The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon... Read More.
Praise for Star Dragon
"Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction."
-- David Brin
"Star Dragon is terrific fare, offering readers a fusion of hard science and grand adventure."
-- Locus Magazine
"Star Dragon is steeped in cosmology, the physics of interstellar travel, exobiology, artificial intelligence, bioscience. Brotherton, author of many scientific articles in refereed journals, has written a dramatic, provocative, utterly convincing hard science sf novel that includes an ironic twist that fans will love."
-- Booklist starred review
"Readers hungry for the thought-provoking extrapolation and rigorous technical detail of old-fashioned hard SF are sure to enjoy astronomer Brotherton's first novel."
-- Publishers Weekly
"Mike Brotherton, himself a trained astrophysicist, combines the technical acuity and ingenuity of Robert Forward with the ironic, postmodern stance and style of M. John Harrison. In this, his debut novel, those twin talents unite to produce a work that is involving on any number of levels. It's just about all you could ask for in a hardcore SF adventure."
-- Paul di Fillippo, SCI-FI.COM
Overblown title for something much more subtle, but profound and cool.
Scientists have discovered evidence of several supernovas in Antarctic ice cores. The evidence is a spike in the concentration of nitrogen oxide, an expected effect from a flood of gamma rays hitting our atmosphere. Two of the three spikes found match known supernovas observed in the 11th century and historically known. Close enough to be seen and noticed (our own galaxy), they left their mark on our atmospheric chemistry.
The third spike is harder to understand, but might simply be from a supernova explosion only visible in the southern hemisphere where it was less likely to be noticed. Not a lot of civilizations keeping great records for us in the 11th century in the southern hemisphere, and supernovas are not necessarily always so obvious. Get one behind a big dust cloud and it would also be hard to see.
Anyway, I think this is really, really, cool. Almost all the information we have about things in space come from telescopic observations, and almost everything we “know” about the effects of supernovas or other celestial events on the Earth are theoretical. From supernova 1987A we detected a handful of neutrinos, and now from these supernovas we’re seeing evidence for atmospheric changes. The supernova remnants are still out there (e.g., the Crab nebula is one of them) and can be studied.
Stuff out there can have an effect down here. A supernova too close could have very damaging effects. There were three stories from Diamonds in the Sky that touch on these issues directly or indirectly, and they’re worth reading: “The Touch” by G. David Nordley, “Planet Killer” by Kevin R. Grazier and Ges Seger, and for the issue of killer asteroids, “How I Saved the World” by Valentin Ivanov.
I remember a Charles Sheffield book about Alpha Centauri going supernova…was that called Supernova? And Fred Hoyle, perhaps in collaboration, wrote a book about the Milky Way core becoming a quasar and it changing life on Earth. Was that Inferno? Hoyle’s The Black Cloud about the solar system passing through an interstellar molecular cloud is a class, too. Others?
As you may or may not know, Orff’s ‘O Fortuna’ was used extensively in the movie Excalibur. Other parts of the soundtrack had this great theremin-sounding stuff and wailing voices and I loved it.
My all-time favorite soundtrack has to be Conan the Barbarian by Basil Poledouris. Totally awesome:
OK, there are some other great soundtracks out there. Star Wars is quite memorable. I liked Bram Stoker’s Dracula sound track very well, too. Some strange ones, too, like Lady Hawke. A lot of good ones out there of different types. Which do you like the best?
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Again, pick up to 3. I’m sure I left a lot of worthy contenders off. Let’s share our love for genre-type music and turn each other on to some new great things.
Last week I linked to an article about how U2 was the greatest science ficiton band. I like U2, but think that the claim is ridiculous. Am I alone? I suggested some bands like Queen, Iron Maiden, the Orbital, and Blue Oyster Cult were much better choices. U2 just doesn’t do that much stuff I would consider science fiction, but I don’t follow them closely and while their top singles may not have much to do with SF maybe they are more of a science fiction band than I give them credit for. To balance things out, I do like this song and video, if you consider Batman to be science fiction (depends on which day you ask me).
So, here is a poll I hope you’ll take a minute to do. Pick up to three bands. If I haven’t listed your favorite science fiction band (not just your favorite band over all), please leave a comment and turn us on to some science fiction goodness. Also let me know if you think I’ve made a mistake with some of the choices here and their claim to being a science fiction band is no better than that of U2.
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I’d love to hear some new suggestions, as long as they’re not country western.
First, what does it mean to be original? Well, I guess it means to be first with something.
But what does that mean?
Well, maybe nothing, really. Over at Techdirt there’s an article suggesting that nothing is original. It’s the old idea that nothing is created in a vacuum, and specifically applied to our current technology and copyright in the sense that everything in our culture is a product of other things in our culture.
Or as Newton put it, “If I have seen further it is only by having stood on the shoulders of giants.”
It is certainly true in science that nothing is totally original, that every idea is built on the foundations of our knowledge that has been long established.
But what about science fiction?
A lot of science fiction is specifically about novelty. New ideas. New reactions to ideas. Asking and answering “what if?” questions never before posed.
And this issue of originality reminded me of Orson Scott Card’s thought-provoking story “Unaccompanied Sonata.” It doesn’t make a lot of sense if you think about it too hard, but it is original about this question of originality. Card proposes a world in which artists are identified young and then kept in isolation to develop their art, free of the influences of other artists. A musician, for instance, is prevented from hearing anyone else’s music.
Weird, huh? But cool to think about. A science fiction idea. Original.
One of the ways to be original in science, relatively speaking, is to cross fertilize from one field to another. You learn a new statistical technique, or image processing algorithm, commonly applied in one area and apply it to a new one. And extreme example of this was when astronomers took some of their source detecting algorithms and applied them detecting breast cancer in medical images. Practical and life saving, if not totally original.
This is the sort of thing Asimov and Niven used to do a lot, taking new science results and bringing them to life in science fiction. It’s the kind of thing I do with my novels, too. I always want someone picking up one of my books to see something there they’ve never seen before. For Star Dragon, I wanted to set a story in a realistic accretion disk rather than an alien planet, and have plot elements that depended on how catalcysmic variable stars work. I also wanted some really interesting future tech that played to themes of the story, and so the chairbeasts and Biolathe were born. For Spider Star, I wanted to set a story in a dark matter planet, again realistically based on real astrophysics of what such an object would be like. This world was so strange that my editor encouraged me to keep the future world building more familiar against the conceptually challenging backdrop. I still had to push the aliens though.
