Wednesday, February 28, 2024

ACES Guide for New Editors

I was not aware of ACES, The Society For Editing while I was working as a technical writer. I do wish I'd known about them (editing was a large part of my job) as they publish some useful resources, including a new and free Guide for New Editors (PDF link). 

Are you new to editing or transitioning to editing from another career? The ACES Guide for New Editors and accompanying list of resources are for you.

In this guide you'll be introduced to different types of editing, learn possible ways to begin your career, explore important topics editors consider in their roles (e.g., ethics, diversity and equity), gain an international perspective, and review a checklist to get started.

The ACES website has many resources for editors including their own style guide and a comprehensive list of diversity and inclusion resources. 

Tuesday, February 27, 2024

2023 Finalists from Analog's and Asimov's Readers' Polls

Analog Science Fiction Science Fact and Asimov's Science Fiction have announced the finalists for their annual readers' polls for stories published in 2023.

The Analog contest (known as the AnLab) has been running since the 1940s and the Asimov's poll for 38 years. Winners receive a cash bonus and some egoboo.

The best part:  All the stories and articles are linked to PDFs that you can download or read online. There's lots of good science fiction, science fact, and poetry to go through here.  

Monday, February 26, 2024

Featured Links - February 26, 2023

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

A winter beach
  • Dodge Lodge. "This week, we remember a Cinderella story gone wrong and learn why playing with dynamite is a bad idea." A fascinating bit of Northern Ontario history that I have not heard about before this article.
  • ‘Enshittification’ is coming for absolutely everything. "The term describes the slow decay of online platforms such as Facebook. But what if we’ve entered the ‘enshittocene’?" From Cory Doctorow, who coined the term last year.
  • Google is making a map of methane leaks for the whole world to see. "A satellite that measures methane leaks from oil and gas companies is set to start circulating the Earth 15 times a day next month. Google plans to have the data mapped by the end of the year for the whole world to see." This is a very good idea.
  • The ultimate guide to using PowerToys. "Windows may not be perfect, but Microsoft gives you the tools to make the experience better with PowerToys. Here's everything you need to know." If you are using Windows, you need PowerToys and this article is the best guide I've seen.
  • How to digitize and declutter your CDs and DVDs. "Save the content you still want, sell the discs you don't."
  • Google's inconsistent Pixel experience makes its phones impossible to recommend. "Three generations into the Tensor experiment, the time has come to stop making excuses for Google's buggy software." I'm more concerned about Google's penchant for killing off apps and services. I've never forgiven them for sunsetting Google Reader. 
  • Long Covid ‘brain fog’ may be due to leaky blood-brain barrier, study finds. "If barrier controlling substances entering and exiting brain is off balance, it can drive changes in neural function."
  • Bluesky: An Open Social Web. "Today, we’re excited to announce that the Bluesky network is federating and opening up in a way that allows you to host your own data. What does this mean?" I have not signed up for BlueSky yet though I probably will at some point. But right now I spend too much time on Mastodon and I don't need another time sink in my life. If you use BlueSky, I'd be interested in your experience if you want to leave a comment.

Sunday, February 25, 2024

Photo of the Week - February 25, 2024

This week's picture is of our cat, CJ, waiting patiently for me to finish getting ready for bed so he can hop up on me and get a snuggle. Taken with the Pixel 8 Pro. 

CJ


Saturday, February 24, 2024

Saturday Sounds - Joshua Redman Tiny Desk Concert

This Saturday's musical treat is courtesy of NPR and their Tiny Desk Concert series featuring saxophone great Joshua Redman. Thanks to Little Green Footfalls for bringing this one to my attention. 


Friday, February 23, 2024

Back On the Moon

Yesterday, a robotic lander made by Intuitive Machines successfully landed near the south pole of the moon. It's the first time a US spacecraft has been there since the Apollo program. 

As I write this Friday morning, it's still not clear just how successful the mission will be is reaching its goals, but the lander is on the moon and sending back some data.

I was especially impressed by the ability of the mission team to overcome a last minute problem by patching the lander's software to use a different set of cameras needed for the landing. That was an epic hack.

Earlier on Thursday, the company realized that its navigation lasers and cameras were not operational. These rangefinders are essential for two functions during landing: terrain-relative navigation and hazard-relative navigation. These two modes help the flight computer on Odysseus to determine precisely where it is during descent—by snapping lots of images and comparing them to known Moon topography—and to identify hazards below, such as boulders, in order to find a safe landing site.

