Bruce Sterling on steampunk — (Thanks to scarlettina.)

Some really awesome metal sculpture — (Thanks to willyumtx.)

Freakonomics on bacon ice cream

Shorpy with the Old Hero of Gettysburg — Burns, born ca. 1793, was a 70-year-old veteran of the War of 1812 when he was wounded in the Battle of Gettysburg, having volunteered his services as a sharpshooter to the Federal Army. He died of pneumonia in 1872. Wow. That guy is a novel waiting to be written.

16th-Century Mapmaker’s Intriguing Knowledge — Anachronistic cartography. See also the Piri Reis map. There’s stories in them there maps. (Thanks to lt260.)

Bad Astronomy on stellar bow shocks — Weird, but cool.

Centauri Dreams on searching for Dyson spheres — Which, by curious coincidence, have been much on my mind with respect to Sunspin.

APOD with a very cool shuttle night launch photo — Longtime readers of this blog may recall my own shuttle night launch experience, complete with YouTube video!

CO2 Seeping Into Water Supply — More reality-based anthropogenic issues with the environment. Darn those liberally biased facts.

Question of the day: What is Leonard Cohen’s day job?

11/20/08
Body movement: 85 minute suburban walk
This morning’s weigh-in: n/a
Currently reading: The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade by Herman Melville

Apropos of Toby being ill, that makes a third Metatropolis author with major health issues this year. Which is just fricking weird, given that we’re a relatively young bunch. One is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.

The Hand Drawn Map Association — Some cool stuff here. (Thanks to lillypond.)

Learning From Mistakes Only Works After Age 12, Study Suggests — Huh. I think I was in my 40s before it started working for me. (Thanks to sheelangig.)

The physics test — A classic, brilliant story. (Thanks to AH.)

Nov. 18, 1883: Railroad Time Goes Coast to Coast — The history of time zones, plus a bonus cool photo of railroading in the Cascades, back in the day.

Macaulay on Copyright — A discourse from 1841. (Thanks to danjite.)

Palin Strikes Gold — Sarah Palin’s $7 million book deal. Good for her. However, not so good for the rest of us. (Including, frankly, my Republican friends.) This only reinforces my conviction that Sarah Palin will be John McCain’s political legacy. I imagine he might wish to be remembered for something a little more constructive, somehow. But he picked her, and in doing so he pulled her on to the national stage. Thanks, John.

Question of the day: Who is buried in Grant’s Tomb?

11/19/08
Body movement: 30 minutes on stationary bike (gym next door to hotel)
This morning’s weigh-in: n/a
Currently reading: The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade by Herman Melville

The aforementioned galleys will be waiting for me when I get back to Portland. One set for the Escapement mmpb, one set for the Green thb. Tor has been very kind about the deadlines, since I won’t have the galleys in hand according to the original schedule. (I wander about the country too much, apparently.)

In other news, another Sekrit Projekt has landed on my desk just now, which oddly intertwines with Sunspin by utter, fortuitous chance. Watch this space for more details, but not, erm, right away.

Between the above matters, I’m going to be a very busy boy into early December. Then I’m off to San Francisco with kenscholes to wreak mayhem at Writers With Drinks (along with Cat Rambo and a cast of several), as well as at Borderlands Book.

Put in more time on Sunspin tonight, as well. For the heck of it, here’s a bit of WIP from the synopsis. (And yes, I’m apparently getting very meta.) This is a synopsis, so don’t read this as even draft of finished text.

Threadneedle drives provided near-instantaneous transit between arbitrary points which had been sufficiently well surveyed to enable accurate astrogation. In the initial years of the Polity expansion, this surveying was done by robot probes moving at relativistic speeds between star systems or, occasionally, other points of interest. By about 2300 PreM, interferometers in the 200-lightminute class enabled sufficiently accurate surveying within distances of several hundred lightyears from their base stations that the need for robot probes was sharply reduced.

At that point, the limiting factors on Polity expansion were the surveying process itself, which could be scaled with sufficient investment, and the cyclical accumulation of social and economic capital necessary to drive colonization.

