Odd Lots
- Let me recommend a thoughtful blog on the issues of writing and publishing, which is remarkable for having one of the most civil and intelligent comment sections I’ve ever run across. (In recent years I’m reading blog comments less and less, because they’re mostly content-free tribal hatred.)
- Maybe the Ralpha Dogs had a hand in this: Making tunable microwave antennas from columns of liquid metal. (Somebody sent me this link, but I don’t remember who. Feel free to take credit in the comments.)
- Tom Roderick sent me this link to a video showing the guldurndest steampunk corkscrew ever. I like wine, but maybe not quite that much.
- And while we’re watching movies, here’s the craziest damned thing I’ve seen in awhile: A jet-powered go-kart. His name is Colin Furze. He’s done other crazy things too, and I envy not only his craziness but his youth, energy, and good looks. Here’s hoping he doesn’t wrap himself around a tree at 200 MPH before he lives long enough to go bald. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- Sarah Hoyt’s reflection on the Golden Age of SFF, and how we writers can bring about the second coming of the Golden Age, if we only choose to. It relates to her concept of Human Wave SF & fantasy, which I did a series on some time back.
- Hurricane season opens tomorrow, and NOAA itself is forcasting below-normal hurricane activity this year.
- We’re finally admitting that open offices (that is, sitting at a table in a field of fifty or a hundred tables without any cube walls between them) are a stupid, self-defeating idea. Productivity requires concentration, and concentration requires privacy and quiet.
- Jim Strickland pointed me to FontSquirrel, a source of free and almost-free fonts. (Nearly all are free for personal use; some require payment for commercial use.)
- I think most of us figured this out years ago: Ideological echo-chambers are self-defeating. I would also add that they are creepy. Pod-people creepy…because what they do is create pod people.
- Stone yourself skinny? No wonder Colorado people are the thinnest in the country!
- Nuts & Volts Magazine (to which I bought a lifetime subscription in 1980!) is posting some of their more interesting back articles. This one, which explains how the Edison storage cell works and how to build one at home, is one of my favorites.
- The coordinator of Sad Puppies 4 lays out her theory of what makes a story Hugo-worthy. To Kate’s list I would add that contenders have something in the way of world-building, which is big part of what I read SF for.
- Ever wanted a Bigfoot blanket? I know where you can get one.
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: psychology · publishing · sadpuppies · science · sf · steampunk · writing
Colin Furze is crazy about ramjets…if you watch some of his other videos, you may wonder why he is still alive.
“Eat your heart out, Jeremy Clarkson!”
How many hold-my-beer-and-watch-this moments do you get to see from someone wearing a necktie, anyway?
I don’t know if it’s the same guy, but there was at least one guy with videos up on his web site back in the 20th century, before YouTube, about his work with pulsejet motors and various vehicles he’d propelled by them.
I’ve seen model pulsejets, and they were loud enough to satisfy the inner child of any 95th-percentile psychopath. I think I’d want to double up on ear protection near something that size…
> echo chambers
I wish James Lileks would fix his web site so I could link to him for proper credit… he wrote a newspaper article about 20 years ago, saying that he’d thought that the internet would be a place where people could mingle and exchange ideas, but it turned out to be a place where every group could carve out its own safe ideological space without fear of being confronted by uncomfortable facts or contrary opinions. Except he was more eloquent about it.
“open offices (that is, sitting at a table in a field of fifty or a hundred tables without any cube walls between them) are a stupid, self-defeating idea”
Tell that to the company I work for, which just moved all the developers FROM cubes TO open tables last year…
The manager in charge at the time (who has since left) justified this in an internal blog post that compared engineers objecting to this to three-year-old children being unwilling to try peas or broccoli. To which one of my fellow engineers replied, “I love peas, I don’t like broccoli at all, and I really don’t like having other people’s dietary restrictions imposed upon me just because they don’t know, or don’t want to learn, how to use a fork.”
Continued from last comment: One of my comments to that manager’s blog post was, “All I’m gonna say is, Joel Spolsky, CEO of Fog Creek Software, manages to give all his developers (and testers, and program managers) private offices…and he manages to do this in New York City, one of the most expensive commercial real estate markets in the world. His rationale for doing this is that it not only increases developer productivity, it makes it possible for him to recruit the very best developers. See: Bionic Office, The New Fog Creek Office“
I think most of the enthusiasm for open plan offices is due to managers being more concerned with keeping tabs on their workers than actually having them produce anything.
Cubicles are almost as bad, particularly when the only method of communication some cow-orkers have is to turn the volume of their speakerphone up to max and then stand outside their cube shouting at it.