Without these rangefinders, Odysseus was going to faceplant into the Moon. Fortunately, this mission carried a bunch of science payloads. As part of its commercial lunar program, NASA is paying about $118 million for the delivery of six scientific payloads to the lunar surface.

One of these payloads just happened to be the Navigation Doppler Lidar experiment, a 15-kg package that contains three small cameras. With this NDL payload, NASA sought to test out technologies that might be used to improve navigation systems in future landing attempts on the Moon.

The only chance Odysseus had was if it could somehow tap into two of the NDL experiment's three cameras and use one for terrain-relative navigation and the other for hazard-relative navigation. So, some software was hastily written and shipped up to the lander. This was some true MacGyver stuff. But would it work?



Tuesday, February 20, 2024

Featured Links – February 20, 2023

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

Cat in a window

  • Cannabis Extract Shows "Remarkable" Ability To Kill Skin Cancer Cells. "The results are promising, but preliminary."
  • Jim Collins: Discovery of the First New Structural Class of Antibiotics in Decades, Using A.I. "Starting from >12,000 compounds to find, with explainability, new drugs effective vs methicillin-resistant Staph aureus (MRSA)"
  • Vaccine Confidence Falls as Belief in Health Misinformation Grows. "Americans have less confidence in vaccines to address a variety of illnesses than they did just a year or two ago, and more people accept misinformation about vaccines and Covid-19, according to the latest health survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) of the University of Pennsylvania."
  • Truths, Untruths, and the Realm of Belief in Between: Misinformation & Propaganda in Science Fiction. "A science fiction author looks at how the genre examines the role of truth and mistruth in the genre."
  • Staring At A Red Light In The Morning Improves Worsening Eyesight, Study Shows. Staring at a deep red light for just three minutes can drastically restore declining eyesight, according to a new study in the journal Scientific Reports. Impressively, improvements from a single session of light exposure lasted for a whole week, although the treatment is only effective if administered in the morning.
  • Router Security. "This site focuses on the security of routers. This includes both configuration changes to make a router more secure, and, picking a router that is more secure out of the box. If you are interested in faster WiFi, there is one page on extending the range of a Wi-Fi network."
  • The real problem with Google's new Gemini Android assistant. "The real problem with Gemini as the Android assistant is that Google's forgotten why a phone assistant actually matters — and what we, as actual users in the real world, need from such a service." He's absolutely right and I'm not installing it on my phone until they fix it.
  • DOJ quietly removed Russian malware from routers in US homes and businesses. "Feds once again fix up compromised retail routers under court order."
  • Researchers reveal lost library of Charles Darwin for the first time. "For the first time since his death in 1882, Charles Darwin’s impressive library has been virtually reassembled to reveal the multitude of books, pamphlets and journals cited and read by the influential naturalist."
  • Friday, February 16, 2024

    Taking a few days off

    It's a long weekend here in the Great White North, which suddenly became white again today. Monday is Family Day in Ontario, and I have a lot of stuff to catch up on around the house, so I'm taking the weekend off. 

    Regular posts will resume Tuesday.

     In the meantime, enjoy this lakeshore scene, taken before the snow hit.

    Lake Ontario in the afternoon


    Wednesday, February 14, 2024

    Verifying the Capacity of a USB Drive

    I've seen a few reports recently about USB drives that are not what they seem. For example, a 1 TB USB drive may actually have a capacity of only 32 MB, but the drive appears to be 1 TB to the operating system. It'll appear to load your files, but when you go to retrieve them, they aren't there.

    Or, as Tech Radar reports, the drive may be using a chip of dubious quality; for example, a chip rejected by a manufacturer because it failed quality control. Steve Gibson has created the ValiDrive utility that will scan the drive and report its actual capacity. It's small, requires no installationm, and free.

    To use it, open the program and insert the drive you want to scan into your PC. It will start scanning the drive, scanning 576 sectors across the memory from beginning to end, logging read and write errors, and report the total actual (as opposed to reported) size. 

    It's a useful utility and I will run it on any drives or cards that get. 

    Monday, February 12, 2024

    Featured Links – February 12, 2024

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

    Ducks in the bay



    Sunday, February 11, 2024

    Photo of the Week – February 11, 2024

    I don't see as many sunrises now as I did when I was working. Taking my usual GO Train from Pickering, there were four times during the year when I could see the sun rising over lake Ontario. Now I have to remember to look up the sunrise time and walk outside and I can't see the actual moment of sunrise because of houses and trees in the way.

    But nature occasionally puts on a light show, and that happened one morning last week when I was taking the weekly recycle material out to the curb for pickup. I ran back into the house to grab my phone before it faded. If I'd been five minutes later, I would have missed it.

