Gerald Brandt

Philip José Farmer passed away peacefully in his sleep yesterday morning.

He will be missed greatly by his wife Bette, his children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, friends and countless fans around the world.

January 26, 1918 – February 25, 2009. R.I.P.

I’m still playing with the formatting of the weekly links.  I’d like to have each link paragraph as a point, but it looks like my CSS layout doesn’t like that.

Movies

- DanMeth.com blogged about movie trilogies, and placed each movie on a meter.  I think I agree with most of his ratings.

Writing

- Many people are aware that Harry Potter, The Anarchist Cookbook and Stephen King books have been banned from schools around the country, but as many civilizations have figured out, censorship is a slippery slope. It is pretty strange to consider Shakespeare has not only been banned from public schools over sexual themes, but that censored editions have been out since the 1700s.

Misc

- After reading Darwin’s work on emotions, the Dalai Lama told Ekman he “would consider himself a Darwinian.“

- Sticking with the Buddhist theme, a temple has been built by monks in northeast Thailand who used over a million recycled beer bottles to make the walls and roofs.

Computers

- DevTopic.com has collected 101 computer programming quotes.  My favourite is 90:

“Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.”
(Martin Golding)

Science

- Quantum experiments with human eyes as detectors appear possible, based on a realistic model of the eye as a photon detector

- Apparently, there is liquid water on Mars.  Images from the robotic craft show what appear to be liquid droplets growing, merging, and dripping on the lander’s leg over the course of a Martian month.

Another short one this week.  I guess sometimes you find lots of stuff that’s interesting, and sometimes you don’t.

Writing

SciFi watch has a blog entry on the nine Science Fiction Writers blogs you should watch.

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SF Signal asked 10 writers what the most difficult part of being a writer was.  These are their answers.

Misc

Not many of us actually get to see what is at the end of the rainbow, so this guy took a picture for us.

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I haven’t posted a YouTube video in a long time.  This one just grabbed me and made me laugh out loud.

This weeks links list is a bit small, but very, very good.

Writing

Brandon Sanderson is releasing his newest book under a Creative Commons License.  You can find it here.  He’s also placing all versions of the book on his website.  You’ll get see how the book changed from the first draft to the final version.

Speaking of free books online, this site has pointers to lots of Fantasy and Science books.

Each year hundreds of words are dropped from the English language. Old words, wise words, hard-working words. Words that once led meaningful lives but now lie abandoned and forgotten.

To go with the rest of the links this week, we have Jeffrey Carver asking if free downloads sells books, which is what it’s all about.

Writing

OK, if a writer is literate enough to write and publish a book, couldn’t he or she manage some basic research into natural history and astronomy? There is enough ignorance in the world without broadcasting more through sheer laziness. A passage in a fantasy novel I read recently described the crescent moon setting at sunrise. Now, class, why is this impossible?

Some of SF Signal’s readers are aspiring writers, so we thought we take this week to ask some published writers in the genre to dispense with some useful writerly advice. Here’s what we asked them:

Neil  Gaiman did a video for Coraline.  It’s filmed in his house, and it’s pretty cool.

Computers

I remember when I first booted up Ubuntu on my computer three years ago that I wasn’t very impressed with the dull black usplash screen. It gave me a feeling that I was back to the Windows 95 era.