why or why not. The other guest was a futurist living in France.
- Science Fiction and Science Fact in Interstellar, pretty much as it sounds. Other guests included KCUR's resident film guru, plus an astrophysicist from KU and an ecologist fresh from the international meeting in South America.
WritingReached 115,270 words as of this morning on Ad Astra Road Trip (book 1 of 3 in The Galactic Adventures of Jack & Stella). Since completing final grades for Fall semester last week, I've nearly finished the draft of the novel. But being so close to the end reveals many things that require going back through and consistifying, enhancing, filling out, and so forth. I've revised the persistent metaphors and imagery for Stella and Jack, rewritten dialogue, cut extraneous language, etc etc. To paraphrase James Gunn, writing is all about revision: You don't know really what you're doing until you've finished the draft - that's when the real writing begins. SO CLOSE to the end. How much is left? Let's call it less than 10k more. My goal is to wrap up the first complete draft before the start of Spring semester... that's less than two weeks from now, and I have a lot of Work-work to do in that time, as well. Eeek. Wish me luck. (PS: Considering I'd initially targeted 70k words, that means I'm almost done with Book Two? Right? Um, yeah, I don't think it works that way.)
Published a couple nonfiction pieces: "Frederik Pohl: Mr Science Fiction (A Love Story)" for Foundation, and a memorial piece about Fred for Elizabeth Anne Hull's Fredzine: The Frederik Pohl Memorial 'Zine, shared with attendees of the Frederik Pohl Memorial Celebration on August 2.
Wrote another half-dozen fragmentary bits for my memoir, Stories from a Perilous Youth. Really looking forward to diving in to that after sending J&S off for agential attentions.
Sold "Orpheus' Engines" (short story) to the original anthology, Mission Tomorrow: A New Century Of Exploration, due out from Baen next fall.
Also got my largest royalty check to date for Transcendence, which feels pretty awesome, considering that the book came out four years ago! (Four years. Gods.)
PersonalI don't know if I've said here, but my mom died on October 4. It's been really on my mind a lot, especially lately.
Once again, you're a lot more likely to see things from me over on my Tumblr (mckitterick), but I still drop in here from time to time. It's my homeland!
Anyhow. On with the AWESOME.
These are the FIRST PHOTOS FROM THE SURFACE OF A COMET.
And if you want to see the first DRAMATIC AS HELL images of the comet from space, check out yesterday's post here.
Rosetta's little Philae probe lands safely on the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko!
The top photo shows one of the lander's feet in the foreground, safely on the ground. The second and third shots show where Philae hoped to land, but bounced: I love this description:
"Soon after the lander touched down yesterday, scientists realized they had a problem. A pair of harpoons designed to tether the probe to the surface of the comet never fired. The probe weighed more than 200 pounds when it was on Earth, but on the comet, it weighs about as much as a sheet of paper. So with nothing to hold it down, it bounced. Data now shows the first bounce took more than two hours. A second bounce lasted just a few minutes. The first photo from the surface showed the lander's leg next to a rugged-looking outcropping of rock or ice. It is humanity's first view from the surface of a comet."
The last image was taken by Philae's down-looking descent ROLIS imager when it was about 40 meters above the surface. The photos reveal a surface covered by dust and debris ranging from millimeter to meter sizes. The large block in the top-right corner is 5 meters across.
We'll get full-panorama shots FROM THE SURFACE OF A COMET later today. The aim of the ROLIS (Rosetta Lander Imaging System) experiment is to study the texture and microstructure of the comet's surface. Photo source.
PS: Bonus photo... someone giffed the Rosetta and Philae landing images from xkcd:
This storm on the Sun is many times the size of Earth. It's spinning at about 12 miles per second, and rising at 90 miles per second:
And here's an animated gif of a SOLAR TORNADO, five times the size of planet Earth:
I frakkin' love science.
PS: I'm doing a reading tomorrow with two other awesome spec-fic writers at The Raven Book Store in Lawrence, KS:
It seems that only when people are kind like that I actually cry, when I feel the pain wash through me, heavy and drowning, dragging me out to sea like an undertow I wasn't aware existed just beyond this calm beach. This crush happens not when I'm alone and thinking about Mom's death, or writing about my feelings, or playing through sad or difficult or happy memories (yes, we had those, too), but when people are kind to me about it. We really lost Mom years ago, during the ungentle decline and destruction of her self that we call, in clean clinical terminology, Alzheimer's, but which in reality is the most brutally destructive event I can imagine, the utter desolation of a person while they're still alive, a meat-grinder of the mind, unemotional gears inexorably crushing all that is a person between the flat surfaces of the machinery, irrevocably tearing through memories and thoughts and the very framework of who we are between sharp steel teeth, hungry, mindless entropy, plaques and proteins and poisons dissolving our past and the people we love from the unique universe of mind that is all we know, that universe shrinking in vast swaths as the information is forever lost, not just like into a black hole, because there the energy still exists, it's contained and stored and available to anyone with sufficiently advanced technology willing to venture beyond the blue event horizon. But no, this is destruction, worse than entropy, utter anarchy and loss and murder, is worse than that, this enfeeblement, it's a disk-grinder polishing minds to a dull featureless gloss, and the machine's operator has no brain, it's a robot - not malevolent like SkyNet or even Saberhagen's Berserkers, but like the physics of half-life decay, the biology of cell putrefaction, apoptosis, erosion, matter-antimatter annihilation, brown-dwarf stars cooling for a billion years alone in the vastness of space, soil blowing in the wind, dry air gradually leaching away its essence and nutrients and moisture and transforming it into toxic shards that suck life when it lands instead of feeding plants as when it took flight.
