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This is inside pool for publishing folks, so those of you who don’t care about that stuff can skip over this to the next post. In the last several months, I’ve noticed a couple of books coming out with blurbs from me that I didn’t remember giving — and what’s happened there is that someone […]

The 2013 Locus Awards final ballot has been announced, and as ever, it is a fabulous guide signposting some of the very best work published science fiction and fantasy in the past year -- a perfect place to start your explorations of the year's books.

I am very honored to have been included on the ballot; my novel Pirate Cinema made the Best Young Adult novel list, which is a particularly strong category this year:

* The Drowned Cities, Paolo Bacigalupi (Little, Brown; Atom)

* Pirate Cinema, Cory Doctorow (Tor Teen)

* Railsea, China Miéville (Del Rey; Macmillan)

* Dodger, Terry Pratchett (Harper; Doubleday UK)

* The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There, Catherynne M. Valente (Feiwel and Friends; Much-in-Little ’13)

See the full ballot after the jump.

2013 Locus Awards Finalists

SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL

* The Hydrogen Sonata, Iain M. Banks (Orbit US; Orbit UK)

* Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance, Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen)

* Caliban’s War, James S.A. Corey (Orbit US; Orbit UK)

* 2312, Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit US; Orbit UK)

* Redshirts, John Scalzi (Tor; Gollancz)

FANTASY NOVEL

* The Killing Moon, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit US; Orbit UK)

* The Drowning Girl, Caitlín R. Kiernan (Roc)

* Glamour in Glass, Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor)

* Hide Me Among the Graves, Tim Powers (Morrow; Corvus)

* The Apocalypse Codex, Charles Stross (Ace; Orbit UK)

YOUNG ADULT BOOK

* The Drowned Cities, Paolo Bacigalupi (Little, Brown; Atom)

* Pirate Cinema, Cory Doctorow (Tor Teen)

* Railsea, China Miéville (Del Rey; Macmillan)

* Dodger, Terry Pratchett (Harper; Doubleday UK)

* The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There, Catherynne M. Valente (Feiwel and Friends; Much-in-Little ’13)

FIRST NOVEL

* Throne of the Crescent Moon, Saladin Ahmed (DAW; Gollancz ’13)

* vN, Madeline Ashby (Angry Robot US; Angry Robot UK)

* Seraphina, Rachel Hartman (Random House; Doubleday UK)

* The Games, Ted Kosmatka (Del Rey; Titan)

* Alif the Unseen, G. Willow Wilson (Grove; Corvus)

NOVELLA

* “In the House of Aryaman, a Lonely Signal Burns”, Elizabeth Bear (Asimov’s 1/12)

* On a Red Station, Drifting, Aliette de Bodard (Immersion)

* After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall, Nancy Kress (Tachyon)

* “The Stars Do Not Lie”, Jay Lake (Asimov’s 10-11/12)

* The Boolean Gate, Walter Jon Williams (Subterranean)

NOVELETTE

* “Faster Gun”, Elizabeth Bear (Tor.com 8/12)

* “The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi”, Pat Cadigan (Edge of Infinity)

* “Close Encounters”, Andy Duncan (The Pottawatomie Giant & Other Stories)

* “Fake Plastic Trees”, Caitlín R. Kiernan (After)

* “The Lady Astronaut of Mars”, Mary Robinette Kowal (Rip-Off!)

SHORT STORY

* “The Deeps of the Sky”, Elizabeth Bear (Edge of Infinity)

* “Immersion”, Aliette de Bodard (Clarkesworld 6/12)

* “Mantis Wives”, Kij Johnson (Clarkesworld 8/12)

* “Elementals”, Ursula K. Le Guin (Tin House Fall ’12)

* “Mono No Aware”, Ken Liu (The Future Is Japanese)

ANTHOLOGY

* After, Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling, eds. (Hyperion)

* The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-ninth Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois, ed. (St. Martin’s Griffin; Robinson as The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25)

* The Future Is Japanese, Nick Mamatas & Masumi Washington, eds. (Haikasoru)

