Off for a Couple of Weeks

I am back online, finally, after a 2-1/2 day power outage. On Saturday afternoon, we got hit by a major windstorm (a derecho), knocking out power to many areas here. It was the worst storm I've seen here, by far, and it was worse north of us, in Uxbridge, and in Ottawa. I took this picture just before I grabbed the dog and headed for the basement.

Power to much of our neighbourhood came back briefly Saturday evening but had to be cut off again because trees fallen on power lines were catching on fire. Our neighbours three houses over had a tree down in their backyard dragging the power line down to the ground. The other side of the street got power restored Saturday evening, which was good as we could get food, but we didn't get ours back until last evening when Elexicon finally showed up to remove the tree and restore the lines to our side of the street.

We were able to save most of the contents of our freezers by buying some bags of ice, then taking the food over to Nancy's mom's house. Most of the contents of the two fridges have to be tossed. At least the freezers are now defrosted and cleaned.

However, we now have a lot more to do, in a period where we were already busier than usual. We have been helping my daughter and her husband move into their house and they are having their wedding reception this weekend. (They got married last year, but couldn't have the big party they wanted because of COVID-19 restrictions). Along with that, we have our anniversary, my son's birthday, and my mom is in the hospital after a fall. 

So, I'm putting the blog on hold until mid-June. I just don't have the time right now to deal with it, much as I would like to. 

Enjoy the spring and I'll see you in June.

Off for the Weekend

It's the Victoria Day weekend up here in the Great White North, a weekend traditionally reserved for gardening, barbecuing, and pounding back a few cold ones. Weather permitting, I plan on doing all of that, so I am taking the weekend off from blogging and will see you back here on Tuesday.  

Interview with Elon Musk at Starbase

The crew at the Everyday Astronaut YouTube channel have scored another interview and Starbase tour with Elon Musk. If you're curious about the details of some of the SuperHeavy/Starship hardware and what the future holds for the production site at Boca Chica, you will want to see this. This is the Elon Musk that I admire – the steely-eyed rocket man, not the weird billionaire who plans to ruin Twitter. The interview is mercifully politics-free and full of serious rocket geekery. 

We're Toast 24

This post is a collection of links that support my increasingly strong feeling that the human race (or at least our technological civilization) is doomed. It is part of an ongoing series of posts.

Note: I put this topic on hold in March 2020, because of an overload of bad news, mostly relating to COVID-19 and the Trump administration. I'm going to resume posting to this topic to focus my Featured Links posts on other things. 

• Report: 'Carbon Bombs' Are Poised to Screw Us Over Big Time. "Massive planned oil and gas projects are set to derail climate progress, reporting from the Guardian reveals."
• Russia’s Invasion Will Keep Killing Ukrainians for Decades After the War Ends. "From Kharkiv to Chernobyl, activists and government workers are tracking environmental damage they say will have lasting effects on the land — and the people."
• Discovery Of The Source Of World's Largest Methane Pool Is Anything But Good News. "A new study by researchers from Queen Mary College London (QMUL) has recently been conducting research on a record-breaking cache of it within the Pacific Ocean. As they note in the journal International Society for Microbial Ecology, this is the largest marine methane deposit in the world."
• White Ho/use prepares to ration vaccines as Covid funding impasse looms. The government’s funds are running out. Tough decisions may soon present themselves.
• I invented Gilead. The Supreme Court is making it real. "I thought I was writing fiction in The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood."
• Tuvalu, sinking in the Pacific, fears becoming a superpower 'pawn'. 'Tuvalu fears that climate change, an existential threat to the Pacific nation, is being forgotten and it worries that fellow island nations could become "pawns" in a global competition between China and the United States, its foreign minister said.'
• Non-COVID" Excess D. eath Rates Ran 21x Higher In Reddest Counties Than Bluest In 2021. If you want to live, "owning the libs" may not be the best strategy.

Read the Sturgeon Award Finialists For Free

The Sturgeon Awards are an annual award for the best science fiction short story of the year. They're named in honour of the writer, Theodore Sturgeon, who was arguably one of the best short story writers the genre has produced.