The machinations of the conscious or subconscious mind are endlessly confusing and fascinating. I've always had faith in the basic laws of physics, that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, and yet, and yet – look at our minds, look at the mental cosmos we construct throughout our lives, the sense we make of others' worlds, and how all that in time is lost into the emptiness, forever, unrecoverable. The human mind is a wonder, capable not only of transforming vast quantities of sensory input into models of the physical world, but then even more incredibly capable of communicating with others. New universes are born with each new mind, simple at first, but they quickly expand and grow more complex and begin almost immediately to blend with others tangential to the borders of our own.
Alzheimer's, malevolent force, destroyer of worlds, eater of universes, accelerates the entropy of the mind leading to utter desolation, first extracting all other people's universes from reality, then you from your own world, then you from everyone else's. Veni, vidi, vici. Entire universes, people, stories of who we are and were, destroyed and never to be recovered again, all traces impossibly erased from reality. How can that be? How can a disease consume all that information? But it does, and everything is lost in the belly of the universe-eater, never to be shat out. The only evidence of the crime is a pile of broken connections to the outside, all the rest of us reeling in frayed ends in an effort to remember who they once touched, where they were once moored to another's world before that person was pulled beneath the waves.
Every person we know will be destroyed in time – time, this feeble attempt to construct a sensible explanation for loss. They will be gone, there is no hope for them to be recovered. The same is true for our own bubble. This is the reality of the universe, and something we cannot answer, only seek to come to terms with.
Trying to understand what it means is a hopeless effort, yet it's all that matters. Asking questions, seeking answers, striving to explore within and then beyond the confines of our bubble-universes: This is all that really matters. This is why I got into writing in the first place, and why I am driven to continue doing so. To understand the glories of matter coming to understand itself, of the universe waking up, opening a billion tiny eyes if only for a brief moment to see other eyes also looking around, and sharing what we have learned, and asking what the others have learned, and then building a greater understanding of it all, flawed and limited as it may be, often incompatible with what the others report. Because everything else is only the void.
If ever I figure out human nature, I can write my last words, but I don't fear that'll ever happen.
Thank you to everyone who has said kind and thoughtful things; I really do appreciate it, and if it brought on the tears, then it served a useful purpose, too. To everyone suffering your own tragedies and losses, my heart goes out to you, and I understand, and I hope my sharing here is more helpful than hurtful. We are all fighting our own hard battles, and though we might succeed for a time, loss will ultimately consume us all. So be kind, and understanding, and try to build the most glorious temple to life that you can in the moments your universe intersects with those constructed by others.
Q: How long in Earth-time would it take a rocket (average sort of rocket speed assumed) to reach the Moon? Same question for Mars, Jupiter, and the Sun?
The Moon is about 240,000 miles away. To get into Earth orbit, you need to zip along at 17,500 mph. To reach escape velocity from Earth, you must up that to about 23,000 mph. If you traveled at the speed of the Apollo astronauts - who roared atop Saturn V rockets to the Moon in the late 60s through early 70s at 23,000 to 24,000 miles per hour - it would take a little over 3 days (Apollo 11 did it in 3 days, 3 hours, 49 minutes).
But wait - 240/24 = 10 hours, right? What's up with these numbers? Why doesn't a trip to the Moon take just 10 hours? The answer lies in physics.
If you don't care about slowing down to land safely, no biggie. Go ahead and crater into the surface of the Moon 10 hours after launch - it'd be exciting for those of us here on Earth to watch! If you miss, though, you'll keep zooming along past the Moon. If you swing by closely enough, you'll even get a little added gravitational boost to scoot you fast enough to reach the outer Solar System.
This is because escape velocity from the Moon is only about 5,300 mph. Faster than that, you'll just fly by (unless you hit, of course). So, because you need to slow down for insertion into lunar orbit, you lose a lot of time. Then you need to orbit a bit to prep for landing, find a good spot, and so forth.