* Edge of Infinity, Jonathan Strahan, ed. (Solaris US; Solaris UK)

* The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Six, Jonathan Strahan, ed. (Night Shade)

COLLECTION

* The Best of Kage Baker, Kage Baker (Subterranean)

* Shoggoths in Bloom, Elizabeth Bear (Prime)

* At the Mouth of the River of Bees, Kij Johnson (Small Beer)

* The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories Volume One: Where on Earth and Volume Two: Outer Space, Inner Lands, Ursula K. Le Guin (Small Beer)

* The Dragon Griaule, Lucius Shepard (Subterranean)

MAGAZINE

* Asimov’s

* F&SF

* Tor.com

* Clarkesworld

* Subterranean

PUBLISHER

* Tor

* Subterranean Press

* Orbit

* Baen

* Angry Robot

EDITOR

* John Joseph Adams

* Ellen Datlow

* Gardner Dozois

* Jonathan Strahan

* Ann & Jeff VanderMeer

ARTIST

* Donato Giancola

* Stephan Martiniere

* John Picacio

* Shaun Tan

* Michael Whelan

NON-FICTION

* An Exile on Planet Earth, Brian Aldiss (Bodleian Library)

* Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010, Damien Broderick & Paul Di Filippo, eds. (NonStop)

* Distrust That Particular Flavor, William Gibson (Putnam)

* The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, Edward James & Farah Mendlesohn, eds. (Cambridge University Press)

* Some Remarks, Neal Stephenson (Morrow)

ART BOOK

* Spectrum 19: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art, Cathy Fenner & Arnie Fenner, eds. (Underwood)

* Trolls, Brian Froud & Wendy Froud (Abrams)

* Tarzan: The Centennial Celebration, Scott Tracy Griffin (Titan)

* J.R.R. Tolkien: The Art of The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, Wayne G. Hammond & Christina Scull, eds. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

* Steampunk: An Illustrated History, Brian J. Robb (Aurum)

Very exciting news.  Here’s the Locus announcement plus the full list of categories, which includes as finalists friends like Elizabeth Bear, Cat Valente, Mary Robinette Kowal, Saladin Ahmed, China Mieville, Jay Lake, Paolo Bacigalupi and Cory Doctorow — among many others. Congratulations to all! Here are the finalists in my category of Science Fiction Novel: [...]

Which is: What is your favorite relentlessly popular song? By which I mean: The song that everyone knows (or did know, at the time), that took over the world in its day, which may or may not be good, depending on your definition of these things, but which you still listen to all the way [...]

It’s here. And it’s good; I especially like that it talks about the intentionally multi-media aspect of the novel (that’s “multi-media” not “multimedia”), because we intentionally built it from the ground up to work effectively in more than a single medium. It’s nice when people pick up on that. For those of you too busy [...]

Humans are very concerned about how we treat each other. We’re somewhat less concerned (in general) in how we treat animals of other species. What will this mean when we meet animals, not only of other species, but from other planets? At what remove will we put them to us then? It’s an interesting thought, [...]

Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) and I have both agreed and disagreed about transparency, for years. In his posting, Crime and Privacy, he has opined, for example, that "Ironically, the more the government clamps down on individual privacy, the more freedom the residents will have. When the government can detect every sort of crime, it will be forced by public opinion and by resource constraints to legalize anything it can detect but can't stop." 

