A mostly commercial announcement that was supposed to be brief

1. Very much commercial: I've closed my eBay store, which is where I was selling my old author copies (as the sole source of mint- or brand-new-condition signed first editions).  Sales had been dwindling and I've had four straight months where the store was wobbling around breaking even, nor did I see much prospect of bringing in vast hordes of new buyers.  I think the collector population is pretty much all Barnesed up, and eBay stores, while wonderful from a convenience standpoint for both buyer and seller, are also somewhat costly.

2. This doesn't mean I'm not still selling signed first editions (and foreign editions and other good things).  I'm putting together a catalog/pricelist, which I will make available to newsletter subscribers as soon as I finish it, and to everyone on request around November 15 (i.e. at the start of holiday shopping, the six weeks during which I've usually made about half my sales for the year).

3. And speaking of the newsletter, another one is imminent, with various news of various Barnesian projects, plus a longish essay (usually 2000-6000 words) that I pledge will never go anywhere other than to newsletter subscribers.  (Permission to quote is however readily granted).  If you've ever bought anything from me via eBay, or the e-Junkie service, or directly, then you're on the list unless you asked not to be.  You can also get on it by emailing me via the link to the right.  I hand manage the list, so all formats are fine -- any way in which you tell me you want your email address added is good.  (And of course you can also drop me a note asking to be taken off).  I have hopes the newsletter will go out tonight or tomorrow morning.  (And if you see this too late, nil desperandum; I always send the previous newsletter to new requests).

4. Cider House Rules, in which I am acting, is getting great reviews and pretty good buzz in Denver, so if you were thinking of seeing it, since the house is small (the back row is the third row!) you may want to get tickets soon (it plays through Sept. 30).

5.   A chapter of Tales of the Madman Underground has been adapted for performance by Denver's own One Night Stand Theater.  Jim O'Leary has done his usual splendid job at converting page prose to stage poetry, and I'm pretty excited that this is going to be performed, on Sunday, October 7.  (Denver area SF writer Steve Raznik Tem also has a story in the performance, so you know this is a class operation all the way).  Details and ticket orders here.

6. More stuff soon.  I'm still having thoughts, it's just the paid gigs are eating up typing time.  See you all soon.

I open the bag again

The Book Doctor's Little Black Bag: Facing up to goodness – Getting to the Good Parts ...: Symptoms and diagnosis: "Mary Sue"  is a term in literary analysis/nitpicking that is something like "paranoia" or "neurotic" ...

As life drifts back into normality, I'm getting back to some longrunning projects, one of which is The Book Doctor's Little Black Bag, in which I share some of the tricks I learned as a book doctor.  Plenty about it over there, including a warning page about the audience: most of this was originally things I explained to people who were almost-publishable.  It may not be applicable to beginning writers (or it might; i'm simply not worrying about them, as heaven knows there are plenty of sites and workshops for them).

 This particular episode is about Mary Sue-ism, and especially about how fixing it can lead you to better things than just a repair and an acceptance.

Where I'm back again from, and what's up

Well, yes, it's been a while, more than three weeks actually, but the chaos is drawing to an uneasy close, like one of those wars that ends in a long miserable drag-out where everyone is just trying not to be the last official casualty. The old office is evacuated, with just a few of the hapless Embassy maids and cooks falling from the helicopter skids, the new office is getting set up at a rate for which "glacial" would be a compliment. Opening night for the play I've been in rehearsal for is tonight, I'm caught up in my paid blogging for various technical and business websites, I've had some sleep and showers, and I'm back at work on The Last President, which is the third Daybreak novel.

So this entry is just sort of a catch-up, and herewith a few links:

I've sent out email notices and changed account addresses to everyone I knew I had to, but those of you who regularly deal with me via streetmail (especially the couple times a year collectors who prefer streetmail, and any of you lovely people who mail out checks) might want to drop me an email if I've overlooked you.

The CiderHouse Rules, in which I am an actor, opens tonight, at the VintageTheatre, 1468 Dayton Street, in Aurora. It's a long play -- there's a Part I and a Part II -- and this weekend we're just opening Part I; next week we'll go on the schedule of Part I in the matinee and Part II in the evening, so Friday and Saturday, today and tomorrow, are your chances to see Part I at night. First time I've walked onto a stage (except to build a set, check a light, or throw rehearsal furniture at actors) in 19 years. Details about the show and ticketshere; I can feel two to four 3000-Word Ramblers impending about it, but since I don't know how soon they'll swim up from the unconscious, or really what they'll be about (I usually don't know till halfway through the first draft) meanwhile, go see the show.