Now, if you poodle along at highway speeds (just play along - you're using a dark-matter drive so you can ignore escape velocities and such, okay?), it would take about 145 days. Get a co-driver, unless you plan to sleep, in which case add a few months. On the other hand, Apollo 10 holds the record for the the fastest any human has ever traveled: 24,791 mph.
To reach Mars is another matter. At its closest, Mars is 34 million miles away; at its farthest, 249 million miles. Its escape velocity is only 11,000 mph, so you'll want to decelerate a bunch once you get there. But at, say, an average velocity of 25,000 mph, you'll reach Mars in 9960 hours, or 13.6 months.
Flying to the Sun - 93,000,000 miles away (about 400 times farther away than the Moon) - wouldn't take you 400 times as long, because you wouldn't need to slow down at all. That's because the Sun's escape velocity is 1,380,000 mph. That's MILLION miles per hour. Heck, you'll even speed up as you approach this flaming mass of incandescent gas, eliminating even more travel time. Let's say it'll take about 3000 hours (a little over 4 months).
Same deal for travel to Jupiter, which has an escape velocity of 133,300 mph. Basically, just drop as deeply as you can into every planet's gravity well along the way to help get you going as fast as you can, because you'll have trouble attaining speeds higher than its escape velocity without bringing along lots of additional propellant for your fusion drive or whatever. It lies about 391,000,000 miles away at its closest, 577,000,000 miles at its farthest. So, traveling along at 30,000 mph, you'll reach Jupiter in 13,000 to 19,000 hours. Just call it at least two years.
I hope you enjoyed!
Go India!
Hello, Mars!
Indian Space Research Organization's press release here.
Some important callouts:
"Men: Gender equality is your issue, too."
"For the record, feminism by definition is the belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities. It is the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes."
"It's about freedom. I want men to take up this mantle so their daughters, sisters, and mothers can be free from prejudice. But also so their sons have permission to be vulnerable and human, too, and in doing so, be a more true and complete version of themselves."
"How can we affect change in the world when only half of it is invited or feel welcome to participate in the conversation?"
"Both men and women should feel free to be sensitive. Both men and women should feel free to be strong. It is time that we all perceive gender on a spectrum instead of two sets of opposing ideals."
"If we stop defining each other by what we are not, and start defining ourselves by who we are, we can all be freer."
"In my nervousness for this speech and in my moments of doubt, I told myself firmly: If not me, who? If not now, when? If you have doubts when the opportunity is presented to you, I hope those words will be helpful."
"I invite you to step forward, to be seen. And ask yourself: If not me, who? If not now, when?"
GO EMMA WATSON. Full transcript here.
My friends, Alzheimer's is a damned horrific nightmare. If I ever start looking down the barrels of that living hell, well... I wish we lived in a country where one could choose not to endure years of ever-increasing loss of self, health, and free will, knowing we cannot get better, certain that we will get worse, until one day we cannot remember our loved ones or even who we are. That, my friends, is the worst hell I can imagine. The only words Mom has formed in the past few weeks, and those were barely audible: "Have a headache."
Click the image to see the News.mic article.
Of course, one other little fella has also been proven to survive the harsh conditions of space: the heroic Tardigrade!
Want more evidence that creatures can survive in less-than-Earthly conditions? How about the recent discovery of a complex microbial ecosystem far beneath the Antarctic ice?
So: Creatures can live deep below the ice in the coldest place on Earth. They can live in the violent conditions of space. What else is thriving in the distant reaches of the Solar System? Let's find out!
Speaking of space aliens, I turned in my new story, "Orpheus' Engines," to the editor of Mission Tomorrow: A New Century Of Exploration, which comes out in the fall of 2015 from Baen Books. This story is the second in a series set in the "Jupiter Whispers" universe, but with some major updates to the characters and environment. Ultimately, this'll become a novel, after another story or two.
Click the image to see the story at Sky & Telescope online.
Planets pair up every so often, but rarely is their dance so intimate. During Venus and Jupiter's embrace shortly before dawn tomorrow (Monday, August 18), they'll be separated by only 1/3° or less - that's thinner than your pinky at full-arm extension. It's the very best planet hookup of the year, and the closest pairing these two have had this century. Here's what they'll look like in binoculars or through a telescope using a low-power eyepiece:
Their tight dance will be brief. Each morning, Jupiter rises a little higher from his eastern bed and Venus lingers a little longer near ol' Sol. The bed they share tomorrow morning is M44, the Beehive Cluster, which will reward augmented viewing:
If you're up before dawn, don't forget to look east toward sunrise and watch two of the brightest planetary bodies embrace!
Writing update: Finished my second story in the "Jupiter Whispers" series (which will one day join to form a novel). This one's called "Orpheus' Engines," at least for now, and tallies up to almost exactly 7000 words. Turned out way more econo-political than I'd expected! Chock-full of alien and human communication issues, with lots of Jupiter imagery to set the mood.