Hm, well, that's right in the general gist, though wrong in the specifics. What Scott is fumbling around -- and that I made explicit in The Transparent Society (1997) -- is that universal and pervasive surveillance can take us in either of two directions.  One is toward Big Brother, if elites monopolize the omniscience and can surveil in secret, without accountability or supervision.  In that case, you get what Vernor Vinge called "ubiquitous law enforcement." And if the cops can't arrest everyone?  Then they'll cherry-pick and arrest those whom they don't like.  In the specifics, Adams is dead wrong.
But he is floundering in the right direction when he holds "that a lack of privacy would lead to fewer activities being against the law. The only reason law enforcement can afford to act against drug users, or prostitution, or gambling, for example, is because only 1% of those crimes are detectable. If police could magically know every time someone violated a drug or prostitution law, the volume would be so high they would end up ignoring the entire class of crimes for purely practical reasons. And that's where we're heading."
Still wrong! But almost there. What is missing from his vision is… citizenship. Let us assume that we remain sovereign voters and citizens, not just legally but empowered by omniscience of our own. By "sousveillance" -- the ability and fierce determination to look BACK at the mighty - of government, oligarchy, corporatcy, criminality - in effect, watching the watchmen. (I portray this in my novels, EARTH and  EXISTENCE and it is very likely. ) Suppose we get used to applying reciprocal accountability and even inserting cameras of our own - or at least trusted witnesses - even in the authorities' surveillance chambers and control rooms. In that case:
1) Cherry-picking and other abuses will be caught and deterred.
2) We will argue, debate, deliberate and change some of the laws ourselves.  Some will be abandoned, as Scott Adams describes, only by our choice, not because of some cop-laziness.
For example, if you are caught every single time you break the speed limit, and if the fine every time is $400, then you will join millions of your neighbors demanding that the system of fines be changed!  You currently pay $400 because the law assumes it is missing 99% of the speeders.  If it catches 100% of them, then rational people will negotiate a shift to a tariff system, where you pay by the mile… and by the mph… each time you hurry above the limit, but are not putting folks at risk. Deterrence that's reasonable and flexible. Um…. duh?
Here is what I find depressing. People just don't get this! Not even smart, out-of-the-box thinkers like Scott Adams. They seldom look at the society of citizens around them and see it! We never notice that 99% of the stuff… even the rules… around us is working! (Just stand at a 4-way stop sign intersection and watch a miracle at work.) Sure, complain about the wretched 1% that isn't!  I got a list of complaints that rolls out the door. But this tendency to only notice what's wrong seriously undermines our belief that we can fix things.
No wonder negotiation has broken down, in this era of dismal culture war.  We all assume the worst. We never ponder… is there a solution that we could negotiate, among ourselves, so that these trends won't rob our freedom, but enhance it?
== The matter at mean ==
The best and smartest of the topical web comics is Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (SMBC), by Zach Weiner. A recent strip illustrates the psychological state that drives elites -- even well-meaning ones -- to proclaim a need for asymmetric information flows… to know everything about us while letting us know very little about what they are doing.  In fairness, such asymmetries can be necessary at a tactical level. But you can count on the rationalizations always getting pushed beyond sense, extending secrecy as a convenience, as job security, and an expression of self-importance -- a tendency that winds up endangering citizenship and freedom.
(Another dollop of transparency wisdom from SMBC.)
We shouldn't get angry about this fundamental trait of human nature -- it is likely what you or I would do, to some degree, if we found ourselves in a position of power. But human nature is a challenge, a foundation we had no part in shaping, a hand we are dealt that can and must be improved. When it comes to surveillance by those with power we simply have to keep up a steady counter pressure, to find innovative methods for applying transparency upward (sousveillance). Watching the watchers, in ways that do not prevent them from doing their legitimate jobs.  It turns out there are such methods, just waiting for a concerted effort on our parts. Here is one example: Free the Inspectors General.
Oh, lest this focus solely on government, note that the same psychological drive affects elites of all kinds, from finance to business to social or international or criminal. Only (a slim majority of) scientists regularly practice transparency as a schooled habit. We are all human. But we must stop this old habit from destroying us. We can't afford to indulge it anymore.
== Skynet now has lasers ==