In other news, I apparently have two sets of galleys to turn back to Tor, Very Quickly. (The mmpb of Escapement and the thb of Green.) Unfortunately, I am not home to receive the galleys or do anything with them, and won’t be able to remedy this situation until next Monday, thanks to the confluence of a trip to Omaha and the magic that is Orycon. This will make next week very entertaining, I strongly suspect.

All of which in turn encourages me to get the first draft of the synopsis of Sunspin nailed down this week if possible. Already it’s longer than any synopsis I’ve ever done, and I haven’t even gotten to plot or character yet. This is going to be a real adventure. There’s a couple of possible projects which may shift Sunspin back in my schedule, but I have some months to figure that out.

Off to the office in a bit. Y’all play nice while I’m saving the world for SMS. (Or possibly from SMS.)

The Campbell Award Pin fundraiser is now underway. [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ]

Pulp Magazines Struggle to Survive in Wired World — Simon Owens with a PBS article on the state of our field.

Non Sequitur on the rules of writing — Heh, yeah.

Photo Gallery: The World of Trench Warfare in Color — WWI history as you’ve rarely seen it. (Thanks to lt260.)

The Tabulator: 1917 — Shorpy with some seriously retro information technology.

Centauri Dreams with more on exoplanets — This is one of my favorite topics in science right now, in a big way.

Bad Astronomy on the oceans of Mars — Light from a distant sea, reflecting a red sky, showing us our own imaginations. Go, Schiaparelli!

The world has never seen such freezing heat — Scientific errors in global warming data. See the comments section as well. (Thanks to tetar.)

What’s a Christian Worldview? — Helpful hints from Focus on the Family. For example, let’s suppose you have bought the idea that beauty is in the eye of the beholder (secular relative truth) as opposed to beauty as defined by God’s purity and creativity (absolute truth). Wow. That’s a pretty bizarre definition of “truth”. Clearly I am not religious for epistemological reasons, if nothing else. (Thanks to danjite.)

Obama talks about his presidency — Worth the watch-and-listen.

Question of the day: Would you book yourself on a trip to the moon?

11/18/08
Body movement: 80 minute suburban walk
This morning’s weigh-in: n/a
Currently reading: The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade by Herman Melville

On the flight out today I did some extensive critique for the Orycon workshop this weekend. Those poor writers have no idea what they’re getting, but it will be good for them. Also put another hour into the synopsis of Sunspin, and find myself seriously contemplating a Wiki for worldbuilding purposes. Process is a bitch, especially when one is on a mission to retune it on the fly.

Had dinner this evening with garyomaha and elusivem. Nice chatter, including some discussion of my writing process, and what Sunspin was likely to do to my head. Took care of some emails and some personal business, and I am shortly to bed. Morning comes early hereabouts, and then I have to drive across the cornfields to the office.

The Campbell Award Pin fundraiser is now underway. [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ]

Fail Blog with a punctuation win — For all you GSP types.

The Guru’s Handbook on teachers and moral codes — Interesting stuff. (The term “teacher” here is used in a fairly broad sense, not specifically formal education.)

The Other — And, snurched from The Guru’s Handbook link above, a fascinating post on the Other. Worth reading from both a sociocultural perspective and a character creation perspective.

Reducing the Risk of Human Extinction — Just in case you were wondering. (Thanks to danjite.)

Ten-Minute Blood Test — A cheap chip rapidly identifies cancer proteins in a drop of blood.

More clockwork bugs — Mmmm. (Thanks to willyumtx.)

NASA Restores Historic Lunar Orbiter Image — Some weird, cool, retrotech stuff going on here. (Hat tip to io9.com.)

The Next RNC Chair: Captain Of The GOP Titanic? — Despite the amusingly snarky headline, an interesting from-outside-the-GOP-box analysis of what happens next for the Republican party.

Question of the day: What, precisely, did Billie Joe McAllister throw off the Tallahatchie Bridge?

11/17/08
Body movement: airport walking
This morning’s weigh-in: 224.0
Currently reading: The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade by Herman Melville

Man, I wish I was tooled enough in the wallet to bid on these myself.