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Now, as to what an actually reasonable price is for an ebook... that's an interesting question (and of course there's no one solid answer, because different types of book will command different prices). For your typical mass-market fiction novel of ~300-400 pages, the kind of thing that would be maybe $8 as a paperback at a bookstore, something around $3-$5

Yes, I price the e-book versions of my books between $3 and $4 for essentially that reason. I do feel guilty that the various e-book "standards" don't allow for anything remotely resembling decent typesetting, so people who read my books on electronic devices are having a definitely less-than-optimal experience. On the other hand, I go to great lengths to ensure that one doesn't see (as I have seen with e-books from big publishing houses) howlers such as the word "you" presented as "y-" "ou".

I believe that the way e-books *should* have been done is to compile TeX on the fly. That way gorgeous output could have been presented on all devices. Frankly, I wouldn't take e-books seriously at all were it not for the undeniable fact that these days the bulk of my sales occur in that medium. I think my view of e-books is decidedly colored by how poor they have turned out to be (as a reading experience) compared to what they could have been.

If anyone cares, I am: http://www.sff.net/people/N7DR.

It's supposed to be five lines:

Trust no one.
I want to believe.
The aliens soon
Will take
Their leave.

Burma Shave

http://www.sff.net/people/teaston/burma.htm

We used to show returns in the form of transistors, lasers, stuff like that. Many of these items didn't actually find a profitable use until decades after their discovery.

Well, give an example of such research first before you make such assertions. I'll warn you though, when you actually try that exercise, you'll find it's harder than it first looks. For example, transistors had immediate financially profitable application since they could replace a much larger vacuum tube triode. And they served as a stepping stone to the first integrated circuits which also had near immediate profitable applicaiton.

And lasers started life as masers which served both as a frequency standard and low noise amplifiers. As lasers, the biggest application, fiber optics cables were quickly developed. For example, the first lasers, according to Wikipedia were active around the late 50s and early 60s (with solid state lasers developed in 1962). The first fiber optics cables were developed in 1966. They were first tried in telephone lines in the field in 1977.

Sure, it's not next quarter thinking, but it happened pretty damn fast, just the same.

Not all R&D is expensive boondoggles, and who the $#%# said "public funds?"

Pay attention to the thread. The title was "Money well spent." That money was for publicly funded fusion projects, ITER and NIF which can reasonably be considered boondoggles as well due to their high costs.

Heh heh I love the irony! I have to agree, I tried some of the $3 books on Amazon and probably won't try any more. The books were sorely in need of not only basic error correction but some professional editing. Contradictory plot elements, repetitive characters, and other nightmares were common. I wouldn't look forward to self-published world, unless 'edited by xxxx' became a valuable marketing tool where people shopped editors as well as authors. Meanwhile, I don't begrudge a few extra dollars for the added service of a professional editor.

Blatant self-vertisement. Try mine: http://www.sff.net/people/N7DR or http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001HD36FU. You will not find the kind of errors you mention. I work very, very hard on the content of my books and the formating for the hard-copy versions (I use plain TeX). The weak point is formatting for the e-book versions. I hate the lack of control. It's still better than most of the others I've seen, but it's far from the perfection I seek in other aspects of my creations.

The huge problem is how to distinguish oneself from the dross that, as you say, fills the self-published universe. I haven't got that figured out at all.

I can't understand why we're seriously discussing this.

Perhaps because the decision to use drugs the very first time (and not to seek treatment) belongs to the person. Very few people in the world become addicts because some Men in Black forcibly injected them. But practically every addict becomes one because he seeks more pleasure.

If you have free will you can use drugs or jump off the bridge or do none of that. You are free to choose. Of course once you stepped on some path you may trigger events that are hard to reverse. If you are jumping off the bridge, it's not easy to reverse your decision mid-fall. But that only means that you have no decision point there.

Denying what drugs do to a person [...] is beyond moronic.

Nobody denies that. If you go and stick your arm into the furnace you will get burned - but you are free (and stupid) to do that.

and what they will do to loads of people if this legalization happens

That is a different question. The reason why we are discussing it lies in fact that the war on drugs is a failure. Any reasonable person would have to ask "what else can we do to fix the problem?

One answer to that (not necessarily the best or the only one) is to legalize drugs and allow the weak-willed people to kill themselves with them if they don't choose to seek treatment. The rest will stay away from drugs naturally.