Science fiction readers are looking for novelty and originality consistently in a way no one else is from other genres. Even fantasy, which might be thought to be open to more originality since you can cast off the rules of our scientific understanding entirely, seems to have very familiar ideas dominating the best sellers. Tolkien may have seemed original to many back in the 1950s, but he borrowed a lot of his ideas from mythology. William Gibson didn’t even own a computer when he invented cyberspace while writing Neuromancer.
All the trops of science fiction, from rocket ships to teleporters, from invisibility to time travel, were totally original ideas for someone at some point.
Personally I read science fiction for the ideas. I appreciate very much good writing, good characters, good plotting, etc., but I can get those from any kind of book. When I read a science fiction novel I want to think about things I’ve never thought about before.
I remember a good story by Kate Wilhelm called “I Know What You’re Thinking,” from back in the 1990s. I think it was nominated for some awards. It was basically a character story of what one woman did with the ability to read minds. Stephen Gould wrote a good book called Jumper (made into a mediocre movie) about someone with the ability to teleport.
I can barely consider either of those, and many others, science fiction.
To me, those ideas have been done many times before, so why do them again? Reader of all types stopped to think already what they would do if they could teleport or read minds, and the joining of the concept with a new setting or character may be interesting in revealing more about what it means to be human (a teenage American boy, a middle-aged American woman, a Tibetan monk, an Indian girl, etc.), but it isn’t original. I can get things about people from other types of fiction. I mean, imagine an issue of Asimov’s that was filled with nothing but good stories about people with the ability to read minds or teleport. Or, wait, originality coming…someone who could do both? Or maybe an entire planet of people who could read minds and teleport? Now at least we’re getting somewhere.
I want to learn something new, to think new thoughts, when I pick up a science fiction story. It should show me a future I haven’t seen, a novel wonder of the universe, people reacting to something that has never happened before and that I hadn’t already spent hours speculating about.
The best science fiction has totally original elements, and when I don’t see them I get cranky and complain. I want to see them more often. They’re why I love science fiction and why I write it. I want us all to be thinking about new things, things relevant to our world of accelerating changes and technology, and to share them.
AAS Action Alert 2009-01: Call Your Members of Congress and Have Them Support Science in Stimulus Bill
February 10th, 2009
From the American Astronomical Society (AAS). It is specifically calling astronomers to action, but anyone, in the sciences or not, should be encouraged now to call their members of Congress and ask the to support science in the stimulus bill. It’s a little trickier for me bring in Brazil at the moment, but modern internet technology can let me do it without too much difficulty (and the senate version of the bill also stripped $2 billion for internet infrastructure, which has both short-term and long-term payoff). Anyway, here is the call for action.
AAS Action Alert 2009-01
Marcos Huerta
John Bahcall Public Policy Fellow
huerta@aas.org http://blog.aas.org
* Summary *
This Action Alert calls upon AAS members to call , FAX or write their members of Congress and Congressional Leadership and ask that they urge the House / Senate conference committee to support strong funding for basic research in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
The Senate compromise bill that is expected to pass on Tuesday includes considerably less science and basic research spending than in the House bill passed earlier this month. AAS members should contact
their members of congress and urge that the final bill include investment in basic research at the levels in the House bill. Investment in the NSF, and DOE Office of Science will both employ highly-skilled and trained workers, but produce innovations and discoveries that will have positive, long-term, economic dividends.
* Background *
The Senate Compromise stimulus plan includes the following science spending:
NSF – $1.2 billion (House Bill – $3 Billion)
NASA Science $300 million (House Bill – $400 million)
DOE Office of Science – $330 million. (House Bill – $1.9 billion)
The House and Senate bills will be reconciled in a conference committee starting this week. By contacting your members of Congress now, you can help increase the funding available for basic research, which will have a significant positive impact on the long term economic prosperity of our nation. Please make the time to contact Congress and use the templates below to help guide your conversation, FAX or letter.
Sample Conversation / Letter Below
* Details *
*** You can find the contact info for your member of congress at the following link: ****
The House and Senate have each passed their versions of the stimulus bill. As negotiations continue in conference committee, I ask you to urge your colleagues to support strong investment in basic research in
the final stimulus bill. Investment in science and technology create high-tech, well-paying jobs in the short-term, and pay dividends in long-term economic growth. There is no better way to stimulate the economy and promote economic grow than investment in science and technology.
The original House bill invested $3 billion in the National Science Foundation; that number was reduced to $1.2 billion in the Senate. Please support the House’s levels of funding in basic research in the final bill – $3 billion for the NSF in the final bill, $1.9 billion of the DOE Office of Science, and $400 million for NASA Science.
Sincerely,
Edwin Hubble
……
SAMPLE PHONE CONVERSATION
Staffer: Hello, Senator King’s office, can I help you.
Astronomer: Yes, I would like to speak with a staffer about the National Science Foundation or science issues.
Staffer: OK, I will see if she is in right now. <pause> She can speak with you now [note; you may get voice mail, leave same message as the next bit of conversation]
Sci.Staffer: Hello, I’m Mike Scott and I’m responsible for NSF issues…how can I help you?
Astronomer: Hi, my name is [YOUR NAME] and I am a constituent of Senator King’s. I am calling to ask that the Senator support strong basic research in the US by supporting the maximum possible funding
for the National Science Foundation, NASA and the Department of Energy Office of Science in the stimulus bill. I hope he/she can also encourage the conference committee to support the maximum possible
funding for these agencies.
I know that basic scientific research is a key driver of our economic growth, and the NSF funds every avenue of scientific and technological research in the country. Additionally, construction of NSF projects and funding of NSF research will produce many well paying, high-tech jobs. Investment in basic scientific and technological research is key to our standing as a leader of the world in science and technology.
Sci. Staffer: Thank you for your message, I’ll let the Senator know your point of view.
Astronomer: Thanks so much. If I can ever be of help to Senator King, please let me know. I am happy to help however I can.