Our friends the HST (High Speed Trading) or HFT (High Frequency Trading) algorithms are at it again. A single hacked/prank tweet on the Associated Press (AP) account, declaring that the White House had been bombed and Obama injured, sent the market into an instant freefall for three minutes, far too quickly for human traders to have been involved. "That goes to show you how algorithms read headlines and create these automatic orders – you don't even have time to react as a human being."
As if we didn't already have enough reasons to dread this particular path to artificial intelligence (AI) now they are planning to equip Skynet… I mean Goldman Sachs HST systems… with lasers! Laser beam technology originally developed for the military is being rolled out to shave time off trades. It will compete with new microwave networks that are increasingly being used by traders. Ah, humans.  Marx was right about capitalists, they will sell the new overlords the rope used to hang us all.
== Transparency-related Miscellany ==
I consulted with Qualcomm about this, amid my decades long campaign to change the design of our cell phone system, so that it will continue to be useful when we'll need it most, when some disaster (local or national or global) brings down the cell towers!  Implementing one of these resilience concepts, Qualcomm hopes to boost mobile coverage with a cell phone service that uses small cellular base stations installed in homes to serve passing smartphone users.
And along similar lines, adding to our potential resilience... Ushahidi aims to build the world’s most simple, reliable, and rugged Internet connection device, but with sophisticated cloud-based features. Its BRCK hub is rugged and can connect 20 devices  with any network in the world, providing eight hours of wireless connectivity battery life
- Smart dust computers, no bigger than a snowflake, will scavenge power from their surroundings, and monitor your world. Clearly a huge predictive hit for my friend Vernor Vinge in his novel -- A Deepness in the Sky -- which explores the possibilities.  Big potential upsides await… or else downsides far worse than Orwell. Raging against such things won't stop them from being abused.  Embracing them just might.
- Hitachi Develops World's Smallest RFID Chip.  Nicknamed "Powder" or "Dust", the surface area of the new chip is a quarter of the original 0.3 x 0.3 mm, 60µm-thick chip developed by Hitachi in 2003. And this RFID chip is only one-eighth the width of the previous model.  Already the hand-wringing has begun… while clueless over  how to deal with such a world.  Clue: moaning about this won't stop it.  Elites will have it. We have one option.  Give it to us all and ensure the elites are watched with this stuff.
- How easy is it to scam the Internet with a fake persona? "Santiago Swallow" skyrocketed from a nonexistent made-up name to a Kred social influence score of 754 out of 1000, within days of being "born" online… midwifed by British technology expert Kevin Ashton (who coined the term "Internet of Things.")  For example: It didn’t take long for Mr Ashton to purchase Swallow some 90,000 followers, all for the price of $50. An automated tweeting service was used to broadcast his thoughts to the world. Image manipulation software created Swallow’s look and Mr Ashton finished his experiment by writing a fake Wikipedia entry and setting up Swallow’s own website through WordPress.
In fact, there are business opportunities for a pseudonymity-reputation conveyance service that would be an instant hit, allowing tools to overcome scams like this. Alas, the general response is hand-wringing and "what'cha gonna do?"
== Past, present and future shock ==
In his book "Present Shock: When Everything Happens NOW," Douglass Rushkoff contends we must get used to the the world arising out of Alvin Toffler's prophetically accurate "Future Shock"… a coming era when everything is happening all at once and the present becomes a cacophony of unbearable complexity. One in which the nostalgic reactions of left and right differ -- the Occupy Movement seeks an endless present of confrontation while the right wallows in apocalyptic dreams of an ending that would relieve one of having to think about complexity. And yet, both of these bickering twins express a common, underlying personality trait: anomie toward the future.
Borrowing from some of the best web-philosophers, Rushkoff calls digiphrenia - digitally provoked mental chaos.  One of many overlaps in his book with near-future problems that I portray in Existence. Such as how corporate investing in new goods or services has been replaced by relentless -- and ultimately futile -- efforts to game the markets in real time, betraying the confident foresight that is supposed to lie at the root of capitalism. The motivator (in that case) appears to be less greed than a pervasive unwillingness to grapple with the gyrations of a rapidly shifting target called the near future.
Rushkoff is a savvy writer and perceptive in his attempt at a big picture.  Alas, temporal chauvinism happens to the best of us and the tendency in "Present Shock" is to fall for the very thing he describes happening to others.  Assuming that the present is the only topic here - the only subject worthy of myopic focus.  In fact, history teaches a sobering lesson - that every major new communication medium triggered disruption alienation and pain, before eventually becoming a net force for good.