The war on drugs cultivates personal irresponsibility, and on top of that it creates a huge crime wave. The crime wave hits innocents - people who don't do drugs, have jobs and have valuables in their homes. The more important members of the society are sacrificed for pleasure of less important members of the society. Black is white, and so on.

From everything that doctors say - and from what your own post says - drug addicts are nearly hopeless. They can't get jobs, they can't work, they can't earn money honestly, and their existence is dependent on a steady supply of drugs. Why don't then we admit that those guys are dead men walking? Why should we hold them at the threshold? Read again the short story called The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar - it is a perfect fit here.

I don't pretend to have a well thought out plan. But the basics of it are simple. Anyone willing to take drugs should first go through a course where physicians explain - and show on addicts in final stages of the disease - what happens if you take drugs. Then you are given a card that says you have been duly informed and now it's up to you to choose.

Then if you want you go to a clinic where for a small fee (if not free) you can inject yourself with a drug of your choice. You will then remain in the clinic (in a cell, more likely) until the effects of the drug are gone and you are not a danger to yourself and others.

Perhaps this is inconvenient for new users, and that's how it should be. But a junkie in a need of injection will not think twice about going to the clinic. A King is used to dine in his palace, but when he is hungry he will gladly go to a fast food joint.

The reason for all that is simple: people want to use drugs. No war can fix that. We can only change the people - something that no society on this planet was able to do, ever - or we can remove those people from the society. If they want they can stay behind walls, in refurbished prisons, and be fed as much drugs as they want, for the rest of their lives. I don't want them dead, I want them out of my life. They have no moral right to take drugs *and* stay in the society of normal people. It's a choice, and they are free to make it.

Jump kits (Go bags)
You put 'em by the door for when you have to rock'n'roll.
http://www.sff.net/people/doylemacdonald/emerg_kit.htm

I'd like to see (or participate in) a study to determine whether Googling on everything but a specific focus area can help concentrate mental faculties on that area. Something like Joe Haldeman's excellent short story "None So Blind".

I think it's time to post a link to this story again.

See http://www.sff.net/people/teaston/front7.htp. The piece appeared in 1998, but it's relevant.

Geoffrey Landis is a liar that often writes and tells stories that never happened. He has lots of works that are nothing but fictional. He even claims to own race horses when he doesn't.

Now it is true that you write Scifi and tell stories that transcends mental acuity right? So did I just tell the truth or did I attempt to maliciously smear your name? You did write that " I do have a horse or two in both of the races" didn't you?

The problem is that the truth is often a rendition of fact or an opinion to be blunt. If I read one of your stories and decided that could never happen, I could say that you were lieing. However, a normal person would see them as one of your works of Science Fiction and you would probably want it viewed that way.

So the question is, does the truth set me free? Do you actually write and tell stories that aren't true, never happened, or possible could never happen? Or was that statement about you being a liar a malicious intent to insult your good name. The truth is, you do write and tell stories that aren't true. And yes, my intent was to show you how the truth shouldn't always be a validation for a defense of libel. The truth is interpreted.

All guesting aside, Geoffrey Landis is a great Scifi writer (I just talked with someone who read one of your works and strongly suggest I should too) and a pretty knowledgeable scientist that has done some great work with the various mars programs at nasa from all that I can tell about him. I only picked on him to show how the truth can be misinterpreted and applied in ways that probably shouldn't automatically vindicate someone of libel. Nothing I said was incorrect except for maybe the liar part where his fiction is presented as that, but someone could miss the presentation and mistake his fiction as one of his scientific endeavors.

If the intent of the statement is malicious, I see no reason not to hold someone liable to it. Often the truth is a matter of opinion. Take the Stapples case for instance, they labeled the guy a thief for not presenting all his receipts. He claims he is a sloppy record keeper and all the reimbursements were justified. Without the receipts, someone took the opinion that he was stealing from the company and the facts back that up. If he finds the receipts, does that make the person's statement any less accurate given the information availible at the time when the truth was he was a bad record keeper and simply didn't provide the proper documentation?

There is no absolutes when dealing with the truth. Especially when the truth is actually a collection of events being interpreted by someone who has to make a decision. This is most evident in car accidents witnessed by people viewing from different angles. There is always something that the other person didn't see or saw differently and it is common to have statements that conflict on who was at fault because of that. It's a flaw in humans that make us colorful because we interpret what we take in and process that information based on our own experiences, training, and whatever else that had made us unique individuals.

