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AstronomyAudioScience

From the Winter Solstice, 2009: “Dancing in the Dark…”

by Diane Duane

In 2009 I was asked to participate in the 365 Days of Astronomy science podcasting project, and they asked me what I’d like to talk about. I thought about that for a bit and finally came back (as has happened moderately often in my fiction) to the issue of the great cardinal or hinge points of the planetary year; the solstices and equinoxes.

So here’s what I did for them about the Winter Solstice. It’s delightful that 365 Days of Astronomy continues its mission, and will be going (we hope!) for another ten years at least.

Wherever you are: may you enjoy the shortest day of the Northern Hemisphere’s year! From here on, the days just get longer…

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AstronomypodcastsScience

From “365 Days of Astronomy”: DD’s Winter Solstice podcast

by Diane Duane

It was a great pleasure to do this podcast for the 365 Days of Astronomy some years back. Considering how close we are to the Winter Solstice*, I thought I’d repost the link to my (winter) contribution here:

Dancing in the Dark: Deities, Celebrations and the Bottom of the Year

Click here to go straight to the MP3 audio. Prefer a transcript? It’s here.

Some links for extra info about the subject of the podcast are here:

http://www.dianeduane.com/solstice

*If you’re reading this in 2016, it falls on December 21 at 10:44 GMT.

 

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ScienceStar Trek

Star Trek predicts it again

by Diane Duane

The US Naval Research Laboratory announced a major breakthrough in materials science on Thursday. After decades of research and development, the NRL has created a transparent, bulletproof material that can be molded into virtually any shape. This material, known as Spinel, is made from a synthetic powdered clay that is heated and pressed under vacuum (aka sintered) into transparent sheets. “Spinel is actually a mineral, it’s magnesium aluminate,” Dr. Jas Sanghera, who leads the research, said in a statement. “The advantage is it’s so much tougher, stronger, harder than glass. It provides better protection in more hostile environments — so it can withstand sand and rain erosion.”

Source: Fark.com

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AstronomyEuropeHistoryHome lifeHumorIrelandMediaOOA2tumblrpredicting the futurepredicting the future badlyreligionthings that piss you off

Dude, where’s my Apocalypse?!

by Diane Duane

Does anybody have an 800 number for the ancient Mayans? Because I need to lodge a complaint.

Seriously, 2012 has been something of a wash all around.  Tragedies. Mass shootings. Anguish of all kinds. Local cataclysms of the flood-and-earthquake variety. Wars and rumors of war (well, yeah, we always have those, but this year has seemed worse than usual for some reason).  Superstorms. Droughts and famines. Endless human pain. (And other species are suffering too, obviously, but in typically human fashion it’s our own pain we notice most.)

A nice hefty apocalypse would’ve really taken the edge off all of those.

Because just think of it.  No more… well, no more [fill in the blank with whatever really gets on your case]. I have my own list:  full of the great tragedies above, but also full of many lesser ones, of annoyances and  disappointments and things that just get under my skin. No more Prometheus.  No more robocalling marketers. No more fiscal cliffs.  No more spam. No more Windows 8.  No more Apple Maps.  Crash a runaway planet or so into us and it’s all over with, and good riddance. (I really would miss never seeing season 3 of Sherlock or the remaining Hobbit films, but when so much evil would be wiped out at the same time, it seems petty to complain.)

Yet after all this effing buildup, what have we got this morning?

Bupkis!

It’s been beyond annoying, really: partly because we were promised two others of these this year. One of them was going to be a few days after my birthday. I thought, “Yeah, typical. I hit a landmark year and then have three days to enjoy it: whose good idea was this??” And the day came — it was supposed to be one of those raptures or something similar — and what do we get?

Nothing.

Then immediately the guy responsible for the math says, “Whoops, no, calculation error, God moves in mysterious ways, I haven’t been told everything, uh, human error, that’s the ticket. It’s going to be October.” The designated date was right after Peter’s birthday this time.  P. simply said, “Great, I get a party and no hangover!” — trust him to see the bright side of an apocalypse: this kind of behavior is the reason I married the man. And the day comes, and we have our little party, and the day goes, and what do we get?

Zip. Zilch. Nada.

What’s the saying? Once might be an accident. Twice could be coincidence. But the third time? Enemy action. The third time, any sensible person would pick up the phone and call Customer Service and say, “This is unacceptable. Something is really wrong at the fulfillment end. You need to do something to put this right.”

But who do I complain to?

Because now we’re going to hear the old song again…  all the stuff about how complex the problem is, how you can’t possibly blame any one person or organization. It was this writer. Or that broadcasting personality. It was a runaway meme. It was publicity-seeking New Agers — that’ll be a popular one. You can just see what the news is going to look like tomorrow, as all these people who promised us an End Of The World that could actually be worth something start pointing at each other and trying to shift the blame.

“Miscalculations in the calendar” — I bet that’ll be the most popular excuse. Rounding errors. Failure to correctly convert metric to imperial, or the other way around. (At least one Mars probe went God knows where because of that: you’d think people would’ve learned better by now! Seriously.) Or wait a moment, no, it’ll all have been a translation error, won’t it? Such a subjective art. Yeah, let’s blame the translators. Like they don’t already have enough on their plates.

