Michael Flynn’s third installment in his January Dancer series falters nae a bit, with such lines as these:
“A faint band of red has cut the throat of night and bleeds across the eastern horizon.”
I’m only half through this one but it’s already safe to say it’s as good as the first two about the Fair-haired Donovan, and well worth your time if you like complex, near-literary Celtic space opera.
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Posted in Library, Science/Engineering, Space
Tagged In The Lion's Mouth, January Dancer series, Michael Flynn, space opera
Now we know their problem. They’re blinded by all the “snow”, obviously.
UPDATE: Make that thirty-five pounds of cocaine, in hollowed-out text books, found in bags in the UN mail room.
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Posted in Israel, Science/Engineering, Scribbles, The War
Tagged nuclear Iran, thirty pounds of cocaine at UN, UN
A world where free-fall is normal and gravity is a luxury you have to pay for. A world where sunlight is not available to all and even those who have the machines that produce it have to get used to full-dark hours of sun-off with no moonlight. Some even live in full-dark all the time.
Virga, life inside a Fullerene balloon thousands of miles in diameter, on the edge of the Vega solar system, is scifi author Karl Schroeder’s five-book (so far) series of swashbuckling tales. This is steampunk Victoriana where computers and other electronic devices cannot exist—unless a crucial part of the central “sun of suns” is turned off.
Great stuff, truly, though it’s not a future world I would care to actually live in, unlike the future world of Jack McDevitt’s Alex Benedict detective series. Virga’s hard science instructs as the romance entertains and the characters introspect, change and grow.
Well worth your time and money to read the first in the epic and don’t be surprised if you find yourself hooked. Unfortunately, they are fast reads. They go lickety-split. Having finished No. 4, a cliff-hanger, I must now wait until Valentine’s Day to receive No. 5. Sigh.
Comments Off on Virga: Cities of the Air
Posted in Library, Science/Engineering, Scribbles
Tagged Karl Schroeder, science fiction, Vega, Virga
Mrs. Charm survived her recent inflamed appendix and her recovery from the surprise surgery has been going well. And she never ate grass (or leaves) to begin with so she doesn’t miss the vestigial organ.
Not that it would help her digest grass or leaves, if she was so inclined, any more than my intact appendix (assuming I even have one; some people don’t) would help me do so now.
When the evolution of, well, evolution made our appendix an anatomical anomaly, it removed the sort of bacteria that once populated it enabling us to digest the cellular structure of grass and leaves in times of famine.
Can’t say I would miss it any more than the vanished tail that once was attached to my tailbone. Ah, but the atrophied muscles that once allowed my ears to swivel every which way, now those I could enjoy having rejuvenated.
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Posted in Science/Engineering, Scribbles
Tagged appendix, evolution of evolution, grass eating, tailbone
The (apparently) world’s first combat submarine, which few alive today have ever seen. Now you can be one of them. You’d never have gotten me in that thing. I’m the descendant of infantrymen. But I can’t help but admire the sailors who volunteered for the H.L. Hunley—and perished.
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Posted in Civil War, Sailing, Science/Engineering, Troops
Time was (it seems like only yesterday, but it was actually before 1995) if you wanted advice from an expert you had to seek them out and hope for an answer.
You could, for instance, investigate until you found their address and wrote them a letter. Or hunted them down in public and shouted your question over the heads of their security. And probably would be ignored.
Nowadays, some of them have a Facebook page and you can write out a question there and, some of them at any rate, will answer you there, or on YouTube.
Thus advice for beginner violinists from Itzhak Perlman, violin virtuoso. Yep. The advice that I remember the best (because I still have trouble following it) is to practice one or two bars of a new chart at a time and, above all, do it slowly.
Perlman: “If you learn something slowly, you forget it slowly….If you learn something very quickly, you forget it immediately.” Thanks, Itzhak.
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Posted in Blogosphere, Music, Science/Engineering, Scribbles
Tagged advice for beginning violinists, Itzhak Perlman, practice slowly
After the war the American versions flew USA airmail routes cross-country.
I used to make plastic models of these and similar planes when I was Mr. B.’s age (11 going on 12) and hang them by threads from my bedroom ceiling.
UPDATE: These birds, photographed sometime after 1918, were from Benbrook Field, southwest of Fort Worth. Photo from the Benbrook Public Library.
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Posted in Library, Science/Engineering, Scribbles
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 