I couldn't decide between two articles this week, so I decided to just post two. First up, a research paper I came across in Science Advances that studies how suction cups adhere underwater.
Blog
Reaper Review
Will Wight’s Cradle series might be my current guilty pleasure read. These fast, light, action-packed, “martial arts” fantasy novels aren’t Brandon Sanderson masterpieces that will massively alter my understanding of how to write fantasy, they aren’t four thousand year old tomes of philosophy or history, they aren’t detailed technical analyses of obscure mathematical theorems (a textbook on the disc embedding theorem might hold the prize for the strangest book currently on my reading list), but every time a new one comes out (which happens with impressive frequency), I get a copy within weeks, and read it within days.
Blood Magic S3:E3: Making Change Release
For all that I really enjoyed writing this story, and think that you will enjoy reading it, I don’t have very much to say about it. It’s a simple story, really, introducing Arval and providing a little context and a little conflict.
The Father of Invention
In woodworking, and a lot of other fields, there exists a variation on the saying “a poor woodworker blames his tools.” The thought that if only I had those tools, or those resources, or that setup, I wouldn’t be having this problem is a convenient and difficult-to-disprove balm to pride and psyche. It’s also a crutch that can ultimately retard a person’s ability to improve.
Weekly Writing Update
I finished Noble Child this week. It clocks in at just a smidgeon over ten thousand words, putting it right in line with an average Blood Magic episode.
Thoughts on the Publishing Industry
Not my thoughts, for once - I subject you to more than enough of those in the Tuesday blog posts. No, this Saturday I wanted to share with you an article Brandon Sanderson wrote in response to his recent, and unprecedented, Kickstarter campaign.
Elder Race Review
Yet for all the attention that the equivalency between science and magic seems to take, it was not to me really what drove this book or made it enjoyable. I think this book was really all about perspective and communication, and the evidence is in the very structure of the book. It is written primarily from two perspectives: the “magic” perspective and the “science” perspective, and it is the contrast between the two that makes this book distinct from any number of other riffs on the interaction between more and less “advanced” civilizations.
Space Debris Economics
Why should a private company make a business out of space debris removal? Alternatively, can space debris removal be made into a viable business model? This is one of those complicated questions that I recently saw reduced to a gross oversimplification in a news article. There were a lot of issues with the article, and I don’t want to dwell on it, but I think the biggest problem was its underlying, unstated assumption that the only viable business case for space debris removal as a commercial service was if the government was the customer, or regulated private space industry into becoming customers. The underlying argument of the article, therefore, is that there is no viable business model based on space debris removal.
Weekly Writing Update
In this third weekly writing update, we'll be talking a little bit about a technique I (try) to use when I come up against a form of writer's block, which I call writing into the next scene.
A Close Encounter with Ryugu
This Saturday article thing is probably not going to continue being every week, no matter what the past three weeks might indicate. However, I did want to share this article I read in Science about an asteroid sample return mission to Ryugu, a C-type asteroid that is, as the saying goes, in the neighborhood, (by … Continue reading A Close Encounter with Ryugu
