Flipping through Shine, I ran across an interesting mention (in the introduction to Lavie Tidhar’s contribution) of Jan Romein’s notion of Wet van de remmende voorsprong, or, in English, the “Law of the Handicap of a Head Start.” It struck me that the Korean internet (a subject about which I recently posted) is a wonderful demonstration of both sides of this notion: the benefit of a late start, and the handicaps that a head start can introduce into a system. The link above details several of the handicaps: the dependency on Windows, ActiveX, and even Internet Explorer 6.0, as well …
Month: March 2010
Shiny!
oh my word, these pages, full of stars: how they Shine! The stars to which I refer are, of course, bright and shiny ideas about this future we’re tumbling toward, and not the authors, of which I am one. Just got my contributors’ copies of Shine, the new anthology of optimistic SF edited by Jetse de Vries that Amazon says is coming out on March 30th. I’ve only read a little of it, but it looks like a hell of a ride! If you want on, you can preorder it at a bunch of places: Jetse has links for all …
Essays on Pop Culture
Some interesting essays, available for a limited time, are available here. I liked the one by Nick Mamatas on Hurley, the character in Lost. Missed one by Kristine Kathryn Rusch which I wish I’d caught. Worth going back and looking every once in a while!
Outsider Writing
Now that I’m back in Korea, and have a free morning, I’m just catching up on some blogs and fiction online and so on. I ran across a very interesting post at Aliette de Bodard’s blog, titled, Writing cultures: insider vs. outsider, about the various advantages and pitfalls faced by authors writing about a specific culture either as an insider, or as an outsider, for a Western audience (as in the dominant SF-reading audience, for example). It’s worth a read, including the comments, especially if you’re interested in my thoughts on the subject.
Launch Pad Open to Applications
I blogged about my experience at Launch Pad here before, and most recently discussed it with a group of other participants here, but I just want to highly, highly recommend that anyone working in science-popularization, in SF media or literature, who would like to have her or his mind blown a bunch of times in a week, getting not just an intensive course in astronomy but also in communicating science to nonscientists, learning about how to approach research, and hanging out with what will be, if you’re as lucky as I was, a stunningly wonderful group of people, you should …