Heuristic

Things I never learned in grad school:

Girl science is pink, and involves perfume, beauty products, soap, snowflakes, and “Beautiful Blob Slime.” (Please note: I did not make up that last.)

Boy science is blue, spooky and perilous, has physics and chemistry, and “Weird Slime Lab.”

There’s also cosmetic science, which is purple and involves cleaning products.

I’m all for encouraging girls to learn that science is fascinating and fun, especially by showing them that they can make fun things that they’re interested in. But really: gender-themed kits that only use scary words like “chemistry” and “physics” for explicitly male kits?

She said she was going to Irkutsk.

He didn’t believe her.

She said she wanted to travel, to find something new, to understand the world a little better.

After 27 years of marriage, he knew when she was lying.

She went anyway.

The suit he wore to the wedding was still in the closet, shoved way to the back. He hadn’t had it out for years, even though he used to wear it for other formal occasions. But his friends were having funerals instead of weddings, and the two of them hadn’t been invited to a formal party in… he couldn’t remember how long. It wasn’t that nice of a suit anyway.

He pulled it out, stripped off his sweatshirt and jeans and left them in a pile on the floor. She hated when he did that, but her opinion didn’t matter any more. The silk shirt fit nicely–it was considerably newer than the suit. He knotted a cashmere tie over it, standing in the middle of the room in shirt and socks and boxers, eyes closed as his fingers manipulated the soft dark wool. When they got married, they didn’t have much money. The shirt and tie he wore then were polyester or something else cheap. They didn’t care then. The two of them were so in love that they would have gotten married in burlap sacks, just for the ecstasy of saying “husband and wife.”

Irkutsk.

The jacket hung off his shoulders like a worn tablecloth. He’d lost weight since those days, turning into a scrawny old man. Not that he was all that old, of course, but today he felt ancient. He spun before the mirror, watching the fabric sag and ripple. Something interfered with the drape of the front pocket. He pulled out an old gift card, the coffee chain named on it long defunct. Nobody drank coffee anymore.

He skipped the shoes, padding down the carpeted hall and into the living room in his stockinged feet. Her favorite painting, “A Mysterious Stranger,” hung in the hall. It would be childish to turn it to face the wall. After so long, he barely saw it, never looked at it. A shadowy figure stood by a table, the oil lamp sitting on it providing the only illumination. The figure held something aloft. He’d always thought it might be an astrolabe, but he didn’t know what one of those was exactly. She’d tried to explain the symbolism to him once, but he still didn’t understand what the painting meant, or why she was so fascinated by the vaguely menacing form.

Her orchid still sat on the table, flowers wilting but not gone. He lined a row of shot glasses up before it, their edges precisely aligned with the bright woven runner. One shot from each bottle in the liquor cabinet: whiskey, gin, absinthe, vodka, catching the light in multicolored array.

He picked up a glass, turned it between his fingers admiring the play of light through the liquid and the glass. Contemplating what would happen if he tossed it back, tossed them all back one after the other. He set the glass down slowly, gently, back into its careful alignment with its neighbors.

He imagined sweeping them all off the table, scattering shards everywhere, the murky swirl of the mixing liquors. He imagined calling his travel agent and booking a ticket to Siberia to find her. He envisioned himself throwing the mysterious stranger and his astrolabe off the balcony, watching it sail down the stories and crash in the street, where it would be pulverized by a passing truck. He pictured the rest of his life without her, so unlike anything he’d ever imagined, even for a moment.

Irkutsk.

Friday flash… on Saturday!

Tonight’s twitter suggestions:

@qitou Cashmere and silk
@Calvin_cat “He could still get into the suit he was wore at his wedding 27 years ago, but you wouldn’t say it still fit him”.
@Marjorie73 a Mysterious Stranger. And some gin
@randomSpammer A Starbucks gift card
@fadeaccompli a dose of absinthe.
@notanyani astrolabe, orchids
@quasigeo Irkutsk

(I collect suggestions, then spend no more than an hour writing a story that incorporates all of them: no time for planning, no time for editing. This one took me right up to the wire.)

From the Barnes and Noble 2011 Best Zombie Fiction:

#10: Rigor Amortis, edited by Jaym Gates and Erika Holt.

Congrats everyone!