Speaking of car accidents, I saw one where someone got T-boned going through an intersection. I was waiting to cross the road when it happened and after giving the statements to the police, an officer came around to see how sure I was that the car had a green light. It appears that the other witnesses claimed the other car had the green light. The traffic light was actually malfunctioning and while we talked about who had the green light, another officer noticed that both light turned green for half a cycle. It appeared that every 5 or 6 cycles, the light would give all directions a green light for around 15-20 seconds. The interesting thing is that we just assumed the other light was red because that's how it works normally. To say someone ran a red light and caused an accident would have ordinarily been a naturally truthful statement until we saw what was going on. This is yet another example of how the truth is often opinions based around facts and not necessarily just fact.

I haven't seen it yet, but I'm going to see it as soon as I can. I was hoping this wouldn't get screwed up, and signs indicate that it hasn't.

The surest way to screw it up would have been to get Tim Burton or Paul Verhoeven to direct it; they don't seem to be able to make a movie based on a book without wanting to change things and put their own fingerprints on it. (I'd love to watch a Starship Troopers movie. Too bad we didn't actually get one.)

Verhoeven thought the militarism of the the Starship Troopers and their absolute contempt for their enemies reminds him of the SS troopers that "invaded his homeland". His version of Starship Troopers is a parody. The Federation in the movie are the bad guys, they've started an unnecessary war and vastly underestimated their opponent's strengths. What we're watching at the start of the movie is propaganda from inside a fascist society that is in the middle of its own version of the Nazis defeat at Stalingrad. Now I know the Heinlein was no Nazi, but I think the idea that only veterans can vote would be more likely to lead to an militarist, imperialist society than the libertarian one he presumably favoured. Heinlein's design principle for society was wrong. What I liked about the movie was the way it was marketed as Beverly Hills in space versus big bugs, but it's actually much darker. As Verhoeven put it "we used to to joke that action movies are fascist so I decided to make a fascist action movie".

That article at sff.net you linked to completely misses this. You miss this too, even though after 9/11 I saw numerous conversation on American TV which seemed to echo this scene

NET CORRESPONDENT: Some say the bugs were provoked by human attempts to colonize within the AQZ, that a "live and let live" policy is preferable to war with the bugs...
JOHNNY Yeah, well, I'm from Buenos Aires, and I say kill'em all

The movie even slyly reminds us the 'hero' flunked math. Verhoeven is subverting the action movie idea that the hero is always right and everything would be ok if he had absolute power. The Führerprinzip of most action movies in fact.

It's sort of bizarre that people who claim to like Watchmen because it subverts the superhero idea can't see that the Starship Troopers movie is a parody of the novel, it's not meant to be a faithful adaptation.

I haven't seen it yet, but I'm going to see it as soon as I can. I was hoping this wouldn't get screwed up, and signs indicate that it hasn't.

The surest way to screw it up would have been to get Tim Burton or Paul Verhoeven to direct it; they don't seem to be able to make a movie based on a book without wanting to change things and put their own fingerprints on it. (I'd love to watch a Starship Troopers movie. Too bad we didn't actually get one.)

Everyone agrees that a perfect, 100% faithful adaptation is impossible, unless you do it as a miniseries that is around 12 hours long. The best we can hope for is that the screenwriter and director do a good job of streamlining the story and keeping the important parts intact. Kevin Smith says that this has been done.

I've read several reviews, and they illustrate how impossible it is to walk the tightrope. The movie keeps large chunks of the original dialog intact, and reviews have complained about dialog-heavy, boring long scenes. As a fan of Alan Moore's writing, I'm expecting that I will like or love these "boring" scenes. You can't please everyone.

I read an interview with the director, Zack Snyder. He said the movie studios pushed on him to cut some of the more shocking scenes, such as a rape, and a scene where a pregnant woman gets shot; but the scenes were important to the story, and he got them kept in. In the book, the alienation of Dr. Manhatten is shown visually in the way he stops bothering to wear clothes; this is kept as well. The pirate-themed side story would have made the movie too long... but they filmed it anyway and it will be available as its own feature on DVD.

I read that Zack Snyder gave each actor a copy of the graphic novel, and authorized them to edit their characters' dialog to more closely match the graphic novel. I have real hope that this movie will make me happy as a Watchmen fan.

