Cookie dough ideas

I was inspired by a blog I read, digital Photography School, to take some photos.  They give out weekly "assignments" and this one had to do with lines.  Between this blog, the awesome camera my wife gave me for Christmas, and the full release of Lightroom, I'm getting more into photography.  I've also made a movie at Tracking Shot that includes more of these photos.  Enjoy...

Sun of Suns (Virga, Book 1)

Karl Schroeder

I've been remiss at writing about the books I've been reading.  Some were good, some were bad, but none really motivated me enough to write here until Sun of Suns by Karl Schroeder.

This is the kind of hard science fiction that I really like.  Karl has created a fantastic, nicely detailed, and self consistent world: Virga.  Try to imagine a "balloon" of air about 5000 miles in diameter with multiple artificial "suns" inside to heat it and provide light.  Since most of the mass is the air, there is no gravity to speak of (except near the edge of the balloon).  Nevertheless, there is quite a thriving and rich set of human inhabitants spread throughout the volume in various "nations" that are in conflict.

Karl has really done a nice job of thinking through the physics and implications.  Nations tend to be spinning wheels of various levels of sophistication to provide pseudo gravity.  Warships are made of wood and mostly fight using rockets or guns.  Clouds are used as strategic cover within battles that are extremely well written with well motivated tactics.  There are waaaay too many interesting little physics-based features of this bag of gas to mention (sargasso's, winter's, balls of water that people live in, etc.).

There is also an "outsider" who comes from something called the Artificial Nature.  Nothing there is "manufactured," the way we know it.  Everything is "evolved."  Entities are sometimes created (ghosts) by collaboratively creating their nervous system.  All very much hinted at and not well explored.  Perhaps we'll find out more in later books.

All in all, this is an extremely satisfying book.  The world building is simply amazing.  It reminds me somewhat of Vernor Vinge in tone (which is a good thing by my reckoning).

Definitley pick this one up.  You'll enjoy it.

I've seen this on a couple of other VOXer's blogs, and it seemed like a decent list, so I thought I'd see how many I had read.  Quite a lot (33 out of 50! you can read a lot when you start in elementary school and are now north of 50...).

This is a list of the 50 most significant science fiction/fantasy novels, 1953-2002, according to the Science Fiction Book Club. Bold the ones you've read, strike-out the ones you hated, italicize those you started but never finished, put an asterisk beside the ones you loved and put a '#' next to the ones you intend to read some time.

1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R.Tolkien
2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov  **
3. Dune, Frank Herbert  **
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein   **
5. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson
7. Childhood's End, Arthur C Clarke
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
9. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
11. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M Miller Jr
13. The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
14. Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
15. Cities in Flight, James Blish
16. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
17. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
18. Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
19. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
20. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
21. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
22. Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card  **
23. The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
24. The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
25. Gateway, Frederik Pohl
26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J.K. Rowling
27. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
28. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
29. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
30. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K Le Guin
31. Little, Big, John Crowley
32. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
33. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
34. Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
35. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
36. The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
37. On the Beach, Nevil Shute
38. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
39. Ringworld, Larry Niven  **
40. Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
41. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
42. Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut  **
43. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson  **
44. Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
45. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
46. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein  **
47. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
48. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
49. Timescape, Gregory Benford
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

As you may be able to tell, I'm a pretty focused science fiction reader, with a definite slant toward hard sci fi and away from fantasy, though I have read some.

I was somewhat surprised that HG Wells, for example, didn't make this list.  I would have also added EE Doc Smith, Edgar Rice Burroughs, William Tenn, and a few others who really helped define the entire genre.

I have to admit that I don't.  My dog would never sit still for it.

However, it seems that lots of others do.  My wife received this group of 30 (!) photos of various pets (mostly dogs) being dressed up as everything from Darth Vader to a Hula girl.  Here's a short movie (1:27 long) that, if it doesn't make you have righteous indignation will proabably make you laugh.

Echelon: A novel by Josh Conviser

Josh Conviser

Josh Conviser has taken a current event, the Echelon program meant to spy on all of our internet traffic hoping to sift through all that and find terrorists, and turned it into a science fiction book.  This seemed like a pretty reasonable premise when I picked the book up.  Sadly, the execution was lacking.

Echelon, the book, is a weird mishmash of stuff.  There is a secret society that has grown out of the NSA Echelon program that now controls everything through a combination of watching the "flow" (all the bits flowing around those darned "tubes" in the internet) and dispatching Mission Impossible type agents to twist some arms.  They have the most pure of motives, these Echelon folks: to save us from ourselves.  Isn't that always how the megalomaniac talks just before he starts killing lots of people "for their own good?"  There is the standard uber-scientist (in this case programmer-type) who can't deal with people and is the only person who ever invents anything.  The uber-agent ends up being infected with "drones" (sort of nanobots that make him super strong, resilient, etc.).  Lots of betrayal, weird things like Thailand being quarantined, and so forth.  Did I mention it is a weird mishmash of stuff?

Well, suffice it to say that things go wrong.  That, by itself, is ok.  The premise is reasonable.

However, the writing just jumps all over the place.  Motivations are not credible.  Plot twists don't seem to be motivated: they kind of jump out at you like an Echelon agent coming to save you from yourself.  The characters are somewhat simplistic and wooden, yet they do things that are unmotivated and out of character.  Just kind of baffling.

I did finish the book, kind of out of duty to the author.  After all...he spent a lot of time and energy on this book.

However, I can't really recommend it to anyone....

Well, I'm trying not to push my startup too much on this blog (though of course if you look you'll see a number of movies here made using it....if I don't use it, how can I expect others to, after all?).

However, we got a nice write up from Rafe Needleman of CNET yesterday.  One thing I appreciated was that Rafe spent the time to actually use our service (even though it is still in an early stage of development) and wrote about it with good knowledge and experience.

Thanks Rafe.  We like it when the press and blogosphere do their homework.

In honor of the upcoming Halloween, and to tie into my sci-fi theme, here's a short video made in homage to classic old space opera (a la EE "Doc" Smith).  Listen carefully to the sound track.  It is an mp3 found on the web a bit more than a year ago (and that I have since lost in a disk crash, sadly, and can't find again), part of a collection of sci-fi atmosphere music.  The rest of this extremely short movie is just silly.  Enjoy!

Well, I found that I needed a change of view, so my blog is now more sci-fi-ish with a robot look.  In honor of that change, here's a movie made using robot photos found on the web....:

(click on the picture to watch the movie)