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Science

It’s the little things

November. National Novel Writing Month. As already alluded to here, I sat down to write on November 1, shiny new novel idea lined up, and promptly realized that this would quickly turn into National Nervous Breakdown Month, and that would be considerably less fun. I can write 50,000 words in a month, if I have time (and this was not the month for that), but they’re not good and useful words. They’re just words in a loose semblance of prose, lots of rambling and not so much with the organized narrative.

So instead, I decided to write some fiction every day in November. No word count, no predetermined project, just fiction. And I did. Written?Kitten! was a great deal of help: it provides a little reward at the end of a certain number of words. I used the 100-word default, and some days that was all I wrote. I worked a bit on the new novel idea, and on a pair of short stories I’d like to finish by the end of the year. (I also wrote a fair bit of nonfiction and ran a weekend-long weaving symposium, but those don’t count.)

The whole thing reinforced my pre-existing belief that writing every day for the sake of writing every day isn’t all that useful for me. If I’m brain-dead after a long day at work, the words I write aren’t particularly useful, and I end up with snippets scattered across my hard drive. It’s better for me to write when I have the focus to do so usefully, rather than wasting my time trying to do something I’m not capable of doing just then. I’m not denying the importance of writing regularly for someone who wants to be a professional: momentum is important.

Instead of writing after work when work has eaten my brain (which isn’t always), I should do other things that will free up time later in larger more useful blocks. I have little time; I have to make the most of it by managing time and brainpower.

Some wonderful things I’ve accumulated:

Predicting the weather, 1851 style: with leeches!

Mesopotamian math homework. (Someday I’m going to write an article on Renaissance Italian story problems: the history of mathematics instruction is fascinating.)

More on pedagogy: miniature murder scenes, a 1930s forensic tool. Special bonus: a “crime-fighting millionaire heiress grandmother.” Can’t beat that!

Three writing articles that go together in my mind, saved here for later:

They’re linked by the Palahniuk article; the second two don’t have much to do with each other. Or, rather, they do, but not directly. I’m pretty good with sentences; the thing in my brain now is what larger chunks of prose do. All three of those address that question, if from very different angles. Sort of.

Wow. That was an expressive description. Maybe I should reconsider this writing thing. But really, the thing I’m flailing to explain? When I understand it, then I can explain it. That’s how I knew I was making progress on sentences. This is the same thing but scaled up. (Learning is a spiral: you hit the same spot over and over, just out a little farther each time.)

Neat stuff

I’ve been accumulating things. Time to pass them on.

The Moscow dogs and the Chicago coyotes: fascinating examples of canine adaptability to urban environments. The Moscow dogs have so far done a better job of fitting into urban patterns, possibly because they come from stock selected for dealing well with people over the past few millennia, or because they’ve had longer to practice. The coyotes mostly stay out of the way, but the dogs have learned to let the cute ones beg for food, and even to ride the Metro.

There’s a lot of ire about the “Futures in Nature” story I ranted about. This is my favorite commentary.

Laura has sent me several interesting things: an exploration of octopus psychology; Nathalie Miebach, an artist who turns scientific data into sculptures; and this video about making a coral reef. She shares my fascination with the art-science interface, though she’s a much better artist than I am.

Leafy goodness

Plants, ecology, pretty pictures, science fiction: all come together in today’s Science in My Fiction essay on leaf shape (more interesting than you might think).

I’ve taken over as the SiMF coordinator. If you’ve ever wanted to write about the science in science fiction, either as a regular correspondent or for one awesome guest essay, I’d love to hear from you.

Something else entirely

I was going to write something about National Novel Writing Month and how I’m tweaking the rules this year to get some of the mass enthusiasm without any of the nervous breakdown, but. I saw this instead, and am too angry about it to write about anything else.

Nature, one of the premier scientific journals, regularly publishes science fiction stories, which I think is fantastic. A number of authors I respect have featured in it, and I’d like to do so myself one day.

But this story? Not at all pleasing. “Womanspace,” by Ed Rybicki, was intended as a tongue-in-cheek mostly-true anecdote about two inept middle-aged men (as stated by the author, himself one of those men). That would be fine with me. I know plenty of inept men, and quite a few of them are covered for by incredibly competent women.

Where Rybicki goes wrong is extrapolating from his single data point to ALL men, and particularly ALL women. Men are hunters, you see, and women are gatherers, and as such women have miraculous shopping powers which extend to retrieving goods from parallel universes that men can’t access.

The story buys into stereotypical ideas in other ways: the two men are busily discussing plans for a technical book while the protagonist’s wife cooks dinner. She recalls a domestic purchase that she hadn’t had time to make, and sends the men off to do it. So the woman is in charge of cooking and shopping, except on special occasions where it’s necessary to send the men out for something even though they’re doing something important? The shop staff are of course female as well, as necessary to his point.