P.S. Alan Moore is not happy with it, but as far as I can tell, he is automatically not happy with any attempt to turn his work into a movie. You could get Peter Jackson with an unlimited budget, and he still would not be happy. I read that they offered to have him help with the adaptation, but he declined. (Which makes perfect sense... that way he can complain about everything, and no one can say "well, you had the power to change that, why didn't you?")

steveha

I started writing books (novels and textbooks) when all I had was a typewriter. Since then using XyWrite and now Word, I've written fifty or so books. Given that experience, I would say that while the things you list would sometimes be nice to have, none are essential. Take notes as necessary and maintain tiered backups (today, yesterday, last week, last month), and you should be fine. At the moment I'm working on a book on 3D printing (Futurist article available below). Initially, I gave each chapter its own file. As the chapters approached final form, I merged all into a single file, which is now (thanks to illos) over 16Meg. Tom Easton http://www.sff.net/people/teaston/

Rather than having the LEM-like vehicle rendezvous with the cycler directly, it might dock with a CSM-like vehicle left in Mars orbit, and the combination might then rendezvous with the cycler. There's no point in dropping all the fuel needed for the cycler rendezvous to the surface of Mars and then launch it again.

That's only true if you're sending the fuel from Earth. If you're producing your fuel on Mars, then you might as well carry it up into orbit with you. See http://www.sff.net/people/Geoffrey.Landis/propellant.html for more details.

It appears that he also has been on Mars

http://www.sff.net/people/geoffrey.landis/Geoff+Spirit.JPG

http://www.sff.net/people/geoffrey.landis/
http://mit.edu/aeroastro/www/people/landis/landis.html

You're at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology and can not practice simple internet privacy.

elle oh elle to you, good sir.

Aside from all the great ones already mentioned, I really enjoyed the "Circle of Magic" series by Deborah Doyle. Re-released a few years ago, and has a level of detail that appeals to the physicist in me, while still being very readable for a 10 year old!

Please read "Permutation city". Very good book, better than matrix IMHO. And it directly mentions raytracing.

This quote, about how science is actually done, is one I put on my quotable quotes page. It's worth reminding people that the "eureak" model of science is a little bit simplistic.

"The work of real science is hard and often for long intervals frustrating...
"Keep in mind that new ideas are commonplace, and almost always wrong. Most flashes of insight lead nowhere; statistically, they have a half-life of hours or maybe days. Most experiments to follow up the surviving insights are tedious and consume large amounts of time, only to yield negative or (worse!) ambiguous results.""

-Edward O. Wilson
"Scientists, Scholars, Knaves, and Fools," in American Scientist 86 (1998)

But, as has been pointed out by Michael White, journalism is more about a "good story" than about accuracy about how science is done.

• Egregious Oversights - According to one of the scientists working on the project:

  We actually had built a dust experiment to test out some methods of removing dust. It had been scheduled to fly on the Mars-2001 Surveyor Lander, but the 2001 lander mission was cancelled after the failure of the 1999 Polar Lander (which used the same basic spacecraft design). In fact, we talked about dust removal technology for the MER, but it simply turned out that the most reliable solution was to increase the size of the panels so that they would still be at nominal power after 90 days worth of calculated dust accumulation.

• Billion-Dollar-Probes - Cost: Approximately $820 million total (for both rovers)
  $645 million for design/development + $100 million for the Delta launch vehicle and the launch + $75 million for mission operations
• Cars on the moon - Didn't have solar panels.
• insurmountability - No one claims the problem was insurmountable.
• Burt Rutan - Aerospace Engineer. He could probably make the rovers fly in the Martian Atmosphere, but wouldn't be able to help much with the dust.
• engineers at any major oil company - These engineers don't tend to work with solar panels, but with the massive profits available to these companies, bending their R&D budgets towards a dust-removal system would probably have some great conclusions as well.
• fucking dusters - Significantly more complex than just a fucking duster will be able to remove. Don't think 'dust' think 'grime'.