For those of you who still wonder what a statistical semiotician does and how it differs from the semiotics or semiology that your English or art history professor might have talked about, recently one of my editors at UBM was foolish enough to ask me that same question, and published my answer.  Contains no numbers or graphs.

Over at Metafilter, cgc373 noticed my I Hate Snark post from December, and provoked a very interesting discussion of it, of exactly the type that I can enjoy reading because I'm not the least bit responsible for maintaining or policing it, and therefore feel fairly little desire to comment, defend, expand, etc. myself. But if you've been wanting to say something about it, a bunch of civil and smart people (some of whom I agree with more than others, obviously) are talking about it there. Also, in his blog, Joshua Miller posted something so interesting that in a week or a month or whenever I know what I think about it, I'll probably say something in this blog, so go read his piece and watch this space.

The RNC is now history, which means that Raise the Gipper! (still available free by clicking on the link off to your right) is now alternate history. Interestingly, sales hit their highest spike just before the convention, which I think was a case of people preferring an imaginary world where the Republican nominee was a decaying brain-destroying corpse to a real world where it's Mitt Romney, and, on balance, who can blame them?*

I now plunge back into the mountains of boxes and furniture; there's an office in here, I'm pretty sure, if I just keep moving things to where they belong. More much sooner than lately.***

§

*Stray observation: before the convention I thought of old Mitt as an amiable doofus pathetically trying to reach above his doofushood, so that's how I depicted him in Raise the Gipper!. Nowadays, to me, he looks more like a doofus who is willing to be vicious, but to remain mired in his doofushood, as long as he gets to stand up front and look important. Doesn't it seem like the Republicans revere Reagan so much that ever since he retired they've been nominating people who make him look somewhat better in retrospect? I mean, at least once a month during both Bushes, I found myself beginning a sentence with, "You know, even Reagan didn't ..."**

**there has now been a footnote, and a metafootnote. This entry is therefore complete, though short by my odd standards.

***the more I look at that phrase the better I like it. I must have bumped my head sometime this morning.  Hope I bump it again.

Stuff that dropped off a full plate

For those of you who arise in the morning hoping that today there will be another 3000-word Rambler, well, not yet.  I'm in process of moving my office and I'm in the last weeks of rehearsing a play I'm in (first time on stage in 19 years.  Shocked to find out I've missed it so much).  So it'll be a while.

Meanwhile, though, I continue to write at several blogs in that other side of my life, marketing intelligence analysis.  Most of you are usually not interested, I have found, in subjects like the Kia Hamstas, Hiscox's quietly brilliant use of a mobile app in B2B insurance, the Zipf distribution of market share, or new statistics for estimating virality.  At least I think that's why you flee me at parties.  But as it happens, today's piece at All Analytics  has something to do with politics, in which some of you are interested, and specifically in structural graphs (pictures that show you how an election works rather than who's winning or predicting who will). So for those of you who just can't get enough of the election, get thee to the link, and you will see a nifty picture and some discussion of it.

For those of you who've already gotten too much, there's always the link to Raise the Gipper! at right.  See you all again, soon,  but probably not very soon.

A numeric approach to the seamy side of life: a very fast and esoteric follow-on for people who sew

Two people dropped me a note asking where I found out how thick a No. 5 sharp was, which they've been wanting to know, apparently, for years.   I had to look  that one up too, and searched for a while before finding the basic info at Prym's catalog website.  And then digging through half a dozen crafting websites.  The note from my crafty friends brought me to the blinding realization that this wasn't actually available anywhere easily in any place I could quickly find on line.

So as a little nod to everyone who likes to make stuff, here's what some research, checking needles from my sewing kit (so I got interested, so sue me) with calipers (because Prym and Simplicity both tend to round needle diameters to the nearest .10), and extrapolating led me to. This might be more useful for model-builders and miniature-makers than for seamst(ers)(resses) anyway, since at least it tells you what size hole a given needle will poke.

For the much too interested: Basically American needle sizes and European are arbitrary number sequences. 

An American No. 1 needle is a millimeter thick.  Each successive number is .05 mm thinner.  Having found a couple of Simplicity hand-sewing needle converstion charts, it became immediately clear that the European system is simply the American number plus 19; the advantage of this for Europeans would seem to be that their shoe and sailmaking needles can all be on the same scale.


PLEASE NOTE: FOR HAND SEWING ONLY.  MACHINE NEEDLES ARE COMPLETELY DIFFERENT.
 No warranty implied!  If you end up using the wrong needled to sew your zombie together and the first time he flips a guy off his hand flies backwards over his head, it's your problem (and his) not mine.