My friend Tom left this link on a previous post about science and art: Bathsheba Grossman. I’d looked at her work before, but I don’t think I’d posted it. Science, math and 3D printing- what’s not to like?

Another friend, Eric, left an interesting comment on my post about November writing lessons.

Eric’s comment, reprinted to save you from wandering back and forth:

What NaNoWriMo was not good for this year: I did not write anything close to 50k words, generating about 10k if you include a section of notes I drew up.

What NaNoWriMo was good for this year: I figured out some things about my writing and how I ought to be writing, if I can just implement them and make them work. I learned that I probably need to start writing things backwards instead of trying to write one-thing-leads-to-another like George R.R. Martin or someone like that. I learned that I probably need to stop beating myself up if I don’t write any fiction on a day but still managed to leave a long comment on someone’s blog or elsewhere (e.g. a long forum post defending Star Trek, speaking purely hypothetically).

The big one was the “writing backwards” bit, if I can just teach myself how to do it. Though “not beating myself up” may be important, too: I think I’m realizing something similar to what you said about writing every day, and for almost identical reasons.

So I’m sort of feeling like NaNoWriMo was a “win” for me, even if it absolutely wasn’t even close in formal terms.

Eric and I have had long angsty discussions about similar issues before, and especially on the pros and cons of writing every day.

The moral: there’s no one true way.

This is important.

Irrelevantly, and tantalizingly, the day Eric left that comment he also wrote one of the funniest things I’ve read in ages. And no, I can’t share it with you, but if you ask nicely he might be persuaded to revise it for public consumption.

Changing the subject completely, this Counterexamples to an Old Earth came across my internet today, via Cheryl Morgan and several other people.

This is a fascinating and brain-hurting example of cherry-picking facts, extrapolating trends outside their proper bounds, and every logical fallacy known to philosophers. A number of the trends cited as evidence for a young earth are actually direct or indirect consequences of anthropogenic global warming, and thus relatively recent, but are warped into justification for recent creation.

And that’s leaving aside the factual inaccuracies, which are legion.

If I were still teaching, I think I’d use this as class discussion material.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m hip-deep in Django today, and kind of having fun with it. I’m evaluating candidates for the obsolete web application that broke when I upgraded my work server. It looks like it would take almost as much time to fix it as it would to switch to something current. Science involves a lot of background stuff that needs to be done just so you can get to the good bits, and data management figures heavily in that category.

The Crossed Genres folks, some of my favorite publishers, have a new anthology out today.

This is their first anthology of original stories; previous anthologies were from the Crossed Genres periodical (no longer with us; I’m certain that has nothing to do with them publishing my first story).

Subversion: Science Fiction & Fantasy tales of challenging the norm is an anthology of stories about striking back at the status quo – whatever that might be. The Authority can be real or perceived; the act of subversion subtle or overt; and the consequences minute yet significant, or immense and world-shaking.

Sound like fun? You can pick up a copy of your very own (Kindle or print) at Amazon or BN (Nook).

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:

• 13 Writing Tips From Chuck Palahniuk
• How I Went From Writing 2,000 Words a Day to 10,000 Words a Day by Rachel Aaron
• Descriptive Passages, Part I: Setting by David Coe

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.)

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.

My friends said it better.

I’ve been part of the mysterious far-flung group known only as the UCF for a while, but hadn’t had the privilege of meeting Wendy in person, only through her presence online. A fair number of my friends live only in the computer, but they are no less important to me than the friends I see occasionally, or all the time.

Edit: More words from others. I’ll post additional links as they appear.

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.

William Gibson:

Cities look to me to be our most characteristic technology. We didn’t really get interesting as a species until we became able to do cities—that’s when it all got really diverse, because you can’t do cities without a substrate of other technologies. There’s a mathematics to it—a city can’t get over a certain size unless you can grow, gather, and store a certain amount of food in the vicinity. Then you can’t get any bigger unless you understand how to do sewage. If you don’t have efficient sewage technology the city gets to a certain size and everybody gets cholera.

Oh, YES.

There are constraints, and also opportunities, and realistic worlds have both, simply as a function of their shapes. Better science doesn’t change that, magic doesn’t change that, though both could change the outline of the constraints and the opportunities. A perpetual motion machine breaks all the rules: if there’s a get out of jail free card, the story is automatically no longer interesting.