4. Draw Conclusions and recognize stupidity
The hardest part of this process is recognizing stupidity where it lies. I can't do this for you, so I'll leave this as an assigned exercise.
5. Actually make excuse for stupidity to public
The creative task involves coming up with a good excuse. The best aren't pious but sincere and have a dose of self-depreciative humor, which shows your recognition of the mistake, preferably with a solution to not repeating it, the best explanation for the mistake, newfound understanding, and your willi

It's a little hard to tell from this very brief article, but what he calls "phantom matter" is what other physicists call "exotic matter" or sometimes "negative matter," which violates one of the positive energy-conditions, and thus has negative energy (in some reference frame). Matt Visser's book Lorentzian Wormholes has a lot more technical details about the various formulations of the positive-energy conditions.

I didn't think to try Dutch to Hebrew, though!

I have this thing against explosive decompression...

where men were moved from a crippled spaceship to a functional one, without vac suits. This has a link to a 1931 story about surviving vacuum.

• Human Exposure to Vacuum, Geoffrey A. Landis
  
• Human Body in a Vacuum, NASA's Ask an Astrophysicist
  
• Effects of unprotected exposure to space on Wikipedia
  

As I understand it, lung tissue isn't a one way passage for oxygen and carbon dioxide, it simply equalizes the partial pressures of these two gasses between the air in the lungs and the bloodstream. Used venous blood has excess carbon dioxide and depleted oxygen relative to inhaled air, so the CO2 gets dumped and O2 gets picked up.

In the case of a lung full of vacuum both CO2 and O2 would be dumped into the lungs. Pretty well cleaning out any and all gasses from the bloodstream, making the blood delivered by the arteries useless. I wonder if you'd last longer if your heart simply stopped right away.

from http://www.sff.net/people/Geoffrey.Landis/vacuum.h tml

"The time of consciousness after loss of cabin pressure is reduced due to offgassing of oxygen from venous blood to the lungs. Hypoxia is the most immediate problem following a decompression."

... by Geoffrey A. Landis, "I first starting putting together this information as a list of references back in the late 80s, when I was a postdoc, and then posted much of it as a contribution to the sci.space FAQ (along with contributions from several others, most notably Henry Spencer). Then when the FAQ was offline for an extended period, but people kept asking the same questions, I put this page online as a web page to which I could refer questions. Since then a number of other sources of information have popped up on the web (many of them quoting from this page), but I've tried to keep this up to date.".

Quote: "Landis holds undergraduate degrees in physics and electrical engineering from MIT and a Ph.D. in solid-state physics from Brown University. He works for the NASA John Glenn Research Center, where he does research on Mars missions, solar energy[1], and advanced concepts for interstellar propulsion. He holds seven patents [2], and has published more than 300 scientific papers[3] in the fields of astronautics and photovoltaics. He was a member of the Rover team on the Mars Pathfinder mission, and is a member of the science team on the 2003 Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) mission. In 2005-2006, he was the Ronald E. McNair Visiting Professor of Astronautics at MIT."

How history repeats itself.

CC.

Would You Freeze?

No.

A couple of recent Hollywood films showed people instantly freezing solid when exposed to vacuum. In one of these, the scientist character mentioned that the temperature was "minus 273"-- that is, absolute zero.

But in a practical sense, space doesn't really have a temperature-- you can't measure a temperature on a vacuum, something that isn't there. The residual molecules that do exist aren't enough to have much of any effect. Space isn't "cold," it isn't "hot", it really isn't anything.

What space is, though, is a very good insulator. (In fact, vacuum is the secret behind thermos bottles.) Astronauts tend to have more problem with overheating than keeping warm.

If you were exposed to space without a spacesuit, your skin would most feel slightly cool, due to water evaporating off you skin, leading to a small amount of evaporative cooling. But you wouldn't freeze solid!

The conscensus seems to be consciousness for 10-15 seconds, no serious injury for 60 seconds to 2 minutes.

Not surprising to me - I wrote all about it in my 2003 science fiction novel, The Pixel Eye ...

On the subject of partial-body vacuum exposure, the results are not quite as serious. In 1960, during a high-altitude balloon parachute-jump, a partial-body vacuum exposure incident occurred when Joe Kittinger, Jr. lost pressurization in his right glove during an ascent to 103,000 ft (19.5 miles) in an unpressurized balloon gondola, Despite the depressurization, he continued the mission, and although the hand became painful and useless, after he returned to the ground, his hand returned to normal. Kittinger wrote in National Geographic (November 1960):

And it goes on. Found at http://www.sff.net/people/Geoffrey.Landis/vacuum.h tml linked in another comment.