    Sunrise





    Saturday, February 10, 2024

    Saturday Sounds - Philip Glass - Symphony 11

    This week's musical post is another in honour of Philip Glass, who just celebrated his 87th birthday. It's a recording by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under the baton on Riccardo Muti, and it won a Grammy Award last weekend for the best engineered classical recording. 

    I haven't been a fan of most of Glass's symphonies, but I do like this one quite a lot. In a review, Classics Today calls it a "rollicking ride" and that's an apt description. It's much livelier and to my ear, much more enjoyable, than his 13th, which I saw performed last a couple of years ago. 

    Friday, February 09, 2024

    Yes, There Is Hope for Us 4

    This is the latest in an ongoing series of posts contrasting my "We're Toast" series of posts, with links to articles that suggest that we might somehow pull through the coming crisis. I haven't done one of these in a while, and yes, there is some good news among all the horrible news that seem to dominate the news. 

    A snowless, sunny park in February


    Wednesday, February 07, 2024

    Are Space Settlements Realistic?

    I recently finished watching season 4 of For All Mankind, a rather good science fiction series on Apple TV+. The premise of the show is that in 1969, the Soviet Union beat the United States to a lunar landing, touching off a decades long space race that eventually resulted in settlements in Earth orbit, on the moon, and eventually Mars. All this in about forty years. 

    It's a wonderful dream but not very realistic, at least not in that timeframe. Which raises the question: are space settlements possible at all? 

    That question is addressed in a new book, A City On Mars, by biologist Kelly Weinersmith and cartoonist Zach Weinersmith. Cory Doctorow reviewed it recently in his Plurastic blog and comes down on the "not realistic" side of the question. 

    The Weinersmiths make the (convincing) case that every aspect of space settlement is vastly beyond our current or reasonably foreseeable technical capability. What's more, every argument in favor of pursuing space settlement is errant nonsense. And finally: all the energy we are putting into space settlement actually holds back real space science, which offers numerous benefits to our species and planet (and is just darned cool). 

    My own take on it is that there's no way that we will have self-sustaining settlements in space, on the moon or on Mars, much before the end of this century. But I think we still need to start on a small scale, in Earth orbit and on the moon, to develop the ability to live in a self-sustaining environment that eventually can be scaled up to something larger. 

    One of the things that will keep large scale space colonization from happening is the detrimental effects on the atmosphere of rocket launches. It's not a major problem right now, but lifting hundreds of thousands or millions of tons into orbit using chemical rockets, even ones using relatively "clean" fuels is going to affect the atmosphere and climate. The only way around this is probably a space elevator, but that needs materials that we don't yet have. 

    It may be that humans can't survive away from the Earth (see Kim Stanley Robinsn's novel, Aurora, cited in Doctorow's post). The only way we'll find out is to try and I think we should.  

     

    Monday, February 05, 2024

    Featured Links - February 5, 2024

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


    Sunday, February 04, 2024

    Photo of the Week - February 4, 2024

    This week's photo is of a barge used to clear the channel between Frenchman's Bay and Lake Ontario. This was taken with my Pixel 8 Pro and it's 5x telephoto and not edited.

    Dredge in Frenchman's Bay


    Saturday, February 03, 2024

    Wayne Kramer, RIP

    Wayne Kramer, the guitarist for the Detroit rock band, The MC5, has died at the age of 75. From Rolling Stone:

    "Formed in Detroit in the mid-Sixties, MC5 (shorthand for Motor City Five) first came to prominence as the house band for left-wing rallies in the city at the time. Following a performance outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, Kramer and company returned to Detroit and its Grande Ballroom in October of that year to lay down what would become their landmark album Kick Out the Jams.

    The live LP — with its rallying cry “Kick out the jams, motherfuckers” — would ultimately land on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. “Kick Out the Jams writhes and screams with the belief that rock & roll is a necessary act of civil disobedience. The proof: It was banned by a Michigan department store,” Rolling Stone wrote of the album. “The MC5 proved their lefty credentials the summer before the album was recorded when they were the only band that showed up to play for the Yippies protesting the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.”

    While MC5’s tenure was short-lived — the band only released two studio albums, 1970’s Back in the USA and 1971’s High Time before their initial break-up — the group had a lasting impact on what would become punk rock, both in its overtly political lyrics and the Kramer/Smith tandem’s explosive riffs."

    I never managed to see them perform, much to my regret. But I did wear out my copy of "Kick Out the Jams", one of the loudest, rawest, and political albums of the 1960s. Kick out a few jams in his honour.