A short one for fun, with math

At the moment I'm drowning in half-finished blog posts as I keep having ideas and getting interrupted before I chew them to my satisfaction; one of the glories of Them There Interwebbical Things is that I don't have to chase after the biggest audience I can find, or any audience at all really, and just figure that the people who enjoy 3000-word Ramblers (tip of the hat to Mitch Wagner, who refers to many of my pieces as that) will find them here, and if that's not very many people, well, some of us are having fun and the rest of you will have to go find pictures of cute babies and cats and short punchy posts about whatever you like to be punched shortly about.

Anyway, having digressed, let me just point you to the following Tweet from Peter Aldhous:

We’ve travelled 560 million km. We’re right on target to fly through the eye of a needle. Target 3km * 12 km #MSL press conf @NASAJPL

The question, of course, is just how proportionate that is.

So ... or sew ... 

A No. 5 sharp hand sewing needle (what most of us keep around for sewing on buttons and closing up small tears) is 0.8 mm thick. The eye of  a sharp is usually about 4/5 of its width, so that would be around 0.64 mm.   An average height middle-class American woman* is 1.648 m tall, and women's eye-to-fingertip length averages 46% of height, so proportionately, if we assume for some horrible reason that this poor crazy woman is threading the needle by raising the thread to her eye and then trying to hit the eye of the needle at arm's length, that thread tip is traveling 1184.5 times the width of the aperture that the sewing woman is so awkwardly trying to hit.** 

NASA's Curiosity, neglecting for the moment that it's traveling in an enormous curved orbit to do it, is traveling 560 million km to hit an aperture 3 km by 12 km.  To make the comparison to the needle a little better, a 3X12 rectangle has the same area as a circle with diameter of 6.77.***  So distance/aperture  is 560 million/6.77=82,714,513.  

You could look on that as NASA trying to hit a needle's eye, not at arm's-length, but at 69,830 arm's-lengths (which comes to about 53 kilometers, if the woman's arm length is the 758 mm I was using before).  Add to that that they're hitting it by throwing (rather than hand-guiding) about a quarter-circle of a curve.  Or you could look on it as the woman trying to thread a needle eye  (at arm's length, remember) that is  only about 9 nanometers wide (about the width of 25 calcium atoms laid out in a straight line).  

That's some sewing there, NASA. Maybe your department of metaphors should look for a metaphor that's about six orders of magnitude more incredible, because that's what you're doing.

§

*why a woman? why not? 

why middle class? because that's the point where early nutrition plays a minimal part.  

why American? Because although my country doesn't take particularly good care of its citizens, it keeps excellent, easily accessible records of the consequences of not taking care of them.

** a=aperture.  d=distance. a=0.64; d=46%*1648 (once you put both in millimeters); d/a=1648/0.64=1184.5.

*** Area=3X12=36=pi(r squared).  r=sqrt(Area/pi)=about 3.39 (staying at two digit precision).  diameter= about 6.77 (same precision)=aperture.  Why use the area?  Because that's what matters when you're trying to hit a target at a distance.  Why circularize?  Because that was what I was doing with the eye of the needle; d/a, distance over aperture, was the proportion of  the distance traveled by the thread tip to the diameter of the needle's eye.  If you want another number figured another way, cook it yourself (and I hope you do).

 

Just for fun let's join the pile-on on Slate's bone-stupid and dirt-ignorant science reporting

Confession: I like Slate and many of its features.  There are often good stories in Double X, I'm a fan of Emily Yoffe's Dear Prudence advice column and Matthew Yglesias's economics articles, and I rarely miss Brian Palmer's Explainer pieces.

But their science reporting not only chronically sucks, it's also very oriented toward the sort of thing that trying-to-be-hip liberal arts grads think is science reporting:  food additives and why to be scared of them.  What trendy people who want to be green are doing with their used underwear.  They do manage to get that the anti-vaccination stuff is bullshit, but then they try to be fair to the anti-vaxers anyway; on issues like creationism, global warming, and so on they tend to run articles about how many scientists or other experts agree and not about the evidence or the arguments, probably because they can count people in white coats but they don't really understand evidence or arguments.

And then there was today's spectacular piece of craptastic reporting.  Luckily for us all, the story (which is credited to Slate V Staff (V is their video channel)) managed to screw up the distinction between a solar system and a galaxy, which thus alerted intelligent third and fourth graders that the writers did not have a farking clue what it was about.  For a while apparently the screwup was in the headline as well, but now it appears to only be in the article text, the url for the article, and a picture caption (more progress may happen later).  So they went from having it wrong in 4 places to having it wrong in 3, which I think should count as a 25% improvement.