Finally, while we're on the topic of Jupiter, how about some bonus photos! First a gorgeous animated gif of the planet rotating:
Click the image to see the Astronominsk page full of more great shots like this.
Finally, check out this amazing 3D animated gif! Put on those old blue-red 3D glasses if you have 'em to enjoy the full effect:
"The financial crisis proved that rich people are no better than me, and in fact, are often inferior to average people. They crash companies, loot pensions, and destroy banks, and when they hit a snag, they scream to be rescued by government largess. By contrast, I continued to pay my oversize mortgage for years, even as my home lost more than half its value. I viewed my bad investment as yet another moral failure."
This story on Salon is important reading if you want to understand why so many Americans vote against their best interests, explaining very clearly from the point of view of someone who learned better.
"I was poor, but a GOP die-hard. I hated government - even as it was the only thing trying to save me. Here's how, one day, I finally left the politics of shame and saw the light."
Shame is a powerful shackle.
First up, the Perseid meteor shower is already underway (see the "Perseid Activity" chart, below, to get an idea of the number of meteors per hour). The Perseid meteor shower is one of the best such displays each year. Peak nights for watching the Perseids are this coming Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday after sunset (that is, the evenings of August 11, 12, and 13). More info on that here.
Next, on August 10 (when the Perseids are ramping up the action) is the next "supermoon" - the third this summer! A supermoon happens when the Moon is full at the same time it reaches perigee (closest approach to Earth). Because the Moon's orbit is not circular, Some months' perigees are closer than others - this month's is the closest of 2014, making this month's full Moon a super-duper supermoon. More info on that here.
Overall, it makes for a pair of really cool astronomical delights! io9 has a good story about the dual astro-events here.
Get outside and enjoy!
I'm now up to 4890 words on my story for Mission Tomorrow: A New Century Of Exploration, a Baen anthology due out in 2015. Max of 7000 words, so I'll have to cut a bunch of what I have right now, because a lot more words are a-comin'! This is the follow-up to my story, "Jupiter Whispers," from the anthology Visual Journeys: A Tribute to Space Art; it'll eventually accrue into a novel when I'm done with all the tales, in good ol' Gunn's Law ("sell it twice!") fashion. Might take a few more years, but I'll get there. The story is due by next Friday, but I'm hoping to complete the first draft over the weekend. Wish me luck!
I've reached nearly 100k words (99,280 to be exact) on Ad Astra Road Trip: The Galactic Adventures of Jack & Stella (this is book 1 of 3). SO CLOSE to both that magic odometer reading AND the end. How much is left? Let's call it less than 10k more. My goal is to wrap up the first-ish draft before the start of the semester... less than three weeks. Much more luck needed for that one.
Class-related progress:
Finished grading the summer SF Institute final projects, which were interesting as usual and, in a couple of cases, outstanding.
I've read, watched, and listened to a metric crap-ton (that's the technical term) of media-related SF while researching for my upcoming (new) "Science Fiction and the Popular Media" course. I've just about completed the syllabus, and have put together most of the web pages for the site: Each week has its own page hosting not only links but also displaying graphics and other embedded media. Looking forward to this, but it's been a hella lotta work.
Oh, and I finally managed to host another Game Day (see pic to the right). Plus all the usual work-stuff (about to dive back into that right now).
Click the image to see the story and bigger images.
I vividly remember the first time I saw the Lagoon Nebula in my Crown 6" Newtonian reflector (on a heavy German-equatorial mount). I was about 14 years old, and I'd dragged the telescope out on a late-summer midnight. I lived a couple of miles outside of a small western-Minnesota town, and our neighborhood only had one streetlight to pollute the night. Carrying my equipment a few hundred yards beyond led to almost entirely dark skies, so the Milky Way and its core glowed like a million tiny sparks arcing across the sky, mottled with fuzzy bright spots. Toward the galaxy's core lay several dramatic nebulae, including this one, spanning huge across the eyepiece, not far from the Trifid Nebula and a whole bunch of other objects. Even using a small instrument, all you have to do is slowly sweep your telescope or binocular across this rich field to see endless star-birthing regions and star-clusters. Gorgeous.
"VLT Survey Telescope (VST) at ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile captured this richly detailed new image of the Lagoon Nebula. This giant cloud of gas and dust is creating intensely bright young stars, and is home to young stellar clusters. This image is a tiny part of just one of 11 public surveys of the sky now in progress using ESO telescopes. Together these are providing a vast legacy of publicly available data for the global astronomical community."
Another shot:
Click the image to see source page.