    Saturday Sounds - U2 - The Spere, Las Vegas - January 26, 2024

    This week, we have something rather special. U2 has been performing at The Sphere in Las Vegas, perhaps the most incredible concert venue in the world. Seeing a concert there is now near the top of my bucket list.

    This is the full show in which they perform their Achtung Baby album and more. It's fan shot video with very good sound. (I'm assuming the audio is an audience source though it might be from an in-house feed. In any case, it's quite listenable.) The video is occasionally jaw-dropping and the performance is up to U2's usual high standards. 

     

    Friday, February 02, 2024

    Locus 2023 Recommended Reading List

    Locus, the newsmagazine of the science fiction and fantasy field, has published their recommended reading list for 2023. As usual, it's a great place to start if you're looking to find high quality science fiction, fantasy, or horror to read.

    These are the books I've read (*) or plan to read from the science fiction novels list. 

    • Creation Node, Stephen Baxter
    • Infinity Gate, M.R. Carey 
    • Red Team Blues, Cory Doctorow
    • The Deluge, Stephen Markley
    • Hopeland, Ian McDonald
    • The Terraformers*, Annalee Newitz 
    • Him, Geoff Ryman 
    • Starter Villain, John Scalzi
    Some of the novelette and short story items are available to read online and links are provided. 

    Thursday, February 01, 2024

    Movie and TV Reviews - January 2024

    Short reviews of what Nancy and I watched in January 2024.

    Movies

    • Underwater: This was a pretty standard and predictable thriller with monsters. The last third looked like they had used up the SFX budget. The IMDB rating of 5.6 was too generous. (Disney+)
    • The Creator: This was a rewatch as we had seen it at the cinema last fall. It was worth rewatching. It also looked much better on our LG OLED than it did at Cineplex. I do wish there were more original big-budget SF movies like this; I could happily live without seeing another MCU, Star Wars, or Star Trek movie. (Disney+)
    • Indiana Jones: Dial of Destiny. Another rewatch (my daughter wanted to see it). It wasn't any better the second time around. (Disney+)
    • Hamilton: We watched about twenty minutes and decided it wasn't for us. The music is good but we had no interest in the story. I'd just as soon listen to the soundtrack album. (Disney+)
    • Killers of the Flower Moon. I think this was the best movie I've seen in the last year, with the possible exception of Barbie. Despite the length, the movie held our attention. The acting, writing, cinematography, production values, and directing are all first rate. From what I've read online, it's reasonably historically accurate, much more so than many big-name US films. And a special shout out to the late Robbie Robertson for a superb score. (Apple TV+)
    • Totally Killer. Back to the Future meets Halloween. OK if you don't mind the slasher scenes. (Amazon Prime)
    • Elton John Live at Dogers' Stadium: I was an Elton John fan from his first album, but kind of lost interest when he started having mega hits. But I now really wish I had gone to see him perform at some point. Just an amazing concert, all the more so when you realize he's in his mid-70s. (Disney+)

    TV Shows

    • Shetland, season 8: Dark and bleak, like the islands with first-rate acting. The plot in this one was unusually complex (maybe too complex) and left us guessing until the end. (BritBox)
    • Antiques Road Trip, season 25: More comfort watching. We find the embedded bits of local history quite fascinating. (PBS)
    • Vera, season 12 episode 5. I don't know why this episode didn't show up with the others in season 12, but it was worth the wait. (BritBox)
    • Slow Horses (season 3): The plot of this one was even more implausible than last season but we still enjoyed it. Gary Oldman's performance is the best thing about the show. (Apple TV+)
    • For All Mankind (season 4): My only reservation about this show is that the time frame is unrealistically compressed. I can't believe that there could have been that much technological progress in 40 years. Still it's eminently watchable and I loved the optimistic spirit. It's the best SF show going right now by far. (Apple TV+)
    • Reacher (season 2): This is the action equivalent of the "cozy mysteries" we like to watch. Not to be taken seriously. It was interesting seeing the local settings subbing for some US locations. (Amazon Prime)
    • The Sixth Commandment: Slow, grim, and quite unsettling, all the more so for being based on a true crime. (BritBox)
    • Hope Street (seasons 1 and 2): More of a soap opera than a police procedural with a lovely setting in Northern Ireland. (BritBox)
    • Emergency Vet (season 1): A documentary series based on the behind-scenes-care at Toronto's Veterinary Emergency Clinic (VEC). We've had to take our dog to the VEC for an eye problem, so we are quite familiar with them, but I had no idea how extensive the clinic's facilities are.