I guess there’s nothing for it but to settle in for a nice long session of watching the fingerpointing, until the news cycle gets bored with it and cycles on.  (And I bet that won’t happen soon enough for some of these people, who’ve thought nothing in particular of inflicting their own crazy paranoias on the rest of the planet at large.) It’ll be just like the week after the US Presidential election all over again, with all the people who thought Romney was such a shoe-in suddenly finding all these great reasons how the other guys in the party screwed it up. “Wait, what? Women? Black and hispanic voters? Young voters? He said not to pay them any mind…! Yeah, him over there. And Romney, pff, I never really liked him anyway…”

Well, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m not going to let this slide.  I want to march up to somebody’s desk and get this made right. I don’t care what it takes: they can bloody well get DHL or FedEx on it, for God’s sake, but I want that runaway planet or whatever the hell it was supposed to be on my desk by tomorrow morning at the latest. And in the meantime, until the email with the tracking number comes in, I just want an answer.

Dude, where’s my apocalypse?!

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EuropeFoodScienceTV in general

Today on NHK World: "Tambo: Life Inside a Rice Field"

by Diane Duane

For those of you who like a good focused nature documentary every now and then: this is super. NHK World has aired this once already today — it’s two hours long, split into one-hour pieces — and it’ll be airing again this afternoon. Definitely worth seeing, as there is some really beautiful microphotography and time-lapse film in it.

The documentary follows a rice crop in a small family field from planting through to harvest, and focuses on the ecosystem that supports the rice and coexists with it. For those of you in Ireland, the UK and Europe who have Sky satellite TV, the channel is 507. The first part of the docu airs at 13:10 UK time, and then (after a brief feature of animations submitted by viewers and a news bulletin) part 2 airs at 14:10. Here’s a link to the schedule page at NHK with a dropdown to convert the timing to that of your local time zone. iPad / iPod / iPhone users: apparently there’s even an NHK streaming video app here at the iTunes Store.

Looks like LiveStation has NHK World live streaming video, if you’re interested. There’s also a live streaming video box on NHK’s front page here.

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AstronomyComputer stuffGraphic and plastic artsYoung Wizards

A couple more snapshots from the "A Wizard of Mars" book trailer

by Diane Duane

Here are two more wallpapers for those who might be interested in DL’ing them. Once again, these were produced in the wonderful Terragen 2.2.

The location is in Syrtis Major, and that shiny object is the “superegg” that the wizards find buried in a dune by an outcropping  there. (I have removed the sand in these shots because I like seeing the whole superegg shape: I find it very cool.)

This first one is a late afternoon shot —

Small Syrtis Superegg image

The second is a reverse angle on the same position, and you can see a proper Martian “blue sunset” in the b.g. The superegg is plainly about to start misbehaving in this one.

Small sunset outcropping image

Both of these are 1920×1200 pixels. The images are hosted at Box.net, so that’s where clicking on the images will take you for your download.

Enjoy!

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AstronomyScienceYoung Wizards

Mist in Valles Marineris

by Diane Duane

Mist in Valles Marineris wallpaper

We’re starting to put together the book trailer for the paperback edition of A Wizard of Mars (which comes out in May) and I thought I might start putting up some of the prettier separate frames as downloadable wallpapers for anyone who might like them.

These are all generated using the wonderful Terragen terrain generation and modeling software, which has been used in some interesting places (the highest-profile at the moment probably being the wonderful volumetric-cloud work they did for TRON: LEGACY). The terrain data comes from Martian radar altimetry sent home to us by the Mars Global Surveyor.

This one shows some very atypical weather in the Valles Marineris region — secondary to some busted-loose wizardry monkeying with the surface conditions, as described in AWoM. The dimensions are 1920×1200. Just “>click here or on the image to go to the download site at Box.net.

More of these are available over at the Young Wizards website, at this link. (The biggest resolutions aren’t available at the moment, but will be during March. It takes a couple/few days to render some of the more complex files.)

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Science

In the Now How About That Dep't: The bonding gene

by Diane Duane

Just reading this article gives me entirely too many ideas for SF stories having to do with scary possible gene therapies… 

A study of Swedish twin brothers found that differences in a gene modulating the hormone vasopressin were strongly tied to how well each man fared in marriage.

“Our main finding was an association between a variant of the vasopressin receptor 1a gene and how strong bonds men reported they had to their partners,” said lead researcher Hasse Walum, of the department of medical epidemiology and biostatistics at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. “Men carrying this variant scored on average lower on a scale measuring the strength of the bond compared to men not carrying this variant.”

Women married to men carrying the “poorer bonding” form of the gene also reported “lower scores on levels of marital quality than women married to men not carrying this variant,” Walum noted.

…Vasopressin activates the brain’s reward system, and “you could say that mating-induced vasopressin release motivates male voles to interact with females they have mated with,” Walum said. “This is not a sexual motivation, but rather a sort of prolonged social motivation.” In other words, the more vasopressin in the brain, the more male voles want to stick around and mingle with the female after copulation is through. This effect “is more pronounced in the monogamous voles,” Walum noted.

NB: this study was done on voles. If you’re human, your mileage might vary.

And this final note:

…it’s too early for men to blame their inability to commit on a single gene, although Lucas guesses it’s an excuse that’s “certainly going to be used.”

 

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