More cool facts about this extremely rich section of the sky: "Sagittarius contains 15 Messier objects: Messier 8 (M8, NGC 6523, Lagoon Nebula), Messier 17 (M17, NGC 6618 Omega, Swan, Horseshoe or Lobster Nebula), Messier 18 (M18, NGC 6613), Messier 20 (M20, NGC 6514, Trifid Nebula), Messier 21 (M21, NGC 6531), Messier 22 (M22, NGC 6656, Sagittarius Cluster), Messier 23 (M23, NGC 6494), Messier 24 (M24, NGC 6603, Sagittarius Star Cloud), Messier 25 (M25, IC 4725), Messier 28 (M28, NGC 6626), Messier 54 (M54, NGC 6715), Messier 55 (M55, NGC 6809), Messier 69 (M69, NGC 6637), Messier 70 (M70, NGC 6681) and Messier 75 (M75, NGC 6864). The constellation also has 22 stars with confirmed planets."
- Spent the first two weeks of June teaching the Speculative Fiction Writing Workshop at KU's Center for the Study of SF, a residential program that consumes pretty much every waking hour.
- Did my thing at the Campbell Conference, which this year honored Frederik Pohl and discussed "Science fiction in the real world." We also presented the Campbell (best SF novel) and Sturgeon (best SF story) Memorial Awards.
- Taught the Intensive SF Institute during the second two weeks of June, also residential (except for a few locals). Final projects should be piling in today. To all of you wonderful scholars and workshoppers who spent your June with us and are home now: I miss everyone so much!
- Wrote another few thousand words on The Galactic Adventures of Jack & Stella:
It's ALMOST DONE - and Book 2 has reached 4000 words.
- My essay on "Frederik Pohl: Mr Science Fiction (A Love Story)" just came out in the current issue of Foundation - The International Review of Science Fiction.
- I'm hard at work on a new Jupiter story (the follow-up to "Jupiter Whispers") for an upcoming anthology edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt. Including this one, I plan to finish (or revise) at least three stories this month and send them out for consideration.
- I'll be quoted in the next issue of Popular Mechanics magazine (!) about the top SF novels.
- Oh, and I gave a bunch of talks and interviews for NPR's Up to Date show, the Lawrence Free State Festival, KU Endowment, the Lawrence Journal-World, SciFi4Me (part of their livestream of the Campbell Conference), and one (plus the usual stuff) at the Campbell Conference.
So I've been way out of touch with the world. Took most of last week as a sort of stay-cation. MUCH NEEDED.
How's your summer going?
This weekend is ConQuesT, Kansas City's science-fiction convention, and I'll be there! Here's my schedule:
Friday 1500 Best new SF&F authors of the 21st century
Friday 1700 Novels from last year you should read
Saturday 1100 Teaching SF
Saturday 1300 Writing for younger audiences.
Saturday 1500 Where has all the Hard SF gone?
Saturday 1600 Hadley Rille Books: Small Press, Big Plans
Saturday 1700 Reading
Sunday 1400 Charity Auction
Here's with more details and other panelists:
Best new SF&F authors of the 21st century
Friday 3:00pm
Bradley Denton
Chris McKitterick
Who are the best authors to have joined the genre since 2000?
Novels from last year you should read
Friday 5:00pm
Chris McKitterick (M)
Julia S. Mandala
Robin Wayne Bailey
Panelists will share the favorite novels from the past year.
Teaching SF
Saturday 11:00am
Chris McKitterick
Deb Geisler
Gera L. Dean
Kij Johnson
Discussion on science fiction in the classroom from middle school through college.
Writing for younger audiences
Saturday 1:00pm
Bryan Thomas Schmidt (M)
Chris McKitterick
Deanna Sjolander
K.D. McEntire
Writing for adults and writing for YA, MG and Children differ. Authors and Editors discuss the differences, the approaches, and fine examples.
Where has all the Hard SF gone?
Saturday 3:00pm
Carol Doms (M)
Chris McKitterick
Rich Horton
Rob Chilson
The shelves are full of fantasy, zombies, vampires, etc. Is anyone writing Hard SF anymore?
Hadley Rille Books: Small Press, Big Plans
Saturday 4:00pm
Karin Gastreich (M)
Chris Gerrib
Christopher McKitterick
M.C. Chambers
Founded in 2005 by Eric T. Reynolds, Hadley Rille Books is Kansas City's own small press specializing in science fiction, fantasy, and historical fiction. Meet our authors and learn about the trials and triumphs of small press publishing. Snacks will be provided, and attendees can participate in a book giveaway. For more information about Hadley Rille Books, including a complete listing of our titles, visit hrbpress.com.
Fiction Reading
Saturday 5:00pm
Excerpt from the (almost complete!) Galactic Adventures of Jack & Stella.
Charity Auction
I'll be at the Charity Auction from 2pm - onward. Proceeds benefit AboutSF, the Gunn Center's educational-outreach program, AboutSF.
Hope to see some of you there!
News item here.
Award details and former winners here.