Niven is a victim of success. I have no doubt that every speculative idea finds wacky application in one science fiction short story or other and are forgotten shortly after publication, but to become fossilized means that the idea is a key part of some book that has been consistently reprinted and read over decades. I mean, I remember reading “At the Core” as a teenager and assuming that the idea was plausible, even though it didn’t entire make sense to me. I mean, I knew stars formed in clusters and that these entire clusters didn’t all burst into supernova explosions leaving nothing behind, and I knew that other galaxies didn’t explode. It was years later when I started getting some real astronomy before I realized that this idea didn’t make real sense. It probably comes from misundertanding or missapplying some ideas about nuclear starbursts from back in the 1960s (e.g., Burbidge, Burbidge, and Sandage 1963 — sorry, a pay article not worth paying for for 40 years).
Now, back when I was a kid I was a voracious reader and learned a lot of things from novels. I assumed that the fact-based information was reliable. I knew enough, usually, to separate out the fantastical elements from the science-based ones, or so I thought. I mean, there was a lot of good stuff in the science fiction I grew up reading. Joe Haldeman taught me about relativity. Niven taught me about tidal forces. Philip Jose Farmer taught me that I could drink my own urine.
OK, some information was of dubious value.
But this all got me thinking about what science fiction (or fiction more generally) is still floating around there being read today, not intentionally getting any science wrong, certainly not for the time it was first written, but is creating misconceptions in the minds of sf fans. Now, there are some interpretive things that I suspect are B.S., like quantum immortality, but can’t disprove, but there have been some science fads, some cool ideas, that just didn’t work out. I’m also not talking about technical/quantitative mistakes, like how the Beowulf Schaefer should not have been able to survive his passage by the neutron star in Niven’s story by that name.
I blame science fiction generally for giving people misleading ideas about faster than light (FTL) travel, generally skipping any treatment of associated time travel.
There have got to be more cases from movies. Alien, for instance, gives people the idea that people should explode when exposed to the vacuum of space. Not so.
Mission to Mars has leaking fuel freeze in space? Ugh! No! Why doesn’t the Earth freeze? It’s in space, too!
Okay, those things are just plain wrong, not properly “fossilized science” just bad science being spread with every movie rental and every cable showing. I’m interested in hearing about more interesting cases like Niven’s exploding galaxy core, which definitely confused me for years.
Various people have argued that public schools are as good as private schools, or drops in SATs actually reflect new tests or a broader demographic going to college taking the tests. I am also aware of the issue that the U.S. looks worse than many other countries because we don’t track students the same way. But really, the basic system was formulated with a bunch of flaws and was not intelligently designed at all.
I mean, why do we have summers off? To give everyone time to forget what they learned through disuse? To work the fields? To force families to spend extra money on daycare or camps?
Why are schools one size fits all? Because everyone learns at the same pace? Because there is only one pace and one order to learn subjects, and it was found through a laborious search?
Why aren’t all teachers well versed in their subjects? Why do we as a society hold school teacher to be a low-prestige position and why don’t we pay them better and attract the top people with an interest in teaching?
Why are languages taught so late in school, usually when they are more difficult to learn and when it is impossible to avoid having an accent?
Why do we have a handful of school boards, usually at the state level, sometimes voted in on the basis of politics or anti-educational special interests (e.g., creationism), decide on a small number of mediocre textbooks that everyone will use?
As an experimental scientist, I want to see more innovation more places and the best systems identified and replicated. I want to use what we now understand about education, what tools we now have available, to revolutionize education. I want science fiction to be happening not just in laboratories and in the gadget drawers of the rich and powerful, but in schools. I see the internet being integrated into schools, and then I see students getting lazier about their research rather than more insightful.
I mean, I used to have to go to the library and sift through several books an encyclopedias, a slow process, when I heard about someone or something I wanted to learn more about. Now with the internet that time is reduced to seconds. That should leave more time to think, and to learn. It seems to result in quick cut and pastes, or quick paraphrasing, and a return to texting their friends or playing video games.
Education in science fiction shows up once in a while. We have the “Teacher” from what I consider the worst episode of original Star Trek ever:
Here in the condensed episode of “Spock’s Brain,” skip ahead to 2:30 for the teacher.
Now, I’m a believer in using science fiction as an educational tool for all sorts of things, especially science, but let’s turn this around.
I think we need to use emerging technology to tell stories, answer questions on the fly, help students to visualize everything. Some form of virtual reality, I think, so that textbooks come alive, and information is provided on the spot as required. Online courses, whether traditional or those that will make use of new technology, can compete and be shared. Future teachers will really need to be on the ball to make sure the information is good, to be able to lead students through interactive environments, address individual interests and needs, and to inspire.
Learning shouldn’t be hard. Learning shouldn’t be slow. Learning shouldn’t be a bore.
Essentially everything that is taught in a K-12 curriculum is very interesting or important. Why can’t it be presented as such? I mean, the dreaded word problem was presumably designed to bring some real-world relevance to math, but man do I not remember a single interesting one. Trains and airplanes and apples and John and Mary with different amounts of change in their pockets. I mean, my god, I am getting dumber just trying to remember some of these. I remember one from college physics about a man walking along the shore and a turtle walking along a canoe…!!! WTF?! The one I remember with “Mister Spook and Captain Quirk” wasn’t much better. I do give one in intro astronomy about how much easier it would be for a Predator to see Kirk than Spock because of the differences in their body temperature — only about ten percent — but we could speculate about evolutionary pressure on Vulcan compared with Earth in light of infrared-seeing hunters.
(An aside: I remember thinking in college that there was a need for a book like “101 Extremely Violent Physics Problems” that involved cars skidding off cliffs, the speed of bodies hitting pavement, and the force of bullets on impact. That would have been fun, a lot of fun, at a particular age. Probably wouldn’t have gotten more girls into physics, but the field hasn’t done a good job of that anyway, and the girls going into physics anyway would be more interesting than average with these kind of textbooks.)
I’m digressing, I fear. There is fun stuff here, interesting stuff here. I remember so many times that if I could just see something, play around with it, I could figure it out. It isn’t so easy to visualize or play around with abstract descriptions in textbooks. Think about the usually awful job movies do with math…you get a montage with equations flying around but rarely any content, and the audience feels like they get it better than when you have an info dump given in lecture form.
One of Einstein’s most powerful memories from childhood that guided him into and through his science career was seeing a magnet in a compass align with north, mysterious and invisible forces in action that were nonetheless understandable.