Animal testing gives good data. A summary:

http://www.sff.net/people/Geoffrey.Landis/vacuum.h tml

Maybe we need an anti-phishing motto along the lines of publishing's "money flows towards the writer" (aka Yog's Law). Something like "you travel to the bank, the bank doesn't travel to you" to discourage unsuspecting email link clickers.

Automatically generate world content from templates.

See, that wasn't so hard. Choose the theme for a new area from a list of the kinds of areas you have templates made for. Bandit camp, visiting caravan, newly discovered underground area, whatever. Choose the race of bad guys who live there. Populate the area based on the spawn table for that race.

The plotline in current MMORPGs are drawn from a small pool of ideas, so just make a list of plot elements for the game genre, and have nearby NPCs generate random quests for that area, for basic content to get started with. This will gove adventurers an in-character reason to explore the new area.

Then choose a goal for the bad guys from a list for that kind of new area. Sacking a town, finding the Dingus of Great Power, whatever. Set a time limit. If some adventurer discovers what's going on in time to stop it, and defeats the enemy leaders, the world changes and the area goes away, becomes ruins, whatever's appropriate. If no one discovers the plot in time, the bad guys *succeed* and the nearby town is destroyed, the Dingus of Great Power is used to summon a demon that ravages the landscape, whatever. There are only 20 or so fantasy adventure plots anyhow, it's easy enough to automate.

Because it's all auto-generated from templates, you can make your world big enough that you don't have thousands of adventurers sumbling across every square inch of landscape every day, so you can have enough content that new areas last a while. Also, when it's trivial to add randomly generated world content, it's pretty easy to turn a writer's ideas into world content. No more "3 days to write a good idea, 3 months for world design and artwork".

Jerry Oltion wrote in his short story -
"The Best Laid Plans", Analog SF September 2005
who:
http://www.sff.net/people/J.Oltion/
where:
http://www.fictionwise.com/ebooks/eBook32371.htm

About humanity starting the terraforming of Mars, and......

Apple isn't going to take on Microsoft. First Apple knows better than to waste their time trying to make an OS that supports every damn accessory; card or plugged in; as that only invites frustration on the consumer level.

They have labored under the misconception that they are a hardware company for years -- and it cost them world domination. If Apple had thought of themselves as a software company back in the early eighties Microsoft wouldn't have stood a chance. Seriously. Gates would still be selling computer languages and maybe an office productivity suite or two. But ninety percent of the world's PC's wouldn't be running Windoze. I wrote up a little allegory called 'Coffee and Donuts' about this phenomenon a while back. Basically the truth isn't that Gates won by making a better product. We already know that isn't the case. So what was the secret? He won by simply understanding the market better.

And the PC market isn't there because of the hardware, no matter how cool it is.

Space is a complete vaccuum, just like the kind in thermos bottles, and it's a VERY good thermal insulant. If your arm is at 37C, and you stick it in the best insulant possible, it will remain at 37C.

Your overall picture is correct, according to authorities like this. But your physics is too simplistic.

Yeah, but going from 10m to 0m is going from 2 atm to 1 atm. The scenario in the parent is going from 1 atm to 0 atm. If multiples matter instead of absolute pressure differential, things might behave pretty badly as your denominator approaches zero. In fact, this site http://www.sff.net/people/Geoffrey.Landis/vacuum.h tml says you lose consciousness in a vacuum in under 10 seconds and die in about 90 seconds.

Tangent: I don't think they pressurize space craft, or aircraft for that matter fully to 1 atm. For example, there's a need to pop equalize your ears as aircraft take off and land, just like when diving. The shuttle is pressurized to ~25% of pressure at sea level. For more, see this very informative page. http://ares.jsc.nasa.gov/HumanExplore/Exploration/ EXLibrary/DOCS/EIC017.HTML

(About the whole sci-fi films becomeing action movies and Michael Bay's lack-of-talent, and Vin Diesel).

IMHO, Bay's (from all 3 films I've seen - "Bad Boys" 1 & 2, and "The Rock") an okay director. The Bad Boys films were enjoyable, because Will Smith and Martin Lawrence wre funny in them, and big explosions didn't hurt things too much. And, frankly, The Island can only be an improvement on it's source material.

