Posts Tagged ‘doctorow’

John sez, “Last fall, you guys ran a story about ‘Backyard Blockbusters,’ my feature documentary on fan films (such as ‘Troops’, ‘Hardware Wars’, ‘Star Trek: Phase II”, or the ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark” adaptation) and fan filmmakers.        

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Trailer for Backyard Blockbusters: doc about fan-films

Charles Darwin, Linus Pauling, and Albert Einstein made great contributions to science. They also made large blunders. In this original essay Mario Livio, astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, and author of the new book Brilliant Blunders: From Darwin to Einstein – Colossal Mistakes by Great Scientists That Changed Our Understanding of Life and the Universe , describes three blunders, and why these great minds made them.        

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Blunders of Genius: interesting errors by Darwin, Pauling, and Einstein

Zeynep Tufekci, a Turkish-American Princeton/UNC sociologist who studies social movements and the Internet is presently in Istanbul’s Gezi Park at the protests. She follows up on her earlier piece on the “social media style of protest” with a long and thoughtful look at what the protesters on the ground in Gezi Park are doing and why they’re doing it: After talking to the park protesters for days here is a very quick compilation of the main complaints and reasons people say brought them to the park: 1- Protesters say that they are worried about Erdogan’s growing authoritarian style of governance.        

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Why are the protesters in Gezi Park?

When the 17th Walking Dead collection came out last December, I called it “grim,” and mentioned that Kirkman and co had introduced some new bad guys that made the Governor seem like a Smurf. Well, now Book 18: What Comes After is out, and the new badguy, a psycho named Negan, is back, and holy.        

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Walking Dead 18: a magnificent villain who makes Hannibal Lecter look like Mr Rogers

I’ve just signed up for the Clarion Write-a-Thon, an annual fundraiser that brings in money to run the non-profit Clarion Writers Workshop, a kind of bootcamp for science fiction writers held every year at UCSD’s La Jolla Campus. I’m a Clarion grad, volunteer board-member, and I’m back teaching the program this year, so I guess you could say I believe in it pretty strongly.        

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Clarion Write-a-Thon: sponsoring writers to raise money for the Clarion science fiction and fantasy workshop

Paul sez, MLE is a wonderful ‘spy film with heart’ an simultaneously an undercover tribute to the videogame Portal, based on a true story. It’s about the unfortunately-named actor Julie Robert, stranded in a foreign country when her only gig evaporates, and who ends up spying as way to survive.        

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Kickstarting a spy film with heart about gamers, based on a true story

Ranjana sez, “I’m a Bournemouth University postgraduate student and I’m producing a short but ambitious steampunk drama for my Masters project and I’m looking for a few props for our film: steampunk radio; wrist communicator device; steampunk guns; other general props.        

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UK film student seeks steampunk props

Alan sez, “Two items here on the same theme: Ruben Bolling, comic author of Tom The Dancing Bug, contributor to JoCo Funnies, etc. has a raffle posted on his blog. If you donate to the American National Red Cross through a page he has set up, you will be entered into a drawing for a        

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Geeky tornado relief fundraisers

Noah Swartz writes, “Aaron Swartz was the ‘answer’ to the final ‘question’ in the ‘Techie Dropouts’ category on last night’s episode of Jeopardy, preceded by other famous techie drop outs like Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg.”        

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AaronSw on Jeopardy!

Well, this is fabulous news: Rapture of the Nerds, the novel Charlie Stross and I published last year, is a finalist for the 2013 Campbell Award for best novel. It’s in some truly outstanding company, too — check out that shortlist!        

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Rapture of the Nerds is a Campbell Award finalist

Alan sez, “The fine folk doing open-access science at PLOS are once again crowd-sourcing their T-shirt design. They want something that ‘appeal[s] to the computational biology community and encapsulate[s] a recent advance or innovation in the field.’ You have until May 14 to submit ideas for a shirt that will debut at their July meeting        

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PLOS Computational Biology wants your t-shirt designs

Tony from StarShipSofa sez, “StarShipSofa is hosting a live writers workshop all in video with SF writers Mike Resnick and Paul Di Filippo. StarShipSofa built its reputation by featuring science fiction from the best authors of our time, from living legends whose works have inspired generations to the rising stars of the genre. StarShipSofa’s focus        

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Live sf writing workshop with Resnick and Di Filippo

If you haven’t heard about the insane letter sent around to a sorority by its concerned and thoroughly awful social chairwoman, you’re probably doing something right. Nevertheless, there is a gem of good in every wickedness, as Funny or Die demonstrates with this dramatic reading of the letter in question [NSFW]        

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Wonderful reading of awful sorority letter sent by horrible sorority sister

The next installment of San Francisco’s SF in SF science fiction reading series features a couple of heavy hitters: Mary Robinette Kowal & Rick Klaw. It’s Saturday, April 20; doors open at 6PM.        

