- Here’s a nice, high-school physics level lab demonstration of an aluminum air battery, made from aluminum foil, aquarium charcoal, salt water, and a paper towel. A few of these in series will run a simple solid-state radio. It would be fun to figure out how to expand the concept into something a little more durable, with thicker aluminum plates, in some kind of container that will confine the messy materials and yet admit oxygen to sustain the reaction.
- Damned if the photo of this beambot doesn’t remind me of the Ed Emshwiller F&SF cover for “Callahan and the Wheelies,” a 1960 story by Stephen Barr that I blatantly imitated in my own high-school fiction.
- When I first got into computing in the midlate 1970s I had a number of CPU green cards, but was always a little puzzled that none of them were…green. (The COSMAC green card was blue, and the 8080 green card was white.) In truth, I didn’t know at the time why everybody called them “green cards,” and if you still don’t know, here’s a site where you can see the real deal. (Thanks to Richard Haley for the link.)
- And from Richard’s own hand comes a list of instruction mnemonics that you won’t find on most green cards, of whatever color. My favorite is EMW, Emulate Maytag Washer, which the crotchety frontloading 3330 disk packs back at Xerox building 214 were very good at doing, except that they were in the spin cycle all the damned time.
- Google Books has mounted most (if not quite all) of a fascinating book called Hi There, Boys and Girls! which is a history of local children’s TV programming in the US. The book is organized by TV markets around the country, and the Google Books version is intriguing for how much material is actually available for free. The Chicago material is available, and excellent, if not as detailed as Jack Mulqueen’s full-book treatment in The Golden Age of Chicago Children’s Television, which has a much more limited Google Books preview.
- We are getting close to the release of Michael Arrington’s Crunchpad Internet tablet, but little or nothing has been said about the only thing I really want it for: a large-display ebook reader. It needs an SDHC slot (which I think it has) and some decent ebook software (anybody’s guess) but given those two things, it could remake the ebook biz. July is flying. Wherezit at, Mike?
sf
Odd Lots
Souls in Silicon on Amazon at Cover
Boy, I sure wasn’t expecting this: An email this morning from Lulu informed me that my SF story collection Souls in Silicon was now being offered through Amazon Marketplace at its $11.97 cover price–not cover plus 30%, as I reported in my May 29, 2009 Odd Lots entry. It’s evidently a test program of some kind, and not all Lulu books are included; in fact, of the eight Copperwood Press titles, Souls in Silcon is the only one in the program. Somebody’s giving up significant margin here, and odds are it’s not Amazon.
But this is an awesomely good thing. I have a hunch that Lulu heard that POD publishers like me were going with other systems (like Amazon’s own BookSurge) to get into the Amazon database somehow and started to worry. Hey, I’d worry too. All Copperwood books would probably be on another system (probably BookSurge) by now had the assembly book project not taken over my life last November. I would not have pulled them off Lulu, but everybody knows that Amazon is the first place people go looking for books online.
I want this program to continue and go mainstream, not just for me but for everybody, so I’m going to make a slightly weird request: If my writeups on the book piqued your interest and you figured you might order Souls in Silicon someday, now is the time to do it–if you do it through Amazon. I’m about to order a few here, and if I could scare up a couple more orders from elsewhere it could support the test and convince them that the decision could pay off for them, by generating higher unit sales even at obviously lower margins.
Here’s the Amazon sales link. (The same link is on the cover image above.) And if you know any other Lulu books in the same program, consider buying them as well. If Lulu’s going to survive it has to be able to get its products into the Amazon database. This may be their best shot, at least until they allow me to use ISBNs from my own set.
UPDATE: I just discovered that within the past hour, all the rest of my Copperwood Press titles were updated on Amazon to their Lulu cover prices. Dare we hope that the test program succeeded?