I’m going to quit for now and come back to this another day. I don’t think I’ve thought about it enough yet or done enough research to be concrete. I do know that students in a planetarium or looking through a telescope are about a hundred times more motivated than reading a textbook or sitting in a traditional lecture, and technology is making those sorts of experiences more readily available.
Anyone know some really good examples of education in science fiction novels/stories, movies, or TV? I was really not that impressed with the adventure game in Ender’s Game, by the way, so let’s skip that one. I can’t help but feel my mind has gone blank for examples, or maybe it is just not a topic that comes up much. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed has some interesting ideas, but they’re not very developed. Ah well…
Warning: this post is practical advice for the individual and risks breeding cynicism toward science.
I am a tenured professor of astronomy at the University of Wyoming, a category I research university where I enjoy a relatively low teaching load and decent pay, and where I lead a research group that has brought in close to two million dollars in grant money in the last seven years. I was a double major in electrical engineering and space physics at Rice University (turning down an acceptance at Caltech), did a PhD in astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin, and did post-docs at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Kitt Peak National Observatory. I have been on both sides of the job thing, for postdocs and faculty jobs, and also both sides of graduate school admissions.
I worked hard to get where I am and followed my love for astronomy even when other paths would have been easier and more profitable. I am something of an idealist, and have been my entire life. This doesn’t mean I am stupid or naive or can’t see how things work.
Read the following keeping in mind I believe it is intrinsically valuable to learn how our universe works, that science has show again and again that it is the best and most reliable tool for doing so, and that I think people are happier and more effective doing what they love to do on a daily basis. Also I think it is important to have at least five qualities to pull off a winning career, but also a plan like the one I am going to describe below.
Disclaimers and background out of the way, let’s get practical.
Let’s say you’re a smart person who loves science and has those five qualities and wants to “win at science.” That is, have a career successful enough to allow you to land the increasingly elusive permanent job and actually do science every day? With the problems of the academic Ponzi scheme, getting that permanent job can be really hard.
But there are some relatively easy tricks to further success and to win.
Most people don’t think about this seriously. It’s only about the next hurdle, e.g., landing the bachelor’s degree, getting the PhD, getting the postdoc, etc., and without serious planning these steps may be difficult. It is akin to the problem writers have. At first it is about finishing something, then about selling something, and after a while you realize you’re having a career, but it may or may not be a good one. We’ll start with some general schemes and move on to some things specific to astronomy.
Generally, find out what things count most in the job market and do them. Do them even if it means skipping other opportunities. Get invited to give a big review talk at an international meeting? By all means do it if it doesn’t take too much time, but skip it if the time will cost you finishing a paper. One refereed publication on your curriculum vita (CV) generally counts more than the recognition of being an international expert. The people with the permanent jobs are not usually people in your field and won’t care. They will be counting papers on your CV.
And since the number of papers on your CV is one of the first things people look at, maximize them. Don’t write a single long paper when you can get away with writing two shorter ones. There is a time and place for writing the large comprehensive paper — one time is when it may be required is for your PhD project and to get some notice in the field (good for reference letters and getting hired as a postdoc), and the other time is after you get tenure.
Also you need to specialize in something you’re good at to maximize production. This is a flaw of my own career. I do everything in observational astronomy from radio waves to X-rays, from imaging to spectroscopy, from spectropolarimetry to spectral principal component analysis. There are some advantages to this approach, but big drawbacks. I will talk about this again in the context of funding. Anyway, figure out what you like to do and what is relatively easy for you. One thing ideally, but because of the dangers of being too limited it is better to pick 2-3 things that are complementary. Maybe some kind of experimental technique, some kind of analysis technique, and some kind of modeling, that can be used together. Become THE RECOGNIZED EXPERT. This will get you invited to join grant proposals and get away with doing something easy and quick for you that will get you added on other people’s papers.
If you have a range of interests, find out which of those interests has the largest piece of the pie. Subfields with more people have higher citation rates and usually demand a larger share of grant funding. It’s hard to get funded or cited if you work in an obscure topic.
Pick your advisors/bosses and collaborators carefully. Pick a productive advisor. Research their publications and pick someone publishing a lot, not someone who is dead wood. You will learn how to work efficiently and be pressured to be productive. Some collaborators are more of a drag on a project than an asset. Some always give good and timely feedback. Some are black holes. Figure out who is who and make adjustments as necessary.
While I think it is critical to develop original skills and learn how to do things for yourself, a lot of the time it is faster and easier to let someone else to the tedious work. In astronomy we now enjoy large databases of images and spectra that are public, through projects like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and the Hubble Space Telescope Multi-Mission Archives (MAST). Sometimes you need to select a sample of objects, design an observational program, propose, wait, get the data, reduce the data, and do the analysis. Sometimes you can just download the data and do the analysis, saving years. Sometimes what you want isn’t available, but it is increasingly available these days. I also remember being amazed at what can be done with published data — most scientists focus on only one small aspect of a dataset, and there may be more important results still hidden there, just waiting for someone else to come along. Or by combining multiple published studies, a meta analysis, clearer results may be readily available. Meta analyses are often very citable.
For permanent positions, getting grant money is often important. Make sure you get experience writing grant proposals as soon as possible. Help your advisor or boss as a grad student or postdoc. Find out if you’re allowed to write your own grants as a postdoc. Say yes to opportunities to review grants, and if they don’t come your way, find out who the grant officers are and email them to tell them you’re interested in being a reviewer in the future. This is an absolutely golden way of learning how to write good grants. It is the equivalent of being a slush reader for a science fiction magazine. It becomes really easy to see what works and what doesn’t and easier to emulate the former.
Find out who in your subfield is regarded as the best and study their work. Emulate their techniques and approach when possible (don’t copy their studies as they’ve already been done, of course). Do complementary projects when possible, and confirm or invalidate their ideas (if you find a problem, don’t be an asshole!). Do this well, and you’ll end up a collaborator at some point, or at least get cited by them a lot.
Don’t take negative referee reports or other criticisms personally. Getting mad at people or having personal vendettas is rarely productive. It is easy to blow an entire afternoon complaining about someone or a referee’s report or how a review panel didn’t understand your great ideas. Swallow all that and make the revisions.