And I kind of thought of the whole Riddick series (especially if you ignore the Theatrical Cut of Chronicles of Riddick and count the Director's Cut instead), as sort of being Conan in space. (Think about it, of all the people with ray-guns and "gravity guns" or whatever the Necromongers were using, the one who does the most damage uses, almost exclusively, knives.)

But now that I've got that out of my system, I can get to the part where I agree with you on something. Yeah, TV needs a break from new Star Trek (by all means, keep re-running DS9 and TNG, and the last season of Enterprise). My Generation has grown up in a world where Star Trek has always been on TV. We need a break, so that Berman and Braga can retire or move on to other things. A series can survive this, fandom-wise. Just look at Doctor Who! Just so long as there are novels with new characters (or lesser characters, as the case may be), and (hopefully), the bookstores will keep them on the shelves, fandom will endure.

Wouldn't it be cheaper, easier, and more effective to, I don't know, build energy systems that don't release carbon? Just a thought.

Sure. Solar Power Satellites. Large arrays of solar cells assembled in earth orbit and the energy beamed to earth via microwave. And no, it will not be a "death ray". The beam footprint would be miles across with a power density a mere fraction of sunlight. See Geoffrey Landis papers and The SSP Monitor, or do a google.

The Neuromancer is a great book. Another read that I really enjoyed and happens to be exactly on topic is "Permutation City" by Greg Egan. I'm posting a non-affiliate Amazon link below.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/sim-explorer/ explore-items/-/006105481X/0/101/1/none/purchase/r ef%3Dpd_sxp_r0/102-8039472-0160938

"The good news is that you have just awakened into Eternal Life. You are going to live forever. Immortality is a reality. A medical miracle? Not exactly.

The bad news is that you are a scrap of electronic code. The world you see around you, the you that is seeing it, has been digitized, scanned, and downloaded into a virtual reality program. You are a Copy that knows it is a copy.

The good news is that there is a way out. By law, every Copy has the option of terminating itself, and waking up to normal flesh-and-blood life again. The bail-out is on the utilities menu. You pull it down...

The bad news is that it doesn't work. Someone has blocked the bail-out option. And you know who did it. You did. The other you. The real you. The one that wants to keep you here forever. "

There are also reviews available. And, no, I have no relation to the author or publisher or whatever.

card actually teaches the occasional class and does writer workshops that help new voices in SciFi move forward...so though his opinions may be dated, he's not an isolationist and he's definitely giving back to the community (i'm gay and pro-card o_O)....and not just low-talent ones. a guy i went to college with attended his spring break class at ASU a few years back and is now an associate editor at locus--not that card changed his life or anything, but im sure the class and insight didnt hurt. tim's little gods collection is pretty damn good imho. can't wait for the rangergirl novel tim pratt

(I told that guy he'd attract attention, but no, he had to have his damn garden)

Loss of consciousness in 10 to 15 seconds. Kills in say, 2 minutes. See here.

In addition to the free RTF download and the PDF (this URL works only intermittently), you can get a free download in Rocket, Windows, and Palm formats of ATLANTA NIGHTS by Travis Tea from Embiid.com.

Vera

Yes, I am one of the thirty-odd writers who collectively make up "Travis Tea," a pseudonym (and a pun -- say it outloud). :-)

Here is some background on this wacky collaborative sting project that we cobbled together.

Several months ago, in response to a claim by a certain publisher that writers working in the SF/F genre believe it "does not require believable storylines" or "does not need believable every-day characters," genre writer James D. Macdonald got approximately 40 mostly science fiction and fantasy writers to cobble together an intentionally horrendous monstrosity of a novel (read it here as an FTP download in RTF and PDF format) and then submit it, in order to display the less than discriminating tastes of that same certain publisher in regard to the kind of work they accept for publication.

Earlier last week, the sting has been revealed, the publisher fell for it (retracting the acceptance as soon as news spread, of course), and I proudly own up to having authored Chapter 13 of ATLANTA NIGHTS by Travis Tea .

Here's a bit of an excerpt from my chapter:

"Actually, I think I am ready to order now," said Isadore, firmly ignoring it all, flipping back his red forelocks out of his face and beyond the back to where the bulk of the abundant and suggestive ponytail rested against his wide strongly utterly virile back -- a back that could do the beast with two backs so well, when one of the two backs came into question and under scrutiny (but the other back of course depended on the woman writhing with him, under him and on top of him ah, the beasts they would make!).