UPDATE: Chris Gerrib wrote to tell me that his Lulu SF novel The Mars Run is also in the program, which in fact includes the top 100,000 Lulu titles by sales rank. Even my slowest seller, The Pope and the Council, is at #37,303, which makes me wonder how many copies the bottom two million Lulu titles have sold…
Odd Lots
- Our good president is creating czars right and left, to the point where you can’t tell the czars without a program. So maybe we need a czar czar–I know a guy named Binks who could do the job…
- Jim Strickland sent me a decent video demonstration of superfluidity in liquid helium. Liquid helium had a starring role in my 1980 story “Cold Hands,” and Richard Bartrop’s cover image of my upcoming story collection Cold Hands and Other Stories includes Richard’s visualization of liquid helium floating free in atmosphere at zero-G. I don’t think we’ve ever fussed with liquid helium in orbit, but if we have, I’d like pointers to any mentions.
- In my novel The Cunning Blood, I postulated fluidic computers, which use fluid pressure and flow rates as the encoding units of information. People think I made this up completely, but not so: The technology was in use as early as 1948, and was written up in Popular Mechanics in the 1970s. (That’s where I first heard of it, though I can’t find the citation right now.)
- If you’re at all interested in the future of the publishing industry and newspapers in particular, be sure to read James Fallows’ take on it. Ad-supported print media are being bled white by eBay and especially Craigslist, which is the direct digital analog of print classified ads.
- From the Words-That-Sound-Exactly-Like-What-They-Are Department: “Dudelsack” is German for “bagpipe.”
- Ethanol is a terribly inefficient use of corn (corn stoves that burn it for home heat are a far better use of corn as fuel) and it may destroy engines as well. Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.
- Some years ago, while bumming around my old neighborhood in Chicago, I noticed an observatory dome on an addition to a late 40s house about three blocks from where I grew up. It was right across the street from Olympia Park, where I tried and failed several times to become good at softball. Pete Albrecht noticed that the New York Times did an article on home observatories a couple of years ago, which included some photos of the observatory, built by an accountant named John Spack.
Odd Lots
- From the Words I Didn’t Know Until Yesterday Department: “charcuterie,” meaning cured meats like bacon, ham, prosciutto, and the preparation thereof.
- I talked to the realtor who’s handling the listing of the old Heinlein house here in Colorado Springs. What she said astounded me: Heinlein’s 1950 custom house is still in there. They built that ugly thing around it in 1995 or so. Parts of the original structure were removed, but most of it still exists, although it evidently was used as framing more than anything else.
- And further relevant to the Heinlein House is a report from elder SF fan Bruce Pelz, who not only visited the house in Colorado Springs in 1963 when the Heinleins were still living there, but he slept in their legendary fallout shelter. (Cool photo there–definitely click through! And thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.)
- Needless to say, I haven’t visited the Heinlein fallout shelter (I stood in line to shake the great man’s hand at MidAmericon in 1976, and that was the only time I ever met him) but I frequently visited the 10-foot-deep underground fallout shelter of the late William A. “Bill” Rhodes in Phoenix, which he was using as a cool (literally) computer room until his death in 2006. It was culturally jarring–people of my parents’ generation took fallout shelters for granted, and people of my generation (for the most part) found them appalling.
- CFLs may not be the big environmental win that they’re being touted as, because the power factor of the lamps is very low. Thery’re still a win, but the hype needs to be pruned back a little.
- The whole idea of a CAPTCHA may be flawed, and although there are a number of objections to CAPTCHAS, this article pins down the primary and probably unfixable one: You can pay people to solve them. There are apparently some porn/pirate sites that charge for access in solved CAPTCHAS. And if nothing else works, hire a CAPTCHA-breaking firm in the third world. It looks to me like CAPTCHAs are becoming at best speed-bump hindrances to bots. If I had to guess, I’d say make it slower to establish accounts, and certainly slower for one IP to sequentially attempt a CAPTCHA. Could teergrubing make a comeback?
- For the benefit of those who asked, here is the Web site of the people who did my crowns over this past year. They are artists, especially Dr. Frank Seaman. The 15-month project was actually a collaboration between two independent offices in the same building. Dr. Jeanne Salcetti did the periodontal portion (gingivectomy, tooth extraction, bone graft, and implant) and she was wonderful too. I recommend both of them without hesitation.
