[Links]
[links] Link salad jabbers in its hutt
Et si la crise de la Sf n’existait pas vraiment — Some French commentary on the current generation of SF.
Life in pictures — In which I make a guest appearance as an Ewok on Julie Ann’s blog.
You can draw, and probably better than I can — Another of Roger Ebert’s meditations on life. I especially liked this bit on sketching: Begin with a proper sketch book. Draw in ink. Finish each drawing you begin, and keep every drawing you finish. No erasing, no ripping out a page, no covering a page with angry scribbles. I have many times said an almost precisely analogous thing about writing first drafts.
A Young Reader Asks: Is There an Elitist Oligarchy in the Underworld of Knitters? — I know there’s a lot of knitters out there in fandom and writerdom. This article about Ravelry is for you. Bonus comparison of knitting to rock climbing.
British Interplanetary Society: Then and Now
A Romp Into Theories of the Cradle of Life
Do Mysterious Forces Dictate Our Travel Patterns? — A curious squib from Freakonomics on the human propensity to travel.
You’re ooonly cheating yourself — Sniffer dogs and lie detectors as observer effects. Security theater, anyone?
Will Egypt’s Revolution Be in Vain? — An Egyptian human rights activist in exile speaks up.
Quantifying Wisdom — Ta-Nehisi Coates on the economic value of the elderly, and incidentally on why society as a whole is not a business.
Back home, GOP freshmen find fiscal responsibility can be tricky business — See, what the Tea Partiers actually meant was for Congress to cut wasteful giveaways that benefit undeserving liberals elsewhere, not critical programs in their own districts. It’s all so simple!
?otD: Are Jawas just undead Ewoks?
2/26/2011
Writing time yesterday: 0.0 hours (off)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 6.25 hours (interrupted)
Weight: 251.4
Currently reading: Dead Iron by Devon Monk
Posted: 7:13 am Sat February 26 2011 |
Where am I?
You are reading the blog of Jay Lake, speculative fiction writer and author of hundreds of short stories, many novels, and winner of the John W. Campbell Award.
Learn more here.
Comments
Leave a Reply
« [personal] Snow day | [photos] Your Saturday moment of zen »
Cora
February 26th, 2011 at 9:50 pmYou’ve got some really good links there. I particularly like the elite yarncrafting underground and Roger Ebert’s “You can draw” article.
Regarding the sniffer dogs, it’s definitely valuable to see whether subtle owner cues can influence sniffer dogs and how to eliminate that sort of influence.
However, I used to work for the German federal disaster relief organization. Among other things they train search and rescue dogs and I had a dog trainer explain to me how it works.
Basically, they have a huge pile of rubble, under which there is a network of concrete tubes. Volunteers crawl into the concrete tubes to simulate earthquake victims trapped under the rubble. The dogs and the handlers are only sent in, separately, once all volunteers are in their tubes. The dogs then locate the “victims”. Since the handlers are not present when the victims climb into the tubes, they don’t know where the “victims” are hidden, so they dogs have to find them without external cues. There’s always dogs that don’t pass the test either.