Posted in Global Warming, Going Paperless, Kindle, Magazines, Newspapers on February 26, 2008 | 2 Comments »
When my Time magazine renewal came in recently I decided not to renew. I had been paying about $29 a year and now it was $49, and I thought that too much. Then on Saturday I saw the new issue at my favorite bookstore and wanted to read it, but I passed on it thinking [...]
Posted in Blogging, Writing on February 24, 2008 | 5 Comments »
Philip Pullman created a wonderful fantasy invention in The Golden Compass when he imagined humans having a dæmon as an external soul to share their lives. His Dark Materials I believe is the largest selling recent fantasy series after the Harry Potter books, so the idea must really appeal to many people. It’s a crying [...]
Posted in Astronomy, Science on February 24, 2008 | 1 Comment »
The other night while waiting to visit Slumberland, I lay in my bed thinking about Einstein. Long ago before people knew the Earth was round, people imagined our world to be a vast plane. Some people imagined the plane to be infinite in all directions and others speculated finding the edge and falling off. Then [...]
Posted in Global Warming, Science Fiction on February 23, 2008 | 6 Comments »
I’ve yet to read any science fiction extrapolating stories about the effects of global warming. The Road by Cormac McCarthy could be about global warming but it could also be about anything that brings on the collapse of civilization. So I jumped over to Google and searched on ["science fiction" "global warming"] and discovered there [...]
Posted in Global Warming, Least Popular on February 21, 2008 | No Comments »
I’ve enjoyed a lot of embedded film clips on the blogs I read so I thought I’d experiment and try to embed a clip here, unfortunately I learned through trial and error and the FAQ page at WordPress that Flash videos are a no-no. That’s too bad. If you want to watch the film I’m [...]
Posted in Magazines, Science Fiction on February 21, 2008 | 1 Comment »
My favorite SF/F magazine, Fantasy & Science Fiction is getting a lot of attention this week because of their new blog. I’ve been reading this magazine since the mid 1960s and I eventually collected most of the issues back to the early 1950s. Sad to say I had to sell my collection during lean college [...]
Posted in Computers, Fiction, Information, Inventions, Kindle, Science Fiction on February 20, 2008 | 2 Comments »
I’ve always loved science fiction but keeping up with the genre is a big damn job. I constantly worry I’m going to miss a breakthrough novel with the impact of Neuormancer or The Life of Pi or Replay just because I was wasn’t keeping up with the times.
As a young bookworm I read several [...]
Posted in Global Warming on February 18, 2008 | 12 Comments »
For many people the thought that humans are the cause of global warming is unbelievable. Some refuse to believe, others can’t believe. I’ve always wondered why. Sometimes I think it might be a religious issue. If you believe in God and believe that God takes care of us, why would he allow us to do [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on February 16, 2008 | 2 Comments »
There’s a major difference between science fiction and fantasy. Both work with the “What if…” hypothesis, but there should be a distinct difference in intent that the reader should recognize. The Sci-Fi writer might say, “What if we could travel to the planets?” Whereas the fantasy writer might say, “What if fairies lived in Central [...]
Posted in Least Popular on February 12, 2008 | No Comments »
Last night I had another dinosaur dream. I dreamed I was with two people that time traveled to the past and lived in a large compound. In this dream I was my making my first jump to the past and was being shown around by the others. The opening scene I shifted from now to then and sat with two other people at [...]