You Can Buy Heinlein’s Address (But It’s Not His House)
Larraine Tutihasi sent me a note that Robert A. Heinlein’s house is for sale in Colorado Springs. Here is the real estate listing. The agent is mistaken; although this is indeed the great man’s address, this is not his house. The Heinleins built a custom home in the Broadmoor area of Colorado Springs in 1950. It was a wonderful design, distinctly Frank Lloyd Wright-ish, with lots of techie grace notes designed by Heinlein himself. The house was supposedly “remodeled” after the Heinleins moved to Santa Cruz, but several people have told me that virtually the whole thing was torn down circa 1995, and the current larger but very ordinary home built on the site. The bomb shelter is apparently still there, as is the very appropriate address of 1776 Mesa Avenue.
I’m floored by the asking price: $650K for a good-sized house on a 1.5 acre lot in the poshissimo Broadmoor is a steal, unless the house has serious problems of some kind. It’s 2.75 miles linear distance from me, but over six miles street distance because of all the damnfool gated communities between here and there.
Oddly, Carol and I lived almost as close to Heinlein’s Santa Cruz home when I worked for Borland, and in fact Carol’s boss’s wife was the listing realtor when Virginia Heinlein sold it in 1988. Alas, I had just been laid off by Borland, and had no clue where I would be working after that, so we didn’t even go see it. I’ve been kicking myself for that idiotic lapse ever since!
Odd Lots
- Back when I was in college in the early 70s, a woman friend told me, “The trouble with you, Jeff, is that you’re too damned happy!” Maybe this is the answer.
- Numerous people have sent me links to “St. Patrick Drives the Snakes Out of Ireland” cartoons, and while they’re all good (use Google Images and you’ll see them) they’re not the one I remember, which I’m now pretty sure was published in National Lampoon circa 1974.
- I misunderstood what my sister said about Crayola crayons in my March 13, 2009 Odd Lots. Crayola (once made by Binney & Smith, now part of the Hallmark empire) manufactures a line of washable crayons, and these are what Gretchen prefers that Katie have, given my elder godchild’s penchant for seeing all the world as her coloring book. The washable crayons have no particular smell to them, but the other day when Gretchen and Bill and the girls and I were in the Mount Prospect Hobby Lobby, Gretchen opened a conventional box of 16 Different Crayola Colors and let me sniff them. Yup. That’s the one. Perhaps some things really are forever.
- I’ve thought that the name of the Sci-Fi Channel has been an embarrassment for 16 years. (Actually, so have most of their house-bred feature-length films.) But now, they’re changing their name to…Syfy. And adding professional wrestling to the lineup. The dork-in-chief over there says that he’s been trying since the 1990s to “…distance the network from science fiction.” Mission accomplished, dood.
- From Baron Waste comes a largish drawn panel by Dusty Abell that somehow represents (as far as I know) every significant SF TV show to come out of the 70s. It’s a good proxy for how much TV you watched at the time, muddied by what you may have seen at cons in the middle of the night in intervening years. I can name perhaps a quarter of the shows represented, so I guess I wasn’t particularly tuned in. (I will admit with some embarrassment that the first whose title came to mind was “The Greatest American Hero.”) And although that little robot golem looks familiar, I can’t place the show that it was on.
- From Pete Albrecht comes a page introducing the Decatron tube, which presents for display a circle of thirty neon-lit points that can be configured to move a group of three around the circle each time a pulse enters the circuit. (Follow the links for more detailed information, especially this one.) The tube “remembers” which group of points is illuminated, and so it can be used to build a decade counter, or a divide-by-10 prescaler for slower mechanical counters. Very slick, and reminds us that technology was perhaps a little more sophisticated in 1954 than we remember–because much of it didn’t sit in the corner of the living room.
- Here’s a new kind of egoscan, at least for technical writers: Search Google Patents for your name. I’ve been cited 27 times in patent filings.