A few things now specific to astronomy. It’s faster and easier to start doing observational work as a student than theoretical work, at least if you’re sufficiently careful enough not to make too many mistakes. If theory is your love, do it, but for me it was not what I loved. Note that some of the most productive and respected people in astronomy are theorists, and if you’re a genius or you can can develop a theoretical niche it is possible to be fast. Chandrasekhar didn’t need my advice. Also a theorist doesn’t have to write a telescope proposal or wait for clear weather to make progress on their project, which is a plus, but they also tend to have a harder time finding grant funding.
An easy way to be a good, innovative observational astronomer is to be able to work at multiple wavelengths. That is, there are usually obvious studies to do following up one project in say, the optical, with new observations in the X-rays. Specialize in wavelengths where there is easy grant money. Optical and radio astronomers have it tough since most projects with ground-based telescopes don’t offer funding. Space-based projects often come with analysis money, so most X-ray projects, far-infrared projects, ultraviolet astronomy, etc., if accepted, are prefunded. Other scientists often get projects accepted and then have money to hire a postdoc with expertise to do the technical work, so these are great areas to work in from a practical standpoint.
Finally, one last suggestion. Instrument builders in astronomy are always in high demand and developing this skill is a great way to get a permanent job. It is risky, however, as instruments can be slow to build (taking more years to finish a PhD), and don’t usually result in a lot of papers.
Summary
1. Maximize your publication rate. Write a larger number of shorter papers.
2. Specialize. Find a few things you can do better and faster than other people. This will result in more papers, and more opportunities to collaborate and score easy co-authorships.
3. Pick a well funded subfield large enough to ensure a higher than average citation rate and grant opportunities.
4. Pick advisors/bosses/collaborators who are productive, and dump the slow, lazy, and unhelpful.
5. Work with public data when possible. Meta analyses, well done, are highly cited. Do your own experiment or observation only when necessary (it’s slow).
6. Develop grant writing skills. Help others when given the chance. Say yes to, or volunteer for, grant review panels.
7. Identify the best in your subfield and study their papers. Adopt their best techniques. Do complementary projects. Collaborate with them if possible.
8. Don’t take things personally. Bull sessions to complain about bad referees, ignorant review panels, or that idiot who wrote a paper critical of your work may be satisfying in the short run, but they can steal time. Channel that energy into revising the paper or proposal so that even a total idiot will see its brilliance.
And specific to astronomy:
9. It’s generally quicker and easier to develop skills in observational astronomy, and there’s also more funding opportunities. Unless you have love or special talent for theory, skip it.
10. Specialize in 2-3 observational techniques/wavebands and don’t try to do it all. Use radio and optical archival data as much as possible and focus on writing proposals that bring both telescope time and funding simultaneously (e.g. space-based telescopes like Hubble or Chandra).
11. If you’re interested in building instruments and can do it well, you will be in demand. The path is riskier, however.
And now it is time to stop blogging and get back to revising a paper.
So, over in science blogger/skeptic land, there’s been a discussion about how to talk to the believers. This comes up for well-educated, rational people all the time. Most of my friends have advanced degrees, talk about things they know well, and don’t have totally wacky beliefs. The ones that do have wacky beliefs wear them well and are open to criticism about them…mostly.
There’s no real consensus about this, by the way. We all tend to go through phases. We have times when we’re silent and don’t want to upset the apple cart. I once sat, silently, and listened to an ignoramus at a campfire go on about how evolution didn’t make sense and that people being born of monkeys was ridiculous. At other times we’re fed up with hearing the nonsense and tend to react with anger, impatience. I’ve had my late nights on fark or slashdot seeing red with some idiot or other and saying things not too politely. Usually we end up losing the silence, losing the anger, gaining patience, and wanting to see some learning going on. I’m evolving toward establishing common ground and trying to help these people figure out how to figure out which point of view is more likely correct based on the principles of science.
It ain’t easy, but it beats the alternatives.
Now, there are a lot of parallels between what science people deal with and what science fiction fans deal with. Unfortunately.
I’m a member of both groups. I can pass for “normal,” whatever that means, but I refuse to do so most of the time. I like what I like, know what I know, and I’m more proud than embarrassed. If I only liked what everyone else liked, and only knew as little as the majority of people in the world, I’d be more embarrassed than proud. I’d be an uneducated member of the herd, happy with what Miss Cleo told me about who I was dating and thinking that Friends* was high art.
Non fans are called a lot of things. Normal people. Non magic folk in the Harry Potter world are Muggles. The term I’ve heard a few times at cons is “Mundanes.” I’ll use that one, even though an older meaning of the word “mundane” is “worldly” with a lot better connotations than the word gets now.
So, what do you do when someone at a party starts going off on the Star Trek nerd they have at work, or says that comic books are stupid things for kids?
Well, let’s reject silence and anger out of hand. They don’t do much good, don’t make you feel better in the end, and open no one’s eyes.
Seek some common ground and educate. Some common ground we share with the mundanes includes money, fame, space babes/hunks, and coolness factor.
Star Trek is a billion dollar franchise. Who hasn’t seen it, fan or not? What ideas have generated dollars in the billions? Star Trek had shirtless Kirk jumping every hot alien in sight and Jeri Ryan in that tight jumpsuit. From here you can slip in something good, like how the first interracial (species?) kiss on TV was between Spock and Uhuru, or how the ideals of the show are good to aspire to. Only a real asshole is going to keep digging at the nerd.
Star Wars is as big or bigger, and Leia in the gold bikini is timeless, if you grew up in that time as I did. James Earl Jones’s voice is magic. Yoda was wise beyond his years. I mean, only a total dork didn’t love Star Wars. Who wants to be a dork bigger than the science fiction fan?
How about with those conservative dicks who think that money is the be all and end all. Point out the box office draw, how most of the biggest films were science fiction. If that doesn’t work as they think Hollywood is a liberal trick, hit them where it hurts: Arnold. Science fiction and fantasy movies made him and his career. From Conan and the Terminator on, it was a wild roller coaster ride, and with Arnold being one of the few bright points for the G.O.P., use it.
For the high-brow intellectual, maybe a literary type who looks down on genre, use Frankenstein for starters. It’s an icon of literature, and totally science fiction. Important issues, with themes important today, too. Don’t let them slip out. It’s making artificial persons from body parts, just like Blade Runner, full of questions about what it means to be alive and to be human. Important shit.