Finalist list for this year and many prior years here.
Photos of the trophies here.
Also available in .doc
or .pdf version
This year's finalists for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for best short science fiction have been selected, announced Christopher McKitterick, Director of the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction. The awards will be presented during the Campbell Conference on Friday, June 13, as part of the Campbell Conference held annually at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.
The Gunn Center is pleased to announce the finalists for the 2014 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for the best short SF of the year:
"Bloom," Gregory Norman Bossert. Asimov's, Dec 2013.
"The Weight of the Sunrise," Vylar Kaftan. Asimov's, Feb 2013.
"They Shall Salt the Earth with Seeds of Glass," Alaya Dawn Johnson. Asimov's, Jan 2013.
"Over There," Will McIntosh. Asimov's, Jan 2013.
"The Wildfires of Antarctica," Alan DeNiro. Tyrannia and Other Renditions, Small Beer Press (originally appeared in Oct/Nov Asimov's).
"The Irish Astronaut," Val Nolan. Electric Velocipede, May 2013.
"In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind," Sarah Pinsker. Strange Horizons, July 2013.
"Mystic Falls," Robert Reed. Clarkesworld, Nov 2013.
"Selected Program Notes from the Retrospective Exhibition of Theresa Rosenberg Latimer," Kenneth Schneyer. Clockwork Phoenix 4, Mythic Delirium Books.
"The Urashima Effect," E. Lily Yu. Clarkesworld, June 2013.
The Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award recognizes the best science fiction short story each year. It was established in 1987 by James Gunn, Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at KU; and the heirs of Theodore Sturgeon, including his partner Jayne Engelhart Tannehill and Sturgeon's children; as an appropriate memorial to one of the great short-story writers in a field distinguished by its short fiction. The current jury consists of Elizabeth Bear, Andy Duncan, James Gunn, Kij Johnson, and Noël Sturgeon, Trustee of the Theodore Sturgeon Literary Estate.
Sturgeon, born in 1918, was closely identified with the Golden Age of science fiction, 1939-1950, and is often mentioned as one of the four writers who helped establish that age. The others were Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and A. E. van Vogt; all four had their first SF stories published in 1939. In addition to fiction (his best-known novel is the classic, More Than Human), Sturgeon also wrote book reviews, poetry, screenplays, radio plays, and television plays, including two classic teleplays for the original Star Trek. He was a popular lecturer and teacher, and was a regular visiting writer at the Intensive Institute on the Teaching of Science Fiction. Sturgeon died in 1985. His books, manuscripts, and papers are deposited at the University of Kansas.
The Award will be presented Friday, June 13, at the Campbell Conference, held at the University of Kansas Student Union in Lawrence, Kansas, June 13-15. The Campbell Conference has been held each year since 1978 at the University of Kansas. It includes a Friday-evening banquet where the annual Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award are given; a Saturday-morning roundtable discussion with scholars, scientists, and writers of science fiction; an afternoon discussion about interdisciplinary science-fiction studies, and other events. This year's topic is "Science Fiction in the Real World," with a special focus on the work and life of Frederik Pohl, a long-time friend of the Center.
Bad books on writing tell you to "WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW," a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery.
- Joe Haldeman)
Bravo, Mr. Haldeman. I've actually heard writing professors telling their students this, sometimes going so far as to suggest "What's wrong with science fiction is that it's not writing about what you know." How boring would literature be if all we did was literally only write about our personal experiences and expertise? We literally could not have a fiction of the imagination or the future or the Other if we constrained ourselves to only what we know. This is why not every single person writes a memoir: The only way to make an average life interesting is through brilliant insights and mastering the tools of humor or conveying emotion or so forth. When that happens, great! But there's a lot more to literature than memoir.
Good science fiction not only poses questions, explores ideas, speculation and extrapolates about possible futures, and offers other mind-expanding goodness, but the best SF also provides deep insight into what it means to be human living in an age of ever-accelerating change.
Science fiction writers have a special obligation to research broadly so that when they write about such technological game-changers as the Singularity or transhumanism or astrophysics, or alternate histories where small but important changes affect our present, or political shifts that change everything about human society, or so forth, the reader can willingly suspend their disbelief.
So in that respect, sure, SF writers inject what we know about the universe around us and people and tech and change and so forth, but if all we do is "write what we know," we wouldn't write much anything at all that has the impact of good SF.
So if you're a new writer, ignore the hell out of that ancient adage... while doing your damnedest to learn everything you can about the alien things you want to speculate about. I suggest these alternatives:
"Use what you know," or "Know what you write [that is, learn it]."
Speaking of writing, here's where I'm at with The Galactic Adventures of Jack & Stella:
While doing a physics experiment at the University of Kansas, Stella found someone to crush on. Of course, the wonderfulness of her day is about to be crushed....