- Rich Rostrom reminded me (after I reported close encounters with numerous tumbleweeds on the plains heading out to Chicago) that tumbleweeds are Eurasian imports that hitched a ride along with shipments of agricultural flaxseed from Europe in the 19th Century. Along with other things that we consider iconically American, tumbleweeds actually came from somewhere else. (I guess that makes us the Ecosphere of Immigrants.)
- I didn’t know that Global Warming™ has made it impossible to build good violins. Um…I still don’t.
Odd Lots
- The dairy that delivered milk to our house when I was a kid was indeed Hawthorn Mellody Farms (as verified by the Sister of Eidetic Recall) which was unusual in several ways: They had an amusement park in Libertyville, Illinois, complete with a miniature train ride, a petting zoo, Western town, and pony rides, that was a famous destination in the 50s for suburban moms with station wagons full of Boomer kids. They were the first dairy to put pictures of missing children on milk cartons. And before they went bankrupt in 1992, they were one of the largest Black-owned businesses in the country.
- Also relevant to my entry of Febraury 24, 2009: Dunteman’s Dairy evidently existed before 1939. A page out of the 1937 Arlington Heights phone book from Digital Past shows an entry for Dunteman’s Dairy at 830 N. Dunton Avenue in Arlington Heights. The 1936 phone book shows a listing at the same address for “L. Dunteman,” so Lenard may have begun operating the dairy from his back yard (not an uncommon thing to do back then!) in that year. Prior to 1936 his listing shows yet a different address. I’ll have to see what’s at that address today the next time I’m in the area.
- Digital Past is a very good source if you’re doing genealogy research on Chicago’s northwest suburbs; awhile back I found the location and a photo of the headstone of Laura Brommelkamp Dunteman there, after looking in vain for some years. (She was the second wife of Henry Dunteman, founder of R. W. Dunteman Construction, which is still in operation in Chicago’s western burbs.)
- Well, grub is still plug-ugly, but it’s no longer difficult to configure. I’ve been using KGrubEditor for over a month now, and it makes the job a breeze. Highly recommended.
- Where’s my flying car? Well, it may be here: Yet another Skycar concept, but this time it’s more Mad Max than Flash Gordon. Put a big fan on the back of a go-kart, get up some speed, and then release the parawing. Off you go!
- Philip Jose Farmer has left us. Along with Heinlein, Clarke, and Keith Laumer, Farmer was one of the SF writers who inspired me to keep going and make something of myself in fiction. I still consider the Riverworld concept one of the most compelling ideas ever to surface in SF, even though the series wandered toward the end and would have been much better had it been three books (on the outside, four) instead of five.
- I was going to do a whole entry on this, but Cory Doctorow said everything I intended to say about whackjob Roy Blount Jr and the knucklehead Authors’ Guild, who want money from anyone who does text-to-speech. There’s nothing I can add, and as a longtime author who still makes money writing, I think I have a right to strong opinions about this. Let me quote Cory here, and cheer:
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Time and again, the Author’s Guild has shown itself to be the epitome of a venal special interest group, the kind of grasping, foolish posturers that make the public cynically assume that the profession it represents is a racket, not a trade. This is, after all, the same gang of weirdos who opposed the used book trade going online.
Review: Hellboy II
Not much would make me want to be 12 again. Halloween 1964 was great good fun (and on a Saturday!) but soon afterward, life started to get mighty weird. Ordinary girls who lived in ordinary houses and had ordinary names (like Terry, Laura, and Kathy—not a Samantha in the bunch!) became mysterious, mythic creatures who in defiance of my own will drew my fascination away from the trappings of a comfortable grade-school life, like flying kites, raiding the neighbors’ garbage on Wednesdays for broken radios and TVs, and…monster movies.
Monster movies were a big part of late grade-school culture in 1964. Cheesewad classics like The Crawling Eye and Curse of the Demon had scared the crap out of me when I was in third grade, but by the time I was 12 the experience was drifting in a new direction. The monsters were becoming less scary than ridiculous. And…we laughed. I think that boys discover bravery by laughing at the things that used to frighten them. (Some of us laughed at girls; most of us eventually called a truce and married them.)