And how about the comic book curmudgeon? Heath Ledger as the Joker. Awesome, and Ledger is dead and they’ll look like an asshole talking crap about him. I hope he wins an Oscar. I loved Nicholson back in 1988 as the Joker, but only because I didn’t know any better. Ledger showed me the way. I’m also hoping for critical success for The Watchmen. We’ll see.
Don’t be silent. Don’t get mad and contradict. Find something that they can’t disagree with and co-opt them. There’s so much to love about what we love that there’s something for everyone, and no one is truly a Mundane all the way through.
Remind them of that.
*Note, I liked Friends just fine, but let’s be real.
Some risks have extremely high stakes. For example, a worldwide pandemic or asteroid impact could potentially kill more than a billion people. Comfortingly, scientific calculations often put very low probabilities on the occurrence of such catastrophes. In this paper, we argue that there are important new methodological problems which arise when assessing global catastrophic risks and we focus on a problem regarding probability estimation. When an expert provides a calculation of the probability of an outcome, they are really providing the probability of the outcome occurring, given that their argument is watertight. However, their argument may fail for a number of reasons such as a flaw in the underlying theory, a flaw in the modeling of the problem, or a mistake in the calculations. If the probability estimate given by an argument is dwarfed by the chance that the argument itself is flawed, then the estimate is suspect. We develop this idea formally, explaining how it differs from the related distinctions of model and parameter uncertainty. Using the risk estimates from the Large Hadron Collider as a test case, we show how serious the problem can be when it comes to catastrophic risks and how best to address it.
I’m equating wisdom here with a type of intelligence, one that “smart†people should have or be capable of achieving. When smart people do/say/believe stupid things, it’s akin to them lacking wisdom, and the stupid things could be avoided if only they applied some of their smarts in a different or more global way. It’s often a failure to see the forest for the trees. Sometimes it’s forgetting that forests are made of trees.
One example I see in astronomy all the time has to do with uncertainties. It’s pounded into our heads as graduate students that a data point doesn’t mean much if you don’t know its error bars, and we often spend more time generating the uncertainties than we do determining the data values. That’s fine as far as it goes. But here’s where the stupid comes in sometimes. There are two kinds of uncertainties: formal and systematic. It’s often possible to calculate and show formal uncertainties, which are usually based on well-understood statistics of shot noise or error propagation. A lot of the time these are worthless, because they’re much smaller than the systematic uncertainties, which depend on the validity of the technique. A simple example of the difference is calibrating how bright a star is in absolute terms. We do this regularly by comparison of photons received in a time period compared to some standard reference stars, and use statistics of photons and detector noise to determine formal uncertainties. The systematic error comes up in the choice of reference stars (or the change in seeing without changing extraction apertures, etc.) — if the standard star turns out to be a variable for some reason, then the formal uncertainty means nothing.
In astronomy, adding those formal error bars to a plot, even when the systematic uncertainties are known to be much larger and more important, will make many an audience member smile happily even when they don’t mean anything. That’s being a stupid smart person.
The paper is in part about seeing the forest, putting a calculation in context, in recognizing that errors with the method, or other unforeseen aspect of the calculation could mean that the actual result doesn’t mean anything. I remember a case back in the early 1990s in my field. It was a calculation of the probability that a certain category of quasar, a broad absorption line quasar, could be what we call “radio loud.” The probability thrown out was one chance in a trillion based on the survey work to date. I published a paper in 1998 reporting my discover of five of them, and now hundreds are known. They’re not common, but they sure exist. The problem was that parameter space had not been uniformly explored to that point, and there is a relationship between radio properties and the presence of broad absorption lines, but it is far from absolute or clearly understood.
Now, here’s the thing. Careful scientists usually couch there statements in qualifiers. I’m sure that calculation of one in a trillion started with a bunch of assumptions, and that those assumptions were clearly started. One of those assumptions was wrong, is all. There was interesting science in why it was wrong. It wasn’t a “mistake” to make the assumption and do the calculation.
The kind of statistical argument made here in the Ord et al. paper has no physics in it. It’s more of a mathematical or philosophical argument. It’s full of its own assumptions, too, which it does state, but seems somewhat unaware of their own limitations. That is, there is the notion that mistakes are made in physics calculations so often that one shouldn’t believe any extremely rare probabilities. Well, yes and no. Sometimes the probabilities can be verified by experiment. Events are rare, but they can still be studied by virtue of having a lot of chances for them to be observed.
There are physics theories that predict a proton decay timescale of something like 1031 years. Well, that’s a dman small probability of any given proton decaying this year. But by watching a lot of protons, we know know that the decay timescale is at least a few orders of magnitude larger, and there is no evidence of proton decay of any sort.
Another post I made related to this topic was after reading The Black Swan, by Nicholas Taleb. Taleb’s big complaint is how the economics industry adopts Gaussian errors, which may or may not be a valid description of the uncertainty for unlikely events. We can prove Gaussians are good for many applications in physics. The problem is that they are assumed in economics, often without compelling evidence, and often with catastrophic consequences.
But I digress a bit. I’m interested in all the tangents on this topic I’m afraid, of pointing out the promise and danger of our explorations. Anyway, when it comes to communicating results to the public, all the qualifiers tend to be dropped. The results tend to drop the assumptions and it sounds like an absolute result, with lots of significance, and such things are rare in science. Then Ord et al.’s argument comes in: people doing calculuations are wrong one time out of a thousand, or ten thousand. On average. Their claim is that this is serious when assessing risk for high cost disasters.
Which says to me we might as well stop doing anything with high stakes, no matter the benefits, and start doing anything to avert risks, even if the dangers are not proven.
Hear this, Fox News? The chances of catastrophic climate change ending civilization as we know it are far from zero according to the experts. But they might be wrong. It might be much higher than they think!
I don’t quite buy this. This is a brand of numerology, philosophy. There are right and wrong answers in the hard sciences. We can be careful. We can check, double check, and cross check. Some authors are better and more careful than others, and so are their referees. Don’t just say, there’s a tiny chance that is wrong and that chance is larger than the tinier chance calculated. Be more careful. Do more checks. Keep checking.