Speaking of which:
- Coming out soon is "Frederik Pohl: Mr Science Fiction (A Love Story)." Scheduled to appear in the Spring/Summer edition of Foundation: The International Review Of Science Fiction.
- My Speculative Fiction Writing Workshop is getting close to full with a nice variety of writers. Really looking forward to this, as always! June 1 - 15.
- As soon as I reach 1st Draft Complete on Jack & Stella, I'll dive back into short fiction. I have about three stories ready for quick revisions (HA!), ten more that need a bit more work but are worth it, and who-knows-how-many (six? ten?) in progress that I really want to get back to. Short stories are great in that they take a LOT less time per word than novels, and they'll help keep my name out there in the zeitgeist while the novels are making their way to shelves, but novels are ALL-CONSUMING. Every idea I come up with ends up in whatever book I'm currently working on. As it should be, I guess, but that means BLACK HOLE of IDEAS, and no new stories.
- Wait, that's not true: I'm planning to develop several things that are back-story for Jack & Stella into stories of their own. Speaking of novels...
- Just about ready to submit Empire Ship. It's done (and has been for a while), but I wasn't happy with some things - worked it out! I figured I'd just hold off until I had a draft of Jack & Stella, and fixed Empire Ship to my satisfaction, then submit them both together... speaking of which:
- And I've reached another milestone on The Galactic Adventures of Jack & Stella: Just crested 80,000 words! That's up nearly 6000 in the past ten days, and all that word-count is brand-new in the past year... in fact, pretty much all of it is new in 2014, as I started over at the beginning at about 30,000 words when I realized it just wasn't working. Ah, the joys of novel-writing.
And now, because this is both inspiring and INSANE, I share OMG DANGEROUS JETBIKE MANIAC:
(Yes, I want to do this. Only I'll wear a helmet, thank you, and do a MUCH better job of engineering a proper bike platform. Are you hearing this, MadMatMax? Nevertheless, I'M IN LOVE. And now a subscriber of his.)
More like this:
Aw, yeah.
Today, I wrote another 1000 words on my new YA-SF novel, The Galactic Adventures of Jack & Stella, bringing the total word-count up to 74,000. More importantly, I've outlined the rest of the book. Did I make that clear? Here, let me say it through cupped hands:
This means I can now confidently say I'm only 20 scenes from the end, and some of those scenes are already fully fleshed-out. Let's call it one month from putting a wrap around the first draft. Oh, and I also did a bunch more outlining of Book 2 (I foresee this being a trilogy).
EXCITED. It might end up a little longer than 90k, but I'm cool with that. (Just trying to avoid writing another work as long as Transcendence). Can I get a "woohoo"?
My absence is largely due to ten million little tasks all piling down like a deluge of weasels, weasels driven like furry rain across the Great Plains, lashed on and on by all this stuff. Let's start with the fun and move into the rest:
- I've made many thousands of words progress on The Galactic Adventures of Jack & Stella. Current word-count:
- EDIT to add: Also been making lots of progress on my memoir, Stories from a Perilous Youth. It's all in bits and pieces, but totals somewhere around 30,000 words!
- I've been doing this "300 Swings a Day Challenge," an idea promoted by the Breaking Muscle folks (who are awesome) and presented to me by clevermanka. Except for one day when I literally didn't have a minute to spare (but spared enough to do something like 100 anyhow, because FUCK ALL THAT I'M PRACTICING TO BE A BADASS), I've made my 300 swings EVERY DAY THIS MONTH. I started with my 55-pound kettlebell, but couldn't do more than about 40 with that, so switched to the 35-pounder. But for the past couple of weeks, I've been doing them ALL with the bigger weight, and in much shorter time (completed 250 swings last night between 7:30pm and 8:00pm, aw yeah), and with ever-improving form, AND starting to see some real changes in the musculature of my legs and ass and, honestly, all over. (I promise to post before-and-after shots at the start of April. Let's hope there's something to see!) I've tried to keep up with my other movements (pull-ups, push-ups, etc.), but the last two weeks have been... well, what got me started with this post.
- My novel, Transcendence, was February's book selection for the PBR Book Club, which meets at the 8th St. Taproom (yes, friends, book fiends gathering at A BAR). Booze, books, and intelligent conversation - great tastes that taste great together. They had really insightful observations and questions. So much fun!
- Saw the AMAZING Latenight Callers in concert at The Replay. If you haven't yet heard this band, DO IT NOW. I think of them as "Electro-Noir," and they're unlike anything you've heard for a long time, or maybe ever. They're seriously one of my favorite bands, and they operate out of the Kansas City metro area, and they formed in the cultural center that is Lawrence, KS. And I Knew Them When.