Locus Magazine has posted a list of the finalists along with links to the stories so that you can read most of them for free.

• “If the Martians Have Magic“, P. Djèlí Clark (Uncanny 9-10/21)
• “Philia, Eros, Storge, Agápe, Pragma”, R.S.A Garcia (Clarkesworld 1/21)
• The Album of Dr. Moreau, Daryl Gregory (Tordotcom)
• “Broad Dutty Water: A Sunken Story”, Nalo Hopkinson (F&SF 11-12/21)
• “Proof by Induction“, José Pablo Iriarte (Uncanny 5-6/21)
• “The Dark Ride”, John Kessel (F&SF 1-2/21)
• “The Metric“, David Moles (Asimov’s 5-6/21)
• “Sarcophagus“, Ray Nayler (Clarkesworld 4/21)
• “Bots of the Lost Ark“, Suzanne Palmer (Clarkesworld 6/21)
• The Necessity of Stars, E. Catherine Tobler (Neon Hemlock)

Featured Links - May 16, 2022

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

• 10 Simple Design Rules for Professional Microsoft Word Documents.  "Want to create professional-looking business reports or academic papers? Use these tips for formatting your Word documents." I wanted a lot of time at work, applying these formatting tips to documents that other people sent me to clean up. It's really not that hard to do.
• A New, Slightly More Comforting, Explanation For The Absence Of Aliens. "Maybe the aliens aren't here because they prioritized looking after the ecosystems on their home planet ahead of excess expansion."
• The World's "Earliest-Known Temple" Was Built 11,500 Years Ago With Geometry In Mind. "A fresh look at Göbekli Tepe, an 11,500-year-old structural complex in Upper Mesopotamia, has reaffirmed it might just be one of the most mind-blowing sites in human history."
• An Observation on Audiobooks. A post about audiobooks from SFF author, John Scalzi.
• D-Day’s Parachuting Dummies and Inflatable Tanks. A WW II misinformation campaign. 
• The QAnon Queen Told Followers They Didn’t Need to Pay Bills. It Didn’t End Well. "The QAnon Queen of Canada told her followers to stop paying their electricity and water bills because she declared them free. But now the utility companies are calling."
• Vast underground water system helps drive Antarctica’s glaciers. "Scientists have finally found Antarctica’s missing groundwater."

Photo of the Week - May 15, 2022

The dandelions are having a good year, which is good for the bees. We need bees. This is not my backyard, by the way; it's on a boulevard not far from my house. Taken with my Pixel 4a.

 

Saturday Sounds - Arcade Fire - We

Arcade Fire's latest album, We, has just been released, and I quite like it. 

A few years ago, my daughter took me to their concert in Toronto as a birthday present, mostly because Broken Social Scene was the opening act. I enjoyed their set, but would have liked it a lot more if the sound hadn't been a total mess, too loud and sludgy making it impossible to hear most of the words or distinguish the instruments. Lots of bass, though. (The sound for Broken Social Scene, OTOH, was excellent.)

 The sound on the new album is just fine and the music is too.

Locus Awards Finalists

The finalists for the Locus Awards have been announced. The awards are voted on by subscribers and readers of Locus, the SFF field's monthly news magazine. The award winners will be announced on June 25 as part of the virtual Locus Awards Weekend. 

These are the finalists for Science Fiction Novel.

The Galaxy, and the Ground Within, Becky Chambers (Hodder & Stoughton; Harper Voyager US)

Leviathan Falls, James S.A. Corey (Orbit US; Orbit UK)

The Echo Wife, Sarah Gailey (Tor; Hodder & Stoughton)

Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro (Knopf; Faber & Faber)

A Desolation Called Peace, Arkady Martine (Tor; Tor UK)

Noor, Nnedi Okorafor (DAW)

We Are Satellites, Sarah Pinsker (Berkley; Ad Astra)

You Sexy Thing, Cat Rambo (Tor)

Shards of Earth, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor UK; Orbit US)

Hummingbird Salamander, Jeff VanderMeer (MCD; Fourth Estate)

I can't comment on the quality of the nominees as I haven't read any of them yet, but I am reading the last of the Expanse books next, probably followed by Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace.