Movable type, glass lenses, radio, loudspeakers, mass media. Each time this happened, some -- like the Luddites of 18th Century Britain -- would cry fore-tellings of gloom: that commonfolk would be overloaded, their ability to process overwhelmed, or that people would drift aimlessly without the anchor of tradition. Meanwhile others -- from Giordano Bruno to Benjamin Franklin to Teilhard de Chardin -- proclaimed ecstatic joy over the prospect of expanding human powers, predicting that the process might culminate in almost godlike omniscience. Every time, the grouches proved right in the short term and wrong over the long run.
Today’s Internet and media-blasted world shows every sign of passing through a similar era of confusion. A confusion well-documented in Present Shock -- though alas, without as big or deep or wide or as calming a perspective as Douglas Rushkoff claims that he is offering. That is no indictment. It is all right to be a meta-example of the very thing that you are describing. And he describes it all very well.
== More Transparency Miscellany ==
- A cool and informative Scientific American article about Google Glass... and my sci fi augmented reality "specs" in Existence... and other takes on how we'll move through a world of many layers and textures.
- An almost completely plastic pistol, made in a 3D printer. It's heeeeere.  What a world.
- Fortunately, personal firearms will be nowhere near as important in the future as universal access to vision and knowledge. Citizen victories in the Age of Cameras can be among the most important in our time. Recent court decisions in the U.S. have supported a citizen's right to film and record police activity in public places and the Obama Administration has declared this right to be "settled law."  No matter could be more important than preserving the one recourse any person must retain, when dealing with authority… our ability to appeal to the truth.
- Now see how the same fight is being waged in Britain by a brave young woman -- Gemma Atkinson -- whose animated story is brilliant and informative.  Again, most of the time, most police are our good and faithful servants.  But the only conceivable way to keep them that way, is by getting them used to being supervised by their employers.  By us.
- Supreme Court says states may bar Freedom of Information requests from non-residents. Resist.
- An interesting rumination on Yelp! and other crowd-sourced "critic and review" systems… the advantages… and many many disadvantages that must be overcome, before this promising method can truly displace the appraisal of professionals and experts.
== Saving provocative politics for last ==
So you think I am always coming down on conservatism?  (That is, the current-loony Fox-led version; I admired  the intellectual honesty of Barry Goldwater and I tell everyone - left or right - to read Adam Smith;  but neither Goldwater nor Smith nor William F. Buckley would recognize today's mutant right.)Well surprise-surprise… I am fully aware of sins of the left, as well!   And I will now  swivel to aim in that direction.
First, bear in mind that moderate liberals are a much larger population than actual leftists, and that liberals do not partake in many of the traits of their more dogmatic allies, nor do they believe almost anything that Sean Hannity claims that they do.  Nevertheless, there truly is a fringe and there are ways in which the far left wing behaves much like fanatics of the far right.
For example, both extremes demand tests of purity and the recitation of rigid, in-group defining doctrines. Neither wing is even remotely interested in applying the genius of pragmatic compromise. At times, the left's political correctness can seem as brutally intolerant as the know-nothing religiosity we see gushing from the opposite extreme.
One very smart social psychologist who lays out the case in ways that should make left-of-center intellectuals squirm is Jonathan Haidt. If you are one of those intellectuals, and are honest, you'll give him a look and listen: The Bright Future of Post-Partisan Social Psychology. (Or see his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are divided by Politics and Religion). And perhaps even adapt. Please. We can only afford one half of the American polity going psycho at a time.
And continuing my swivel to cast a wary eye in all directions: a war on whistle blowers? It is much more complicated than this, and there have been other measures that enhanced whistle blowing incentives, of late. Still we need to keep paying attention.
And… the U.S. gives big push to internet surveillance: Senior Obama administration officials have secretly authorized the interception of communications carried on networks operated by AT&T and other Internet service providers, a practice that might otherwise be illegal under federal wiretapping laws.  I see such things as inevitable.  What I demand (and you should) is that we get something in return.  Ever increasing powers of supervision.
There. See?  I am wary in every direction. Remain suspicious! Especially if you have a "side" that you feel is better than its opposition.  It may only be better in 90% of the ways…
…and that 10% could become lethal. Unless we make sure that even our "friendly" elites know.  That we are watching them.. . ...a collaborative contrarian product of David Brin, Enlightenment Civilization, obstinate human nature... and http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/ (site feed URL: http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/atom.xml)