Yes, you can even buy your own copy at Lulu.com to read for gut-wrenching hilarity and educational purposes (lessons on how not to write can be derived from the perusal of this book). Here is the stellar lineup of blurbs from the back cover. And that's just the ones that fit the back cover. There are twice as many additional blurbs inside the front matter of the book. Some of them are truly classic....

I predict this will replace THE EYE OF ARGON as midnight panel reading material at science fiction conventions. This book, is purely and genuinely bad. So bad that it's great. In all seriousness, The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest should give it a special achievement prize. :-)

For more detailed coverage, including a list of contributors, of the ATLANTA NIGHTS atrocity -- or should we say, travesty -- see the Cold Ground blog , and Tor Books editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden's Making Light . ..

Also, looks like the LA Times has picked up the story .

:-)

Vera Nazarian

Yes, I am one of the thirty-odd writers who collectively make up "Travis Tea," a pseudonym (and a pun -- say it outloud). :-)

Here is some background on this wacky collaborative sting project that we cobbled together.

Several months ago, in response to a claim by a certain publisher that writers working in the SF/F genre believe it "does not require believable storylines" or "does not need believable every-day characters," genre writer James D. Macdonald got approximately 40 mostly science fiction and fantasy writers to cobble together an intentionally horrendous monstrosity of a novel (read it here as an FTP download in RTF and PDF format) and then submit it, in order to display the less than discriminating tastes of that same certain publisher in regard to the kind of work they accept for publication.

Earlier last week, the sting has been revealed, the publisher fell for it (retracting the acceptance as soon as news spread, of course), and I proudly own up to having authored Chapter 13 of ATLANTA NIGHTS by Travis Tea .

Here's a bit of an excerpt from my chapter:

"Actually, I think I am ready to order now," said Isadore, firmly ignoring it all, flipping back his red forelocks out of his face and beyond the back to where the bulk of the abundant and suggestive ponytail rested against his wide strongly utterly virile back -- a back that could do the beast with two backs so well, when one of the two backs came into question and under scrutiny (but the other back of course depended on the woman writhing with him, under him and on top of him ah, the beasts they would make!).

Yes, you can even buy your own copy at Lulu.com to read for gut-wrenching hilarity and educational purposes (lessons on how not to write can be derived from the perusal of this book). Here is the stellar lineup of blurbs from the back cover. And that's just the ones that fit the back cover. There are twice as many additional blurbs inside the front matter of the book. Some of them are truly classic....

I predict this will replace THE EYE OF ARGON as midnight panel reading material at science fiction conventions. This book, is purely and genuinely bad. So bad that it's great. In all seriousness, The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest should give it a special achievement prize. :-)

For more detailed coverage, including a list of contributors, of the ATLANTA NIGHTS atrocity -- or should we say, travesty -- see the Cold Ground blog , and Tor Books editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden's Making Light . ..

Also, looks like the LA Times has picked up the story .

:-)

Vera Nazarian

Here's the RTF version since the PDF seems to be down:

ftp://ftp.sff.net/pub/people/doylemacdonald/sting/ StingManuscript.rtf

Your blood is at a higher pressure than the outside environment. A typical blood pressure might be 75/120. The "75" part of this means that between heartbeats, the blood is at a pressure of 75 Torr (equal to about 100 mbar) above the external pressure. If the external pressure drops to zero, at a blood pressure of 75 Torr the boiling point of water is 46 degrees Celsius (115 F). This is well above body temperature of 37 C (98.6 F). Blood won't boil, because the elastic pressure of the blood vessels keeps it it a pressure high enough that the body temperature is below the boiling point-- at least, until the heart stops beating (at which point you have other things to worry about!). (To be more pedantic, blood pressure varies depending on where in the body it is measured, so the above statement should be understood as a generalization. However, the effect of small pockets of localized vapor is to increase the pressure. In places where the blood pressure is lowest, the vapor pressure will rise until equilibrium is reached. The net result is the same.)

Hmmmm... turns out, there actually is data on animals (intentionally) and humans (accidentally) exposed to a vacuum.

• You'd lose consciousness after about ten seconds
• Your blood would NOT boil.
• Your body would swell up to about twice its normal volume, but this could be constrained by an elastic body suit.
• You'd want to open your mouth: If you tried to hold your breath, your lungs would balloon up and rupture.

Details of all this here