- Went to Planet ComiCon in Kansas City's Bartle Hall Convention Center. Got to hang with LeVar Burton, Jonathan Frakes, Darryl "DMC" McDaniels (who's now working on a hip-hop comic!), Gates McFadden, Brent Spiner, Jewel Staite (Kaylee), Wil Wheaton, the Xenomorph from Alien (and his Predator buds), plus about a zillion local fans - many of them in costume. Wow. This was my first media-con since the 1990s (hello, weaselmom!). I had no idea a local comicon could be so HUGE. The lines to get in wrapped around TWO city blocks. Once I adjusted to the crowds and lines, I realized that everyone was there among their tribe - polite, friendly, and HAPPY. A lot more fun than I'd expected. I'll do one of these again.
- Finally, FINALLY, got the CSSF Lending Library fully alphabetized, including organizing our magazine holdings by publication and year. Just an off-hand guess, but I'd say we hold about 30,000 volumes. That was a monumental task, I TELL YOU WHAT, but my office (aka The Center's Space) is now the coolest room on campus. Before-and-after photos coming soon.
- Designing my first Freshman-Sophomore SF course, which I'll offer this coming fall: Science Fiction and the Popular Media, where we'll study science fiction across a range of media forms including film, television, literature, fanfic, comics, gaming, and more. Hook 'em young, as they say. I made a request for suggestions on Facebook (which, sadly, is where I've been posting lately, also on my Tumblr blog, because if I'm only dropping something quick, that's where I go. Sorry for contributing to LJ's Long Decline.) This class should be a BLAST!
- Hosted the English graduate-student recruitment party at our place, and met with one of the (hopefully) incoming creative writers.
- Reading (and doing all the other logistics and setup) for this summer's Speculative Fiction Writing Workshop (June 1 - 15). We'll again have BOTH science-fiction Grand Master James Gunn and the inimitable Andy Duncan as this year's guest authors! Yours truly leads the Workshop. Are you thinking about applying, or know someone who would love to participate in an intensive but only two-week-long workshop? Now's the time!
- Doing the thousand-and-one things necessary to host an international scholar here at KU. This year, the Center is host for a professor from Turkey! She'll be here until the end of May. (The last two were from China. We get around.)
- Did a ton of thesis-project reading and critiquing and meetings, especially with one of my grad students who's working on an SF novel.
- Teaching: Nothing unusual this semester, but teaching three full, writing-intensive courses always starts to crush me as we approach the middle of the semester. I was hoping to get caught up this week (Spring "Break"), but I have so many other things to do, including...
- Journal-article writing: I'm finishing a research-intensive article about one of my greatest science-fiction heroes, a man with whom I had the great privilege and honor to spend anywhere from a few days to a week each summer: Frederik Pohl. Wonderful to go back and read so much by him again, but not so great to have to do this on top of things like...
- Gary K. Wolfe's "Bold Aspirations" visit and talk for KU. SO MUCH planning. SO MUCH spreading the word, and setting up contacts, and writing press releases, and organizing gatherings, and ferrying him here from the airport, and so forth. Which was all great, mind you, but in the end a massive disappointment due to things I cannot discuss publicly. Friends, my fondness for academia is on the wane.
- Building and organizing a group of Center for the Study of Science Fiction Faculty Affiliates. This has been really cool, setting up interdisciplinary relationships with faculty from all across the University of Kansas, but also a huge investment of time and energy. Expect Big Things out of this! More to come.
- Similarly, I've been working with another brilliant group of interdisciplinary faculty and KU administrators in a think-tank named "Tech 2070," whose goal is to prepare the University for the kinds of changes we'll see over the next 50 years. FANTASTIC stuff, these bi-weekly meetings, but they also require hours of homework (seriously, but it's all stuff I'd read anyway given the time), including preparing to give presentations now that we've started to gel in our purpose.
And because it's not a post unless I share a photo of our Outdoor Pets, I hereby present "Squirrels Combating the Blizzard By Eating Tons of Birdseed" from the storm that whacked us recently (just days before the temps climbed back up to their present 60s and 70s!):
Click the chilly squirrels to see my Facebook photo albums.
Speaking of cute animals, want to see tons more photos of space-stuff and baaaby animals (among other things)? Then check out my Tumblr blog:
Click the fierce baby elephant to see my Tumblr blog.
...aaand now I've just spent an hour writing this post. So that's what's kept me away for so long. What have you been up to?
Organizer Nathan Hutchcraft sez anyone who's read the book is welcome to attend (you don't need to be a member), so I hope to see some of y'all there, too!
Click the image to see the NASA page.
This is not a false-color image: The gas and dust in each layer of the atmosphere act as prisms, filtering out certain wavelengths of light. You can't really get a view like this from Earth (well, for a lot of reasons, but that's one.) Here's another shot of a moonrise from space, taken by astronaut Ron Garan in 2011:
Click the image to see Ron Garan's Twitpics page.
Happy moonrise Friday!