The Verge reports One of the greatest science fiction magazines is now available for free online “If you like classic science fiction, one of the genre’s best magazines can now be found online for free. Archive.org is now home to a collection of Galaxy Science Fiction, which published some of the genre’s best works, such as an early version of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man.”
Here it is: Galaxy Magazine at archive.org.
FYI, the Humble Book Bundle: Super Nebula Author Showcase presented by SFWA has a nice collection of science fiction for dirt cheap (no DRM, multi-format).
This Interactive Game of Thrones Map with Spoilers Control is pretty amazing. It seems to be based around the books and not the TV show. You can set a slider for what to reveal up to and show character movements through that time.
Jazz Music and Physics Have a Lot More in Common Than You Think. I'm surprised.
It might not seem like music has much to do with cutting-edge physics at first glance. In his new book, The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe, Brown University physics professor Stephon Alexander argues that using music as an analogy can shed light on some of the deepest mysteries in cosmology.
Alexander is not your typical physicist. Born in Trinidad and raised in the Bronx, he developed twin passions for jazz and physics at an early age. As a graduate student, he played the saxophone in jazz clubs and mastered Einstein’s equations. It’s a unique perspective that informs his approach to both; for instance, he views John Coltrane’s seminal Giant Steps album (1960), with its trademark ‘sheets of sound,’ as the ‘sonic equivalent to Einstein’s bending of the space-time fabric.’ Gizmodo caught up with Alexander to learn more about this hidden link.
I saw The Martian last night and loved it. I had read the book in June and think it's a great adaptation. The story is the same, but the story telling is a little different so that the things a movie can do well it does while the things a book does well it does. You can enjoy the film just as much having read the book or not, and if you want to read the book afterwards there will be more things in it that will keep it interesting. I knew what was going to happen while watching the film and was on the edge of my seat the whole time with a big smile on my face. They nailed this.
Matt Damon is an astronaut stranded alone on Mars. He has to overcome all the various ways Mars is trying to kill him using his wit and determination. Science itself is practically a character in this film. I'd avoid watching the trailer, it gives away too much. The best description of the book I've seen is from xkcd:
It's Ridley Scott's best film since Black Hawk Down. Drew Goddard did a great job on the screenplay adaptation. The scenery on Mars is gorgeous. Matt Damon is great. The movie is thrilling, emotional and funny. I found it really refreshing that everyone in this story is smart, really smart, and no one is stereotypical socially-inept genius that's in every other film. So far it's my favorite movie of the year. Go see it.
Update: Vox talks about 5 of The Martian’s boldest scientific twists, explained.
Hugh Hancock has a very interesting piece, What's The Best Medium For A Storyteller In 2015 And Beyond?.
The article has a lot more detail and speculation than I summarize above. Well worth a read.
The 2014 Nebula Awards Winners were announced. I don't know any of the novels or even novelists. I had picked up the best novella recently on a Kindle sale for $1 so I'll get to that pretty soon now. Otherwise I don't really know any of the written works (I'm a bad sci-fi fan).
On the other hand I've seen all the movies nominated for dramatic presentation. They're all worth seeing. I'm surprised Guardians of the Galaxy won; I liked it but everyone else seems to have liked it more. I think Edge of Tomorrow would have been the better winner of a sci-fi award.
I've seen that there's a new movie coming out in November with Matt Damon called The Martian. I haven't watched the trailer (I've been down on trailers for a while) but am vaguely aware that people seem to like it. I found out it's based on a book that one of the Mythbusters' loves. Today's xkcd convinced me I really want to read and see this:
So for $6 it's now downloaded to my Kindle.
Update: Read it, the description is dead on and I loved it. Lots of "Oh Shit" moments followed by a laugh-out-loud line.
Game of Thrones episode chapter coverage is a neat graphic showing which book chapters the TV episodes cover. The first season and book line up pretty well, but the fourth and fifth season are pulling from lots of different places.
ABC News reports Second Harper Lee Novel to Be Published in July "Publisher Harper announced Tuesday that 'Go Set a Watchman,' a novel the Pulitzer Prize-winning author completed in the 1950s and put aside, will be released July 14. Rediscovered last fall, 'Go Set a Watchman' is essentially a sequel to 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' although it was finished earlier. The 304-page book will be Lee's second, and the first new work in more than 50 years."
Amazon lists 100 Books To Read In A Lifetime. I'm surprised I've read 25 of them (and own a few more).
I saw Inherent Vice yesterday. That's the Paul Thomas Anderson movie based on a Thomas Pynchon novel. I've tried Pynchon a few times and can't do it. I read The Crying of Lot 49, got a couple of hundred pages into Gravity's Rainbow a couple of times and failed to find the verb in the first sentence of Mason & Dixon.