Budget Bytes

I have a New York Times subscription and get a daily email from them loaded with recipes. They look great, but in practice, they tend to be too complicated and use ingredients that I don't usually have at home. This week's Recomendo newsletter pointed me to a recipe site that's much more to my taste, so to speak. 

Budget Bytes bills itself as a place for "delicious recipes designed for small budgets". After browsing the site for a while, I have to say I'm impressed. The site is much more than just a list of recipes. For one thing, it's extremely well organized. As well as being able to find recipes by the usual categories (breakfast, dessert, meat (with subcategories), quick, and so on), there's a page listing close to a hundred subcategories. Even better, there's a much longer list of ingredients used in the recipes that link to all the recipes that use that ingredient. Brillant! And of course, the site is searchable.

Added content includes preparation and cooking tips, meal plans (by paid subscription), how-to tips, suggested pantry staples, and more. There's also an app for both IOS and Android. The recipes are well thought out with clear instructions and include the cost of ingredients (in US dollars) so Canadian users will have to add the exchange. 

I posted about this site on Facebook and one of my friends commented that the registered dietician where she works uses it and recommends it to their clients. 

I expect to be using a lot of their recipes in the coming months. 

Featured Links - May 9, 2022

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

• Last Dangerous Visions Acquired By Blackstone Publishing. After 50 years, it looks like Harlan Ellison's great unfinished project will finally get published.
• Inside the battle on the Eastern Front. "I was given access to a secret Ukrainian base."
• Rechargeable Molten Salt Battery Freezes Energy in Place for Long-Term Storage. "The technology could bring more renewable energy to the power grid."
• China developed a drone swarm that can fly effortlessly through an entire forest. "Inspired by birds, built by students."
• Italian study shows ventilation can cut school COVID cases by 82%. "An experiment overseen by the Hume foundation think-tank compared coronavirus contagion in 10,441 classrooms in Italy's central Marche region."
• They Leaked the End of the American Experiment. "Many of us screamed into the wind about the importance of voting, the cold danger of apathy, the sheer cruelty that would be unleashed, the searing reality that too late is too soon. But we can still reassemble our past and break our present—we have to."
• Sailors say aircraft carrier that had multiple suicides occur among crew was uninhabitable. '"This is the very bottom," he told CNN, speaking of the situation on the USS George Washington.'
• How ‘Big Funeral’ Made the Afterlife So Expensive. "It's time to reevaluate the cost of death care—and its environmental impact." Sadly, this is something that many of us have had to deal with since the before times.

Photo of the Week - May 8, 2022

Here's a tree stump along the Pickering lakeshore. It decays more every year; likely it will have collapsed in a few years.

Fujifilm X-S10 with 27 mm. F2.8 WR at F8, 1/340 second, ISO 400, Velvia film simulation

 

Saturday Sounds - Trey Anastasio Band - April 30, 2022

Today, we have a recent concert from the Sweetwater Music Festival last weekend featuring the Trey Anastasio Band (TAB). Trey is, of course, the guitarist for Phish. As well as being an amazing guitarist, he is a versatile songwriter and composer and has a crackerjack band to feature his material. This is an official recording with pro quality sound and video.

Being a jazz fan from when I started getting into music as a teen, I actually prefer the music he makes with TAB to that of Phish  . It's funky, jazzy, groove heavy, and highly danceable. Turn it up loud and groove to the music!

Note: The video should start at the beginning of the concert, but if it doesn't forward to 15:00 in the video.

Disney Is Evil

This article describes why I won't subscribe to Disney+. (I'm not a big Disney fan anyway, but they do have Star Wars). They maintain that when they bought authors' contracts, they bought the right to publish their works but not the obligation to pay. This is against established contract law and would upend the publishing industry if it became standard practice. And as usual, it's the little guy that gets screwed. #disneyisevil

Kindle to Support EPUB, Sort Of

Amazon has announced that you will soon be able to send EPUB files directly to your Kindle, using the Send to Kindle email address that each Kindle has, or later in the year through the Send to Kindle app. The files will be automatically converted to the current AZW3 format. 

