Rich Horton had nice things to say about, among a bunch of novellas, novelettes, and short stories that he considered “strong work” from 2010, my story in Shine. (And mentions, in the same breath, Alastair Reynolds‘ story that appeared right beside it, which was a favorite of mine from the anthology.) So yeah, I’m flattered.
Month: March 2011
Fukushima Radiation Detected in Kangwon-do
UPDATE: An English-langauge article on it is up now at Joongang Daily. ORIGINAL POST: Okay, so… don’t panic. (Yet.) But yeah, they’re detecting the first traces of radioactive xenon from Fukushima in Korea. (Source article, in Korean.) It’s been detected in the Eastern province of Kangwon, which is to the west of Seoul and over some mountains — that is, on the coast facing Japan. One claim is that the radiation circulated down into Korea after passing over Siberia/Kamchatka, which sets up a disturbing (to me) bit of evidence that, hope as we might, not everything is blowing eastward and …
The Underbridges of Internetland
Sometimes, there’s nothing to do but laugh at them: The internet has taught us a number of things about human beings: Weirdness is way more well-distributed than we used to admit or believe. Groups of people can achieve pretty incredible things acting in concert, across vast distances, like building and refining the OS I’m using. Unpopular is simply a different value of popular. There are some uncomfortable truths mixed in there, too, though. One of them is the following: Some people are unrepentantly, irredeemably assholes… and the more anonymous they are, the more they allow their nature to show. At …
Subscribing to eMagazines Online from Abroad
You know, I expected this was going to be easier. I mean, why should it be harder to subscribe to the electronic version of a magazine than to the paper version? It ought to be a lot easier, considering that you don’t have postal workers and airplanes and delivery trucks involved in the electronic delivery. This was what I was thinking when I decided to shift from print magazine subscriptions to online ones, anyway. Since I’m considering getting some kind of tablet computer this year, or maybe a used iPad (since the newer generation is out now), it would mean a …
Global: What It Really Means in Korea
In Korea today, one of the great buzzwords is “global”: you hear about “inbound globalization” at educational institutions, you hear about “global marketing,” you hear about “global outreach.” The word “global,” has attained a kind of buzzword status but as one of my students pointed out last semester in a public speaking exam — he gave a speech on the subject — global almost always really means, “Anglo-American.” (Note: by this I mean, English-language of the American subtype. I don’t mean in the sense some Americans seem to mean when they say “Anglo-American”, ie. British American or something.) There’s an …
Birthday Cyser
Well, I am a few weeks late in starting it, but when you’re bulk aging something for a year, a few weeks seems like not so much to worry about. For those who don’t know the term, a “cyser” is simply a mead/cider fusion. That is, it’s an alcoholic beverage in which the alcohol is created by the fermentation of sugars in honey (mead) and apple juice (cider). I went with a five gallon batch, with approximately two gallons of the must being apple juice. The remainder is water in which 5.2 kilograms of acacia honey has been dissolved. The …
Stepping Out of the Shadow of Maybe
Well, Miss Jiwaku and I are paying close attention to the news about Japan’s ongoing crisis in Fukushima, and the good news is that it seems to have stabilized. (The bad news is that it still doesn’t seem to be getting better, so the stability is probably precarious and it’s stable but at a very dangerous point.) It seems a little self-indulgent to worry too much, since compared to a lot of people in Japan we’re insanely lucky right now. But unlike some people around here, we’re both acutely aware that national borders, as fictions, do nothing to block the …
Where are the Robots Indeed?
I was thinking the other day, when work by human workers at Fukushima had to halt completely due to radiation levels, why the hell no robots were being used to continue work onsite. Seems I wasn’t the only one to think of this, and now even BoingBoing had picked up on it. I want to recall my recent post about robotics for a moment. If you look at the article above, the point is made that Japanese robotics research has lately involved building robots that do things like run marathons, play the saxophone– –and I’ll confess I’m not in principle against …
Claymation Plato Cave
Whatever problems one may have with the “Allegory of the Cave” from Plato’s Republic, this claymation is pretty damned compelling: I still have a measure of distrust for the notion’s scarier uses in getting people to believe funny notions about the world with no evidence save testimony (someone is always willing to claim that he has his own special access to ultimate truth, and [fill in pitifully unimaginative proposition here]; but being aware of the limitations of your own perceptions is a good thing. It applies to things like culture, or even relationships, not just to metaphysics and ontology and …
What Have We Done?
UPDATE (16 March 2011): Well, at least someone’s finally talking about wind currents as if it’s worth considering. I’m a little dubious about how much to trust the specific claims, but at least people are now talking about it… a little. ORIGINAL POST: Well, here we are, a mere few weeks into the semester I think of as “the semester I ended up staying in Korea.” Last semester, North Korea began throwing a missile-fit (which is what happens when adult-children with missiles throw hissyfits) and bombed the crap out of a South Korean island, thereby elevating the tension in North-East …