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San Francisco science fiction reading with Mary Robinette Kowal & Rick Klaw

This handbill — which can be seen in the British Museum — dates back to the 1650s, and was produced by the first coffee shop in London, in St. Michael’s Alley, Cornhill. It is a simple innocent thing, composed into a drink, by being dryed in an Oven, and ground to Powder, and boiled up

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Coffee ad from the 1650s

Randall “XKCD” Munroe’s new “What If?” feature answers one wild hypothetical per week. The first two are corkers: Relativistic Baseball baseball asks what would happen if a baseball pitcher could throw a ball at 0.9C; the second, SAT Guessing, looks at the (very long) odds against getting a perfect SAT by bubbling in random guesses.

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Baseball at relativistic speeds and other wild hypotheticals

The latest installment in Bill Willingham’s astonishingly, consistently great, long-running graphic novel series Fables is volume 17: Inherit the Wind. The premise of Fables lets its creators use any mythos, any tradition, any narrative, and mix and match as necessary, and Willingham and his illustrators continue to show that these possibilities are indeed endless. While

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Fables 17: Inherit the Wind

Wise words from Nick Cave: “Inspiration is a word used by people who aren’t really doing anything. I go into my office every day that I’m in Brighton and work. Whether I feel like it or not is irrelevant.” Inspiration is nice, but if you only work when it strikes, you’re going to be an

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Inspiration sucks

Noah Scalin’s bonus skulls on his skull-a-day site, made from two- and three-inch vacuum tubes, are tremendous: “Most of the ones I own have this extra bump at the top so I decided to try leaving it unpainted giving you a peek inside and making them have a bit of an alien/robot feel.” [BONUS] 399/400.

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Vacuum tube skulls

Leatherworker Tom Banwell’s latest piece, his “Crixus” mask, is very nice cross between the Hannibal Lecter transport mask and something from the Road Warrior: “I realized that the center seam between the eyes–while helping the skull look–was unnecessary and if I eliminated it I could add a row of spikes there. I changed the leather

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Crixus: gladiator mask

Ainsworth, a “remedy store” sells “homeopathic” “remedies” — diluted-to-nothing, heavily shaken essences of substances that are good for what ails ya, providing whatever ails you is treatable by placebo (and they’re happy to sell you “remedies” for potentially serious illnesses that are otherwise eminently treatable provided you’re willing to use science instead of profitable nonsense

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Homeopathic doses of the Berlin Wall and tap water

John Schwartz wrote a great profile of John Scalzi in the NYT, in honor of his latest book, the absolutely cracking Redshirts, an existentialist comedy space-opera. The novel, Mr. Scalzi’s eighth, is something of a hit, especially for a work of science fiction without light sabers — or any of the accouterments of big-brand series.

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John Scalzi, profiled in the NYT

Paul sez, “I’m the writer and presenter of the hit BBC3 show ‘The Real Hustle’, and I’ve just released a new video to promote my one-man show, ‘Lie. Cheat. Steal. Confessions of a Real Hustler’ at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe. ‘Free Drinks Forever’ teaches nine entertaining proposition bets for you to fool and fleece

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Nine bar bets you can’t lose

A report from Louis CK’s no fees, no scalpers direct-sales concert tour: Mr CK is up more than $6 million, and scalping is down to less than one percent (compared with 25 percent for his other, traditional-sales events). CK has been approached by scalpers who defend their practice by saying it’s legal. He replies to

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Louis CK’s direct-sales concert: $6MM+ and running, and scalping all but extinguished

Dan “Mediactive” Gillmor sends us his latest Guardian column, a thoughtful and fascinating manifesto for what the role newspaper ombudsmen could morph into, in order to maximize the relevance and centrality of newspapers and news organizations on the Internet: • Aggregate (quote and link to) every thoughtful critique of the organization’s work that I could

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What news ombudsmen should do to make the news part of the Web, and vice-versa