I understand it’s fashionable to make fun of people who are using their iPads (or other large tablets) as cameras, but, you know what? I like using mine as a camera. The huge, hi-res screen is awesome for framing and picture taking. I have several cameras around the house, ranging from a DSLR down to [...]

Here they are. See anything you want? (I will note that 1001 Secrets Every Birder Should Know by Sharon “Birdchick” Stiteler is a book I actually went out and purchased, because she’s a pal of mine and I’m also a fan of her work.)

As I mentioned in my March Locus column, I'm celebrating the tenth anniversary of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by m planning a prequel. volume As part of that, planning'I going to read aloud the entire text of that first book into the podcast, making notes on the book as I go. Here's part six.

Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com

John Taylor Williams is a audiovisual and multimedia producer based in Washington, DC and the co-host of the Living Proof Brew Cast. Hear him wax poetic over a pint or two of beer by visiting livingproofbrewcast.com. In his free time he makes "Beer Jewelry" and "Odd Musical Furniture." He often "meditates while reading cookbooks."

MP3 link

And here is the very nice award they gave me there. It is interesting, and perhaps instructional, that the comment I got the most as I was showing it off was “wow, that would be an excellent award for murdering someone with.” Yes, I suppose it would be. Not that I have any plans to [...]

Not dead, just traveling. Back to home, this time. Yay! Hope your Cinco de Mayo is full of Cincosity. No, I don’t know what that means either. But it sounds nice, doesn’t it.

The “High Quality Research Act,” sponsored by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), would strip the peer-review requirement from the National Science Foundation (NSF) grant process, inserting a new set of funding criteria that is significantly less transparent. Smith, sponsor of the highly controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that would expand U.S. oversight over copyrighted intellectual property on the internet, published an editorial in Roll Call describing how his vision of science funding is based not upon the impacts new research may have on the scientific community, but whether that research will “create jobs.” He went on to boast about how much of the House science committee’s $39 billion in agency budgets gets dumped onto nuclear, fracking and “clean coal” projects. Smith has no background in science.  But then, neither do any of the members of the majority party on the House Science Committee.


Deepak Chopra weighs in upon the firestorm over whether TED, the organization that stages wildly popular international Chautauqua lectures, was right to ban from its site talks by psudo-science promoters and "alternative medicine" hucksters.  From my language, you can tell that my sentiment runs against the tide -- the tsunami -- of howls crying out "repression of free enquiry!"  A storm that Dr. Chopra joins.
But no, I won't.  As author of The Transparent Society, I am hugely in favor of openness, transparency and reciprocal accountability.  But the aim of having a wide-open civilization is not - as some would have you believe - that all opinions are equal.  It is that true Reciprocal Accountability is the way that pearls rise out of manure piles.  It is how we figure out which revolutionary or impudent ideas merit further attention and which sink into the simmer of crap, of which Ted Sturgeon called "90% of everything."TED has proved itself to be a marvelous center of entertainment, ideas and discussion.  It should be wide open to concepts that have at least some, tentative balance of evidence in their favor and demonstrably repeatable phenomena to convey.  But we do our fellow citizens, many of whom have proved stupendously gullible (e.g. vaccination panic and climate denialism) no favors when we have ZERO pre-vetting according to the scientific standards that have served our civilization so well.