I was curious how PTA would approach it, knowing that he was probably the only person who could. I suppose he did a good job, because I couldn't get into it either. There's a dense conspiracy plot that's really really hard to follow. I'm sure it holds together, but I don't think anyone on first viewing can follow who does what and who says what and oh yeah what did that character do the last we time saw them? I'm sure that's just like the novel (though it's apparently one of the easier Pynchon books to follow). It's a dense plot with a really weak narrative.
So it's really about the journey and the atmosphere the film creates. 1970s LA Noir with stoners. I have to say, I just don't care. Yes there are some funny scenes and from some friends who saw it, I could have had a better audience. I saw it with about 25 people who I think each (including me) laughed once, at a different scene. Friends saw it in a packed house with people laughing all the way through. Regardless, this is no Lebowski.
Anyway, Vulture lists Every Thomas Pynchon Novel, Briefly Ranked if you want to give it a shot.
I liked the Verge's story The Everything Book: reading in the age of Amazon
"It’s in this room that Amazon learned people switch hands on a book roughly every two minutes, even though in surveys they claimed not to. (This is why the Voyage has identical page-turn buttons on both left and right.) The Voyage’s page-forward button is much bigger than page-back, because Amazon’s data showed 80 percent of all page flips are forward. As Green describes research like this, it seems likely that Amazon has spent more time studying the physical act of reading than any company before it."
I found this kind of interesting:
Instead, Amazon wants to enhance what’s on the screen with software. If there's a unifying idea to the Kindle as an app, it's in fixing the little things that once made you put down your book in frustration. A feature called X-Ray, for example, stores a books' most common characters, locations, and ideas. Just press on a character's name and a miniature bio pops up; in an epic like Game of Thrones, it’s a godsend. Amazon knows from its embedded dictionary which difficult words tend to trip us up, so on Kindle, they are defined in superscript above the text. Rather than send you to Google to look up a short passage in a foreign language, Kindle translates it for you automatically. It tells you how long it will take you to finish a chapter, based on how quickly you normally read.
I've definitely loved the popup dictionary features on my mac and iOS devices. I've used it occasionally on my Kindle but since it's not a touch screen, it's a bit more effort to use. I haven't used x-ray or these other features (I don't even know if my Kindle supports them). Still if they care so much about the reading experience, it's inexplicable to me that the typography on the Kindle sucks so much. I'd have thought that would be one of the most important things to get right.
And I'd really really love a way to legally get digital copies of physical books I own.
All Leather Must Be Boiled has posted a family tree of EVERY HOUSE in A Song of Iron and Fire combined by El-Daddy. It's a giant png and looks like it's a single tree though it's in a format that can be deceiving or at least a little hard to follow (look for Walder Frey for an example). Still it's very impressive.
Lane Diamond makes a lot of good points in The Future of Publishing – One Man’s Perspective
Christopher Wright argues, Amazon v. Hachette: Everyone Is Wrong But Me "This is a horrible fight. No matter who wins we’re probably screwed. Hachette isn’t the hero, and Amazon isn’t the hero either."
Arthur Bryant writes about Laurence Tribe's new book, Uncertain Justice: The Roberts Court and the Constitution, which I want to read.
Tribe: SCOTUS Denying Access to Justice Because It’s an “Anti-court Court”
"Tribe documents the Roberts Court’s “dramatic rewriting” of procedural rules to “unmistakably” favor big business, including an “assault on class actions” and rulings that make it “virtually impossible to escape arbitration agreements.” He writes:
With each passing day, public courts more permanently disappear as a real option for many Americans in their dealings with big business – when we seek employment, buy phones, sign up for nursing homes and open bank accounts... The proceedings are secret, arbitrators aren’t always bound by the law, there is no jury or right to appeal and companies sometimes pick their own arbitration firms.
The Court’s majority, moreover, isn’t just limiting access to justice to end the ability to hold businesses accountable:
Since 2005, the Roberts Court has issued a string of decisions that make it harder to hold the government accountable in court when it violates the Constitution…. The result is a shrinking judicial role in enforcing the Constitution and protecting our liberty.
Why is this happening? Most fundamentally, because the Roberts Court is “far more sensitive to the substantial burdens of litigation than to the potential benefits of lawsuits.” Tribe writes:
Whereas the midcentury Court saw itself as a protector of the powerless… the Roberts Court is mostly uninterested in that role…. It has dealt critical legal rules a death of a thousand cuts – leaving many of our rights intact but making them effectively impossible to enforce in any court…. It is an anti-court Court."
Farhad Manjoo writes in the NY Times Bits blog about the Amazon/Hachette battle, Amazon's Tactics Confirm Its Critics' Worst Suspicions "Now Amazon is raising prices, removing ordering buttons, lengthening shipping times and monkeying with recommendation algorithms. Do these sound like the moves of a man who cares about customers above all else?"
I noticed too they've raised their prices on comics. They used to regularly offer 30-40% off list price, now it's more like 18-23%. A few months after I noticed that trend they bought Comixology.