Just as aggravating, the story made the open assumption that everyone reading such a prestigious journal would be male, and would have a wife at home.

I’m willing to give Rybecki the benefit of the doubt here. He and his friend and his wife had a funny anecdote, and were all amused, and he wrote it up without thinking too hard about about. After all, middle-aged males in the sciences are often oblivious to issues of stereotype and discrimination regardless of the number of training sessions they’ve sat through. (He says in his comments that some of his best friends are women “my own (better-paid) professional wife thought it was funny,” which doesn’t really help his case but was enough to pass his own personal filters.

But WHAT were the editors thinking? I expect more thought from the editorial staff, and that’s where I place the major share of the blame here. It’s 2011, and we’re still dealing with outdated stereotypes about the roles and mental processes of men and women, even here among purportedly-enlightened scientists?

Oh wait. I knew that.

Look to the sky

I admit it, I wrote fiction last night instead of writing my Ada Lovelace Day post. Tsk. But I wanted to tell you about a woman of science anyway, even a day late.

In 2009, I wrote about a woman who’d influenced me even though she was long dead. Last year I wrote about a woman who helped to pave the way for others to enter traditionally male fields like medicine and science.

This year, I chose Maria Mitchell, the first female professional astronomer in the United States. Born on Nantucket in 1818, she attended Cyrus Peirce’s school for young ladies but was largely self-educated.

Discovering a telescopic comet in 1847 was the result of much hard work, study, and time spent behind a telescope, but it seems to have been what brought her to the notice of the scientific establishment. Prior to that, she was a teacher and librarian, both acceptable female professions.

Afterward, her life must have changed dramatically. She became the first woman member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1848 and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1850. She became the first professor of astronomy at Vassar College in 1865.

Mitchell was also active in the women’s suffrage movement, and in protesting slavery. She must have been ferociously brilliant, and worked very hard at her passions, but also stood up for what she thought was right.

If you’d like to know more, Google books has a collection of Mitchell’s writings published in 1896, seven years after her death.

(And yes, I did recently read Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary, by Pamela Dean.)

Science Fiction Geekery

Need something to read this weekend? SFSignal has a wonderful guide to the recent NPR Top 100 SFF books.

Me? I’ll be reading this.

Or maybe I’ll be reading the books I just got from Elizabeth Bear’s book sale.

Or going to SCA events in the rain.

Or, just maybe, all three.

Friday science

I have a DRAFT of the cursed project, only years late, and with much more agony than expected. I’m off to drink beer.

But first, so you don’t feel abandoned, some SCIENCE, science that has nothing whatsoever to do with the cursed project.

This makes me happy, and even makes me feel better about satellites (a major component of the cursed project).

(via Bad Astronomy)

More spectacular astronomical photos.

And finally, this is weird: what you eat can affect your gene expression. It turns out that microRNAs from plants can be found in animals that eat them, and those microRNAs could be affecting which proteins your body produces. Wow.

Okay, enough science. Beer and pizza!

Have an excellent weekend, and don’t work too hard.

Feathers!

Not horsefeathers, but dinosaur feathers preserved in amber.

That’s so cool.

And a few other things to keep this from being a ridiculously short post…

Ada Lovelace Day is October 7 this year. I need to come up with a good topic, to follow my essays on Beatrix Potter and Elizabeth Blackwell.

Elizabeth Bear is interviewed at Terribleminds.

And let me share with you my earworm, entirely unrelated to anything else in this post.

Writing and science

Isn’t that all we ever talk about around here? Apparently.

Remember that zombie book that I had a story in (Rigor Amortis, Absolute XPress, 2010)? The one that sold a gajillion copies and is being reprinted?

The publish date isn’t until mid-October, but there are copies in the dealer room at WorldCon in Reno. (Where I’m not, but I plan to be in Chicago next year!) So exciting!

And some links, both writing and science:

PublishAmerica does it again. Simply amazing.

Free will? Nope, just parasites.

New way to develop models for 3D printing, one of my pet tech interests: evolve them. (Anyone else remember Richard Dawkins’ software for The Blind Watchmaker?)

Augmented reality is another pet interest, and this company’s prototype is amazing: 3D real-time optical tracking? Wow.

Science and writing

I know, two topics you’ve totally never seen here before!

First the writing.

How to write a book in three days. Michael Moorcock did it, and explained how.

If that wasn’t enough to think about, here’s Lester Dent’s Master Plot Formula for pulps.

And then the science.

Those word count progress bars? Just might help you succeed!

But whatever you do, watching TV should be avoided. There are so many reasons, but a really big one is that it has a serious impact on life expectancy, possibly even worse than smoking.

More reasons that drinking coffee is good for you: skin cancer prevention.

And if, like me, you combine the two, the deadline for the Science in My Fiction anthology is fast approaching. Got your story done?