Impudence?  Yes!  Tilting at paradigms?  Sure thing. Quasi-religious quackery by men who have spent fifty years evading accountable and verifiable experimental disproof of their bald-faced jabber?  Um… I think that, having proved that I am liberal minded, I don't have to drop all of the standards I was trained, as a scientist, to bring into a world that desperately needs them.

==Human Nature and the Blank Slate==

Prof. Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of our Nature (proving that violence has declined, steeply (per capita), worldwide since 1945), does a TED talk about Human Nature and the Blank Slate -- a topic he dealt with in his his older tome The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Fascinating as usual.

Our children will have so many diagnostic tools to focus on THEIR kids than we clueless parents had.  For example: new research from Bristol and Cardiff universities shows that children whose brains process information more slowly than their peers are at greater risk of psychotic experiences. These can include hearing voices, seeing things that are not present or holding unrealistic beliefs that other people don’t share. These experiences can often be distressing and frightening and interfere with their everyday life.

==Marvels of Earth and Space== 

NASA’s Kepler mission has discovered more than 2000 confirmed planets orbiting distant stars. Planets with a known size and orbit are shown in this animated graphic from the New York Times, including five planets orbiting Kepler 62, two of which are only 50% larger than Earth and orbit in their somewhat smaller sun's Goldilocks Zone.  These are only the confirmed exoplanets.  There are more than a thousand potential candidates. You live in a civilization that does stuff like this!

Ponder that again. You live in a civilization that does stuff like this! Did that feel good? Now, get righteously pissed off at the fools (of both right and left) who seem hell-bent on repressing anyone, at any time, from feeling the way that you just did.

== And now more ==

Sunjammer spacecraft will 'sail' toward the sun next year -- using a 13,000 square foot sail, a collaboration of the UK Space Agency and NASA.

New measurements suggest the Earth's inner core is far hotter than prior experiments suggested, putting it at 6,000C - as hot as the Sun's surface.

A major mystery of life on Earth is that organisms are exclusively made up of left-handed amino acids (Chirality). One theory is that star-forming regions sometimes exhibit circular polarization of the light from a powerful star, and this polarization may affect the molecules forming near other new stars in the region, causing most or all of the pre-biotic "soup" molecules to prefer one orientation over the other.  Hence, sibling systems born from the same nebula might tend all to be the same molecular twist… and another region will be opposite, with nothing for the first group to eat.

Off the coast of Sri Lanka, photographer Shawn Heinrichs captured a dramatic battle between sperm whales and orcas.  Nature is important and beautiful.  But also very tense and not sweet.

Earth warmed more in the last three decades of the 20th century than it has during any 30 year period in the last 1,400 years. Over the past 1,400 years, the Earth experienced a gradual cooling, according to the study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience. Between 1971 and 2000, all of the cooling was entirely reversed.

Investors in carbon-intensive business could see $6 trillion losses as policies limiting global warming stop them from exploiting their coal, oil and gas reserves. Excuse me while I fail to weep.  It used to be "conservative" to want efficiency and to believe in waste-not, and to dislike fouling one's own nest.

==Technology Advances==

An Eye Tracker in every smart phone? Gaze and eye tracking are becoming ever-more off-the shelf. Someday I'd like to explore whether my idea from SUNDIVER exploring the latency effects of the unconscious recognizing scenes before the conscious mind does, might lead to a lie detector and personality profiler.  A terrible curse if monopolized by some elite but the best tool to save the Enlightenment, if shared by all.

The small molecule universe, or SMU is the set of all feasible organic molecules below a certain weight. Now, Duke University and the University of Pittsburgh created a virtual library of every compound that could exist. The sections are all marked out--now chemists can get to work filling them in.  Mind you, much attention is now shifting to proteins and large molecules.  Still, the SMUniverse is ripe with opportunities and this may help researchers organize their efforts.  E.g. "the team found vast regions of emptiness, small molecule dark matter, where countless new compounds may fit in like unknown puzzle pieces."