And why pick on the Large Hardron Collider? For the PR? And when the actual conclusion is that there’s still little risk, and when fear mongers like Fox News are likely to pick up on it and spread fear?
I mean, can anyone say how often the very best people do a calculation wrong, have it checked and found to be okay by everyone else in the field, sit around thinking about it for years facing criticism and questions from people about if it is wrong, and still fail to see any errors? I submit that in this scenario, consistent with the business with the LHC, hasn’t happened often. I don’t believe anyone can assess the liklihood of error here, except to say it is smaller than usual.
Again, I am really tempted to rewrite the blog entry with the same arguments, only replacing the Large Hadron Collider with Anthopogenic Climate Change, to argue that we’re mistaken about how likely total destruction of the planet is via runaway greenhouse effect. I haven’t seen anyone putting high odds on that. If it’s lower than 1 in a 1000, this paper by Ord et al. suggests it might as well be considered 1 in a 1000. How about a little Kyoto, Fox News, in the face of rolling the thousand-side die on the extinction of mankind?
Interview with Eric Nylund, Author of Mortal Coils
January 27th, 2009
In addition to being a great writer, Eric Nylund is an old friend of mine. I first met him and became a fan of his at the Clarion West Writing Workshop back in the 1990s. Eric has written original science fiction and fantasy for well over a decade now, and more recently has hit the best-seller list with his Halo video game novelizations (which I think have been some of the best genre military science fiction written in recent years and shouldn’t be limited to only fans of the game). Eric has a background in physical science and his fantasy work is nicely self-consistent with rigorous and interesting magic systems. I’ve read all of his books, including an advance copy of his brand new novel Mortal Coils, which I discussed here last month, with favorable comparisons to Harry Potter and Neil Gaiman.
Given that I know Eric well, and he asked for it, we’re going beyond some of the usual stock questions I usually use. He looks ready for them…
Mike: What writing opportunities have opened to you as a result of working in the gaming industry?
Well, there’s the obvious thing of being in the right place time when someone walks down the hall and asks you to write Halo novel (those are really once-in-a-lifetime occurrences!).
But really that’s the tip of the iceberg.
I’ve gotten to meet so many brilliant people while working in the video game industry – and not just other video games people, but and the best and brightest in literary field, Hollywood, comics… you name it, everything that’s cool today.
Probably the best thing about working at Microsoft Game Studios, though, is the education I’ve gotten on how to make, promote, and perpetuate mass-market, billion-dollar, blockbuster intellectual properties (little things like that come in handy when you’re trying to build your own literary empire).
Mike: Is it true you get video games for free, and the ones that aren’t free are tax deductible?
True. I get all Microsoft games for free. In fact, it’s part of my job to play those games as they’re being developed. My recent favorite is Halo Wars, btw.
It’s also required to play our competitors games to get idea of what they’re doing. It’s fun but still a lot of work (akin, I guess, to working at Disneyland and getting to see all the ugly exposed machinery of your favorite rides).
Mike: Do you consider yourself a “sell-out” for writing Halo novelizations? Some writers consider media tie-ins a threat.
*laughs*
*laughs a little more*
Oh yeah, I’m a sell out for contributing to the successes of one of the biggest intellectual properties on the planet…and winning myself about a million fans in the process.
Okay, seriously, I’d only consider myself a “sell out†if I wrote something that I couldn’t make my own.
I could imagine a scenario where someone came up to me and said, “Hey, we need a Halo novel written and there has to be three Spartans and one of them is a girl and they have to befriend a little kid and a dog, rescue a bunch of slaves, blow up the Death Star, and then get promoted admirals of their respective fleets—oh, and by the way, we need one of the Spartans to be a midget.â€
But in all the media tie-in novels I’ve written I’ve gotten to tell the stories I want to tell and make them mine. For example, in the first Halo novel I knew I had to come up with the story about why these super soldiers were around, and somehow get the Master Chief’s story to dovetail to the beginning of the first Halo game. I was given lots of room to create that story and I consider it mine (on a personal level; mind you, Microsoft owns the intellectual property and copyright).
I know, however, some writers consider media tie-ins a threat—or the worst thing that ever happened to literature—or both. Honestly? Media tie-ins come with a huge built-in advantage of already having a mass-market audience. It’s hard for your average midlist novelist (if such a thing as a midlist novelist even exists today in this market) to compete with or feel good about that.
Mike: Which Halo book is your favorite?
The Fall of Reach.
Runner-up would be Ghosts of Onyx.
Mike: If the Halo books have been doing so well (I mean, bestseller lists, what kind of genre writer are you?), why go back to writing original concepts?
The Halo books are great, but there are two reasons I’m also writing original fiction. First, in order for me to do a Halo book there has to be one under contract with a publisher (currently there’s not yet…to the best of my knowledge), it somehow has to build and expand upon the existing Halo intellectual property (not just retell some story within the universe), and it has to be a story where they give me enough rope to either spin a great story… or hang myself.
I was originally offered the chance to write The Flood (the second HALO book), but I turned it down. Don’t get me the wrong Bill Dietz did a great job of writing that book… a lot better than I could have, in fact, because I would have tried to change the story completely and somehow make it mine. That wasn’t the purpose of that novel; it was a re-telling (and to Bill’s credits, the embellishment of) the first HALO game.
Here’s the second reason: I really like writing my own intellectual property. There’s no built-in audience, but I have ultimate freedom to do whatever the heck I want. What writer could resist that siren call?
Mike: Which of your original concept books is your favorite?
Mortal Coils. No kidding. I’m not just plugging the new book. This is the biggest and best thing I’ve ever written.
Mike: What was your inspiration for Mortal Coils and can you give us any hints about where the series will go after the first book?
Inspiration? Geez, I have a family—that’s enough drama to inspire anyone to write a novel where your relatives are gods and fallen angels vying for world domination and you’re a teenager in the center of that warfare just trying to figure out how to talk to the opposite sex.
Isn’t that how everyone feels when they’re a young teen?
Hints… hmmm…. I’m trying to keep everyone’s focus on this first book. But okay, if you put a gun to my head there four books more after Mortal Coils where the conflict between the Immortals and Infernals come to fruition, a lot of other players get into the game, and no punches are pulled.
And obviously the last line in Mortal Coils should give you a BIG hint where I’m going.