Here's the article location (notice stupidity in url): go on over there, oh faithful followers, and pile on it!

http://www.slate.com/blogs/trending/2012/07/26/kepler_space_telescope_finds_our_twin_galaxy.html

And for those of you who don't have time to do that, here's what I said there, which is actually the more serious matter:

****

They also managed to miss the actual scientific significance:

Kepler 30 is our twin in only one respect:  it is a non-Hot Jupiter system.  Most of the exosolar solar systems discovered so far have been Hot Jupiter systems, i.e. ones where you have a great big honkin planet, Jupiter sized or even bigger, in a very tight orbit (Mercury or closer).  In  all Hot Jupiter systems where the planes of rotation of the star and of the planet have been determinable, it has turned out that the two planes are wildly out of kilter, and in Hot Jupiters with multiple planets this also has turned out to be true of the other planets; i.e. they're not in a common plane.

Our own solar system is one of the very few non Hot Jupiters so far known.  All our planets are in a common plane roughly parallel to the solar equator.   Kepler 30 is another non Hot Jupiter.  The research team was able to determine -- using sunspot versus eclipsing -- that Kepler 30's three planets are all in the same plane with its equator.   There are now TWO non Hot Jupiters with the solar equator and the planes of the planetary orbits all aligned.  This suggests that non Hot Jupiter systems form from the primitive disk and stay that way, whereas the much-more-detected (either because they are more common or because they are easier to find with current tech, we can't know which yet) Hot Jupiters suffer one or more cataclysms that throw their planets into orbits far out out the plane in which they originated. 

This in turn may explain the apparent absence of other civilizations so far in our radio search for them: maybe only right-sized worlds in the habitable zones of Non Hot Jupiters offer enough time for intelligent life to develop, and maybe that kind of real estate is  terribly uncommon.   It also may offer a perspective on the formation of planetary systems generally; maybe by far the most common process results in Hot Jupiters.  Maybe the process of detecting the planes of the equator and the ecliptic and matching them can be used to find the elusive non Hot Jupiters. 

In any case, it is a big, interesting science story, at least as interesting with regard to where we actually are in the universe as the Higgs Boson or the unknown hominid ancestor story,   and  it was totally missed by the Slate staffers, whether they were interns, regular staff dipschittz, elves for whom Slate didn't set out fresh bread and milk, or some wandering homeless guy that they gave a bottle of gin to if he'd just do a science story for them. 

AND, as many others have noted, they didn't manage to understand the difference between a galaxy and a system.  God forbid they ever have to handle a globular cluster.

On the bright side, I'm sure the piece about why American women will still wear bikinis for the Olympic beach volleyball event was probably thoroughly vetted and dead accurate.

****

And that was the last line of my comment at Slate.

Now, look.  I know it's perfectly possible to be trying to scientific accuracy and to screw it up.  In fact, my own novel Losers in Space,  which really really really tried to stay true to the hard sciences, contains an overwhelming whopper for which I shall probably some day shine Howard Davidson's shoes with my tongue.  (Well, actually, Howard's too nice a guy to really make me do that.  I hope.   But he'd be entitled, dammit). 

And it happened for probably exactly the same reason that Slate's lousy reporting did: I thought I knew more than I did but was in fact massively ignorant and easily confused.  That can sometimes be the beginnings of wisdom, and perhaps Slate will redeem itself by hiring a couple of real science reporters.  But as Dave Barry wisely said, it's not nearly as effective to tell a kid that "Darling the stove is hot and you mustn't touch" as it is to hold his little hand on the burner (yeah, I know, I will now get 3-5 emails telling me that there are people so dumb that they will read that and do it; maybe I need an eleventh form letter).  So go over to Slate, grab'em by their metaphorical wrist, and don't let'em go till it smells well-done.

And while you're at it, if you're on Amazon or Goodreads and reviewing Losers, you might point people to that blog post; I wince a little every time someone says the book was written with "perfect accuracy"  or some such phrase.  (On the other hand, I cackle with evil glee every time someone complains that it was written with perfect accuracy, or grumbles that they found yucky old science in their science fiction.)

Late breaking word: io9 gets it right. And io9 has never really pretended to be anything other than pure fun.  Of course, aside from being more accurate, their article is much more fun than watching that silly video at Slate, which looks like a slapped together at the last minute project in a Communications for Non-Majors course.