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Social media and creeping horror
One of the things my friends have advised me to do as part of building my presence as a new author is take social media seriously. Particularly Twitter. I’ve been doing that, and for the most part...
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On Spock
Leonard Nimoy died today. I found myself surprisingly affected by that. And as I watched the tide of sorrow pour over the internet, it occurred to me to ask: why, specifically, was I so touched? In...
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How we decide
Since my recent post on Twitter and Facebook, I’ve been thinking of airing a piece of science I was tinkering with at Princeton, and never got round to putting in the world. That science asks the...
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How to Fix the Hugos
I have spent way too much time this last week reading the various back and forth articles about the Hugo award debacle. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this, the short version is as follows....
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On Ostracism
In my last post, I talked about the current woes over the Hugo awards, but all the while I was writing it, I felt like there was a major point that I was missing out. That point was larger than SF...
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Are we hitting peak social justice?
I have a prediction, and it’s this: outraged social norming on the political left is close to a tipping point beyond which the left will begin to collapse under the constraints of its own narrative....
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Cheating Light
There’s a lovely article that came out recently by Alasdair Reynolds about how humanity might reach the stars. In it, he talks about how unlikely it is that we’ll ever travel faster than light, but how...
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Let’s Play God
Let’s start today by answering a few nice chewy questions that some people have spent far too long worrying about. Q: Did God create life? A: No. Q: Is life a miracle? A: No. Q: Is the creation of life...
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Greece, Germany, Banks
Poor old Greece wants the EU to stop predating on its economy with unsustainable loan arrangements. Poor old Germany doesn’t want to be out of pocket due to the Greeks. The Greeks want to believe that...
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On Being Launched
Before my first novel, Roboteer, came out, I sought out the excellent Mr. Ed Cox for advice on how to function as a new author. He was a little down the authorial road from me, my Gollancz peer one...
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Ownership
What is ownership? We tend to think about ownership in relation to money. You buy something, you own it. But ownership is much older than that. There are plenty of animals that claim territory, and...
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Money
What is money? Why does it exist? In the last post, I talked about ownership, and proposed that it can occur in the absence of money. So if money isn’t necessary for anyone to lay claim to their...
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Option Four
Gosh, isn’t modern politics weird? Here’s a scary thing that just happened in Austria: they elected a far-right group. It bears an uncanny resemblance to movements happening elsewhere in the western...
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Trump Slug
Slime molds are simple, single-celled creatures nevertheless capable of impressive feats of reasoning. They have a novel behavior that has been much studied. When food gets scarce and their survival is...
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Jo Cox, Precipices, China
I’m posting a lot about politics at the moment, but there’s a reason for that. And that’s that modern politics scares me. Apparently, it also scares this guy. In his eloquently blunt article, he...
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Brexit: what I got wrong
In April, I posted the following anticipated timeline on Facebook regarding Brexit. Looking at it now makes me laugh, sort of, in a hysterical kind of way. 1: Tories tell angry right-wing voters that...
View ArticleWhy not Nationalism?
Politics are strange these days. The Right and the Left seem to see eye to eye ever less frequently. People on both sides become increasingly frustrated with each other. People conclude that others...
View ArticleWhy the world has gone crazy
Do you feel like the world has gone crazy of late? I do. It doesn’t seem that long ago that Western civilization was capable of making relatively rational political decisions that crossed party lines...
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