They will drop support for the old MOBI format though files that you have will still continue to work (and I assume you can still sideload them directly from a computer). 

I'll be interested to see how well this works. Currently, I run EPUB files through the Calibre app so I can force justification to flush left (aka ragged right) as fully justified files look horrible at the font size I normally read at. I don't know if the new conversion from EPUB will support changing the default justification. If you know, please leave a comment. I would also like to see the ability to use the Atkinson Hyperlegible font, which my .mobi files don't seem to like, although I can get that working on AZW3 files by using Calibre.

At some point in the next year, I may buy a Kobo reader so I can download library books directly to my device and for the better typographic support offered by Kobo. (I can read library books on my phone or tablet, but would prefer to use an ereader as it's easier on the eyes). 

 

Featured Links - May 3, 2022

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

• Vogelbescherming Nederland - Together for birds and nature. This is a Dutch web site on which you can view webcams of nesting birds.
• How Toronto-based street gangs are terrorizing small-town Ontario. "Cashing in on the endless opioid crisis, drug-trafficking street gangs from the GTA are branching out into rural, northern and First Nations communities—with deadly consequences."
• Balloon detects first signs of a ‘sound tunnel’ in the sky. "Atmospheric analog to ocean’s acoustic channel could be used to monitor eruptions and bombs."
• When Will Humanity Become a Type I Civilization? A New Paper Explores Our Limits. "A Type I species is able to harness energy on a scale equal to the amount stellar energy that reaches its home planet. Type II species can harness energy on the scale of its home star, and Type III can harness the energy of its home galaxy."
• The surprising afterlife of used hotel soap. "Hotel guests leave behind millions of half-used bars of soap every day. A nonprofit is on a mission to repurpose them." I found this absolutely fascinating and wonder why no one ever thought of it before. 
• Google Lens in desktop Chrome can now copy text, translate, and open Images Search. "This could be very handy."
• Finding Neptune: How we discovered the eighth planet. "This ice giant hid from humanity’s view for millennia. But eventually, its sibling planet gave it away." An interesting bit of astronomical history that I didn't know about. 

Movie and TV Reviews - April 2022

Short reviews of movies and TV shows we watched in April. It's baseball season now so there won't be as many as last month.

Movies

• Moonfall: To quote Grace Slick: "When logic and proportion have fallen floppy dead". (Amazon Prime)
• The Green Knight. I was expecting a schlocky action movie and instead got a 70s-style arthouse flick. As usual, the plot didn't make a lot of sense, but it was very moody and evocative. (Amazon Prime)
• Uncharted: It's a decent action flick, with all the usual elements, but the final quarter of the movie strained my willing suspension of disbelief past the breaking point.
• Zeros and Ones: This looked like a B-grade action flick, but turned out to be a dark, moody mess. It does star Ethan Hawke, but he hardly ever speaks. We gave up after half an hour. (Amazon Prime)

TV Shows

• Halo: This is based on the hit video game of the same name. Shows and movies based on video games generally haven't been very good, but this one has high production values and an interesting plot.
• Prime Suspect: Tennison. This series is a prequel to the hugely successful Prime Suspect series with Helen Mirren. Stephanie Martini is quite good as are the minor characters. I do wish there had been another season.
• Nancy Drew (season 2): If there was really this much supernatural stuff going on in a Maine town, it would be headline news all over the world. I would have preferred more mystery and less supernatural.
• Harry Wild: A retired literature professor becomes a private eye solving crimes that appear to be based on books. It's an interesting idea, but it makes the plots even more contrived than usual for this kind of series. (Acorn TV)

Photo of the Week - May 1, 2022

I love the patterns that the branches of trees make before they are obscured by leaves. In a month, there will be a green canopy overhead. Taken with my Pixel 4a.