Being home alone for the nonce (and it’s getting to be a lot of nonce, sigh) I rented a monster movie a few nights back and sat down to find the 12-year-old in myself, if there’s any of him left. The movie is Hellboy II: The Golden Army, and boy, if all monster movies were like that, I might be willing to go through puberty again. (Wait. No, strike that. Forget it. Never. Sheesh.)
I tepidly enjoyed my first viewing of the original 2004 Hellboy, and my admiration has grown after seeing it a few more times. In 2004 I didn’t recognize it for what it was: A ’60s monster movie with much better monsters—plus a monster we could identify with. Sympathetic monsters as a concept are not new. King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962) pitted the anthropoid against the sauropod, and expected us to root for our nearer cousin. (This did not stop some of us from identifying with Godzilla.) Hellboy II, however, perfects this approach by completely understanding its audience and giving them absolutely everything they could want.
Hellboy‘s high concept is that of a toddler demon accidentally dragged into our dimension by a group of occultist Nazis in 1944. Hellboy, known to his buds as “Red,” is a poster child for the nurture side of the nature/nurture debate. Although nominally a son of Satan, he is raised with high standards in a secret military base by kindly Professor Bruttenholm (John Hurt) and keeps his horns ground down to stubs so they don’t skewer anybody accidentally. Sixty years later, Hellboy has a job for a paranormal Men-In-Black-ish agency, hunting evil occult-ish thingies with a revolver as big around as my thigh. As the 2008 film opens, Hellboy has an annoying new boss—a pompous German ghost who lives in a deep-sea diving suit—and the same hot girlfriend, the incendiary Liz (Selma Blair) who becomes a Johnny Storm-ish human torch whenever she gets annoyed. Hellboy annoys her at times, but he’s a hell boy, after all, and fire does nothing to him. The intellectual and C3PO-ish gill-man Abe Sapiens returns, carrying around Ghostbusters-ish paranormal thingie detectors and sounding befuddled.
The plot is conventional action-film fare: An evil albino kung-fu-ish elf named Prince Nuada wants all three parts of an ancient gold crown that would give him control over an army of 4,900 Tik-Tok-ish clockwork warriors, and mayhem ensues. I think most of us are a little tired of deranged albinos, I’m guessing real albinos most of all. It was purely gratuitous albinism, after all; Nuada could have been purple for all the difference it would have made. We 12-year-olds don’t care what color the monsters are. We just want to see their asses kicked, and imagine ourselves doing the kicking.
And that’s where Hellboy II excels: It knows what 12-year-old boys want, and ladles it on with a trowel. Guillermo Del Toro created the single most marvelous collection of monsters in film history, and has them all wandering around in the hollow portions of the Brooklyn Bridge. The Troll Market is nothing but monsters, and our good-guy freakos Hellboy and Abe don’t get a second look there, as they search for Nuada, belch, have repartee, get in fights, and generally wreck things. The humor is gross but nonsexual, the violence comic book-ish and not especially bloody, and through it all is an un-subtle invitation to 12-year-old boys to take it all in and…laugh.
The real secret is that Hellboy himself is a boy—just like us. He wants attention (he gets in trouble by posing for photos and signing autographs) and resents the constant implication that he’s freaky and unattractive. His life is a sort of prepubescent nirvana: He’s snotty and rude but heroic, as boys always like to imagine themselves. He’s got the biggest damned handgun I’ve ever seen. And he gets paid to make a mess.
The film has some weak spots where it goes too far toward the comic: Hellboy and Abe drink too much beer at one point and start singing “I Can’t Smile Without You” with Barry Manilow on the CD player. That aside, it’s a wonderfully effective montage of chases and fight scenes, with a weird Celtic steampunk-ish setting for the climactic battle against the Golden Army. It’s certainly derivative; in fact, it borrows from everything in sight, and may in fact be the most ish-ish film I’ve ever seen. But that didn’t keep it from being a great deal of fun. After it was done, I could only think: Well, I’ve taken care of the monsters. Now I just have to figure out girls.