Mike: You’ve written some comic books now. How did you get into that and how does it compare to writing novels?
Writing a comic book script is a lot closer to writing a screenplay than a novel, at least in format and how I go about thinking about putting it all together. In a screenplay it’s frowned upon to give specific camera angles to the cinematographer or direction to the actors. In a comic script you’re required to do those things, so there’s a lot more creative freedom.
How did I get into writing comics? Now they think of it… the same when I got into writing media tie-in novels. Someone walked into my office and said they had this writing gig…. (maybe it’s not a once-in-a-lifetime thing!)
Mike: Do you have any suggestions for how people can break into writing for the gaming or comic industries?
Samples. I know of no one who a will hire you without looking at your work. For games, this means coming up with a videogame script (and if you don’t know what one looks like, don’t guess). It’s better to download some easy-to-use engine like the one Bioware has for Neverwinter Nights and make a little scenario. Record some scratch voiceover. Show people that you know how to pace a story without getting in the way of the gameplay. That would be a great way to get your foot in the door.
Same thing goes for breaking into comics. You need to know what a comic script looks like and have a couple written and waiting to show people. Even better, get an artist to do a couple of sample pages for you.
Mike: Who are your favorite writers and what has most influenced your writing?
I like Roger Zelazny and Harlan Ellison, Tim Powers and Ursula K. Le Guin. Zelazny, though, is the biggie for me. Somehow he managed to be eloquent without all the literary fluffery that usually goes along with that. He was great.
Mike: Writers tend to drink a lot. Are you an alcoholic? If not, why not? Don’t you believe in traditional methods? (This question probably reveals more about me than Eric, by the way.)
I’m not an alcoholic but I very easily could be. Most of my writer friends have one or more of the following problems: depression, alcoholism, or drugs. It’d be easy to say that we’re all just a bunch of whiny babies who have no self control. But I think there’s something more than that to this business. You do your best, you put your work out for all to see, and people love or hate you…or more common, they love and hate you which contribute both to your delusions of grandeur and your depression (or it makes you bi-polar).
Every pro-writer says they have thick skins and none of it bothers them, but they’re liars. All of them.
Why aren’t I alcoholic? They’re two things from keeping me getting drunk every night: my wife and my five-year-old son. Every time I take a drink they give me a look that says, we love you, we need you… take it easy on the booze…and take it easy on yourself…we’re here for you.
Mike: If you had access to any property from tv, movies, comics, or video games, what one story would you kill to write?
I would love to do a FALLOUT novel (Fallout is a videogame, for those few don’t know).
I’d also kill to write the video game adaptation of ENDER’S GAME.
Mike: If you could have one weapon from the Halo universe, what would it be and what would you destroy with it?
I’m not exactly talking about ebooks or transitions of technology. I’m talking about Larry McMurtry’s contention that we may be living in the twilight of the novel. (Note that he happens to be giving his talk on this topic, ironically perhaps, at Rice University where I literally read hundreds of novels as an undergraduate in the late 1980s.)
McMurtry is a great writer, author of the awesome Pulitzer-Prize winning Lonesome Dove, the Oscar-winning screenplay for Brokeback Mountain, among many other memorable stories. From the article:
Q: What will you talk about at Rice?
A: The end of the culture of the book. I’m pessimistic. Mainly it’s the flow of people into my bookshop in Archer City. They’re almost always people over 40.
I don’t see kids, and I don’t see kids reading. I think little kids love to have stories read to them, but when they get to 10 or 11 or 12, they run into this tsunami of technology: iPod, iPhone, Blackberries.
They don’t resist it, and it’s normal that they wouldn’t; it’s their culture. I’m not so sure they ever come back to reading. Some will, but most won’t.
On the flipside, my friend Laura Mixon emailed this to me a few weeks ago:
Here is a recent NEA survey with very promising news: reading has seen a real resurgence in the past eight years. Especially fiction, and especially among the young. They’re calling it the “Harry Potter effect.”
Hmm. Has McMurtry heard of Harry Potter? Kids ARE reading. I don’t see them poking around smelly old used bookstores now or any time in my life in significant numbers. The report highlights big growth among 18-24 year olds, the ones McMurtry also doesn’t see in his used bookstore. Maybe that’s because they prefer to go to the Barnes and Noble where they can have a latte, or just order books over the internet. The report also highlights reading dips in the past associated with other forms of entertainment that have become available with new technology.
There are some real issues in here, but McMurtry appears not to have done his research on this topic. Book sales haven’t crashed and the rates of book reading are up across the board right now. There’s certainly competition for our leisure time, more so than ever before, but the demise of book culture doesn’t seem to be hovering in the near future. Maybe the in-store used book culture. A lot of younger people are reading stories and books online and don’t necessarily have to even pick up a physical object called “a book.” They’re still reading fiction, however.
(An aside. When I first released Star Dragon for free online several years ago, I received an email about eight hours later from a new fan who told me how much he had enjoyed it. He went on to explain that he never bought books anymore and did almost all of his reading on the computer, I think in an effort to make it clear that he’d never have read my story if I hadn’t have put it online, and certainly never would have bought it. The whole electronic distribution and copyright thing is a discussion for another day.)
McMurtry seems to be seeing the “graying” of the used book customer, perhaps in a similar way that we see the sf fandom community graying. It’s a cultural change, certainly, but not I think the end of novels or of science fiction in particular. However the NEA study did note this about genres:
A new question on the 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts allows reporting of the reading preferences of adults who said they read novels and/or short stories. Presented with the following genres—“mysteries,†“thrillers,†“romance,†“science fiction,†and “other fiction‗ 53.0 percent of novel and/or short story readers said they enjoy reading mysteries. The next greatest percentage (40.8 percent) went to “other fiction,†while thrillers were the third most popular (32.6 percent), followed by romance (28.5 percent) and science fiction (25.4 percent).
Last? Well, being down there with romance isn’t so bad given sales in that category. The missing variable is how many people with the different genre preferences pick up more than a book a year.
The experience of reading a great novel is still very powerful today, for every generation, even with other entertainment options, and there continue to be wonderful books out there to choose from. I don’t think I’m wrong about this. Call me optimist to McMurtry’s pessimist, perhaps, but I’ve got the data on my side.
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