A fascinating article about some NASA engineers meticulously disassembling an Apollo era F-1 Saturn engine and digitizing it so that a new version (modernized) might be reborn in the new Space Launch System (SLS).

MIT's solar cell turns one photon into two electrons -- via singlet exciton fission.

The end of the spacesuit? Nano suit (now only in the larval stage)  could revolutionize space travel.

OpenWorm: an Open Source Virtual Worm simulation, accurate in biology and behavior, to help researchers in biology research.

A filter based upon NASA technology is so powerful it gets rid of everything in the Coke that makes it Coke, and turns it into ... plain water.

Alan Alda is teaching new scientists on how to speak plainly and how this will benefit science.

New methods of generating large volume high density toroidal air plasmas. Just envisioning it gives me the willies!

Roundup… the most-used herbicide… is it a danger to your health? In 2007, as much as 185 million pounds of glyphosate was used by U.S. farmers. And Europe bans three commonly-used pesticides in an effort to protect honeybee colonies.

The marvelous xkcd on scientific outreach !!!!!

Final note:  I'll be talking about this later, but the implications just to science are chilling.  How our ability to deal with modern problems with traditional American agility is being dragged down by those who believe (fervently) that the End of Times are nigh.. . ...a collaborative contrarian product of David Brin, Enlightenment Civilization, obstinate human nature... and http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/ (site feed URL: http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/atom.xml)

In case you missed the Twitter updates about this yesterday, the results of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America board of directors election are in. Steven Gould will be the new president of the organization as of July 1, joining current members Rachel Swirsky, Bud Sparhawk and Lee Martindale (who were re-elected into [...]

RT Booklover’s Convention is primarily a convention by and for romance writers and fans, and so the attendance skews heavily female. It’s a very interesting experience, in a positive way, and I’m having a lot of fun. And as you can see from the photo above, I am opening myself up to new experiences, like [...]

My latest Locus column, "Improving Book Publicity in the 21st Century," addresses the lack of automation and management in traditional publishing an publicity, and suggests some simple and cheap ways that publishers could join up the way its editorial, marketing a PR departments communicate with reviewers and other publicity outlets to save money and score more PR for their writers.

Right now, this stuff all lives in separate word-processing files and spreadsheets in different departments’ hands, which results in all sorts of bizarre occurrences that I see firsthand.

There’s the trilogy whose first volume I blurbed, and whose first two volumes I glowingly reviewed – and I sold a ton of each. The publisher didn’t send me book three for review, even though it had a quote of mine on the front cover, the back cover, and the jacket-flap. They didn’t even tell me it was out – by the time I saw it in a store, it had been out for a month, and my review showed up weeks after the book’s publicity push was over.

I know how that happened: the cover quotes came from editorial and were sent to marketing, which had them in a word-processing document. When PR brainstormed people to send review copies to, they forgot to include me, so it fell through the cracks.

There’s the graphic novel series, now in up to something like 17 volumes. I’ve given every book a positive review, and all the new volumes have quotes from me on the cover. I never get review copies of this one – I don’t even get a notice from the PR department when a new volume is out. But the same PR department has sent me something like nine volumes of another series, none of which I’ve ever reviewed. If I don’t review book one, that means I either didn’t like it, or didn’t even bother with it because it looked so unpromising. Having skipped book one, you can be certain I won’t review book two. This same publisher sends me mountains of single-issue comics, even though I’ve never reviewed one of those.

Improving Book Publicity in the 21st Century

That headline is basically the summation from Paul Miller, who spent a year offline (on purpose, he wasn’t in jail or anything) and has now posted an article to tell folks what he learned about himself in the process. He’d hoped that being offline would help him get in touch with the “real” him; he [...]

Let’s talk about sex. Yes, sex! Why? Because Delilah S. Dawson wants to, and it’s her Big Idea slot, for her new novel Wicked As She Wants. And I am okay with that. So here we go! DELILAH S. DAWSON: Yes, that’s a dude in a blouse with an oiled chest, but I promise you’re in [...]