Wait! Mission accomplished. The nice part about being 12 is that you’re not 13 yet. And the really great part about being 56 is that you’ve already been 13.
Highly recommended.
2008: The Final Odyssey
I had breakfast with Isaac Asimov. I shook hands with Robert Heinlein. Kate Wilhelm did a tarot reading for me. I've workshopped with Gene Wolfe, George R. R. Martin, and A. J. Budrys. Nancy Kress is still a close friend. David Gerrold wrote for my magazine for ten years. I saw Keith Laumer from a distance once, and have had several conversations with Larry Niven and David Brin. But I have never been anywhere close to Arthur C. Clarke. Now I won't get the chance; as I learned on arriving at home this evening, he has died in Sri Lanka at age 90.
Arthur C. Clarke was my favorite SF writer for a long time. Asimov was a little dull, and Heinlein's stridency bothered me at times, but Clarke was as close to perfect as SF writers got for me, at least in high school—and maybe still. His SF was about ideas, and he let nothing else get in the way of those ideas. I began writing SF by imitating his short stories. When I later began writing SF novels I was imitating Keith Laumer, because I knew damned well that I could never imitate Against the Fall of Night or Childhood's End.
As I have reported here more than once, when I was seventeen I gulped and asked a beautiful girl to go out with me and see 2001: A Space Odyssey. She said yes. Seven years later, Carol said yes again, when I asked her to share a different kind of odyssey with me. Yup, Arthur C. Clarke landed me first a best friend, then a lover, and finally a spouse. (One doesn't get that kind of service from Barry Malzberg.)
There's not much more to say. When a man gets to be 90 before he dies, I don't mourn, I celebrate. We had him a long time, and now he is free of all the suffering and limitations inherent in flesh. I happen to think that I may meet him yet…but let that pass. We have his stories. He worked his magic on me, and I would not be the writer I am if he were not the writer he is.
Just one more word: Thanks, Sir Arthur. Really. And thanks again.
Odd Lots
- Do not fail to read Bruce Schneier's latest short item in Wired, which is his simple demolition of David Brin's peculiar “transparent society” concept, which I first read of in his so-so novel Earth (1990) and thought was BS even then. Having no secrets doesn't help where the differential of power between two parties is high. This seems pretty obvious to me; I do not understand why Brin gets points for this “no secrets” notion of his.
- Some of the worst horror films (as well as SF films and some westerns) can be streamed without charge here. Where else can you find “Attack of the Giant Leeches” or “Killer Shrews,” both of which I recall seeing on Channel 7 at 4 PM on Thursdays back 1965-ish. Even at age 12 I could roll my eyes and say, “Those aren't giant shrews. Those are dogs in bad shrew costumes.” But hey, that's what makes a B-movie a B-movie, right?
- It may be clever, but can a gun this small really be deadly? (That is, assuming you don't aim it up your left nostril…)
- This is freaking amazing: Images of a landslide on Mars, taken while it's happening. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- Jim Strickland pointed out a pneumatic tennis-ball based antenna launcher. We always used slingshots back in the day, and I have a Greenlee Cablecaster that was designed for dragging CAT5 over suspended ceilings via fishline, but something about the ball shooter is very appealing.
- Glover Wright is bringing back Science Fiction Quarterly as an online pub, and it looks promising. I recall reading a few ancient issues of the original SF Quarterly pulps from the late 50s and was pleased, though the world and I were, um, at least thirty years younger then. The first issue will be out in March.
- Gripe of the week: The keycap letters on my expensive Avant Stellar keyboard are decals, and they are already wearing off. It's only been a year. What's this thing going to look like after another ten?
- Speaking of keyboards: I need a wireless keyboard for use while sitting on the couch and running photos or video clips on our big TV. The SX270 is under the TV in plain view of the couch. The keyboard needs to have an integral pointing device. (I prefer things like IBM's TrackPoint nipple to the ubiquitous scratchpad.) Anybody got any suggestions?
