A reminder about Aurora Award nominations
The deadline for nominating works for a Prix Aurora Award is fast approaching. Today is the day when mail-in ballots must be postmarked by, and the deadline for online nominations is February 15.
The Aurora Awards, for the best Canadian works of science fiction and fantasy, are nominated and voted on by fans. Any Canadian citizen or permanent resident can nominate up to three works or individuals in a range of categories in both English and French. The five works with the most nominations go on the final ballot and are voted on by members of CanVention, the annual national SF convention. It costs nothing to nominate but there is a fee for voting on the final ballot. The mail-in and on-line nomination forms are here.
My novel Marseguro (DAW Books) won the Aurora Award for best long-form work in English last year, and its sequel, Terra Insegura, is eligible this year. You can read the first two chapters of Terra Insegura (or listen to me read them) online here.
If you consider my work worthy of a nomination this year, and you’re a Canadian citizen or permanent resident, I hope you’ll take the time to do so. But I hope you’ll also take the time to nominate others. There’s a partial list of other eligible work at the Canadian SF database.
Remember, nominating is free! And it only takes a couple of minutes.
Spray-on liquid glass
“Spray-on liquid glass” sounds like a product you’d see advertised at two o’clock in the morning in an infomercial.
It sounds even more like a 2 a.m. infomercial product when you see headlines about it that claim it is “about to revolutionize everything.”
Maybe it’d sound more impressive if I used its more formal name, which is “SiO2 ultra-thin layering,” but that’s hard to type, so I’m going to stick with “spray-on liquid glass.”
Besides, that’s exactly what it is: an extremely thin layer of glass that can be sprayed onto…well, just about anything.
Though it was invented in Turkey, the patent for spray-on liquid glass is held by the German company Nanopool.
It consists of almost pure silicon dioxide, a.k.a. silica, extracted from quartz sand. Water or ethanol is added, depending on what kind of surface is to be coated: the water-based versions are good for absorbent surfaces such as stone, wood and fabrics, while the ethanol-based versions are suitable for metal, glass, plastic and painted surfaces. There are no other additives: a bottle of liquid glass contains only water or ethanol, and molecules of silica. And not too surprisingly (since silica is the most abundant mineral in the Earth’s crust), the coating is non-toxic and environmentally harmless.
The glass binds to the surface through quantum forces that come into play at the extremely small scale of these tiny glass particles. The coating is only about 100 nanometers thick–that’s only 1/500th the width of a human hair.
An article in the June, 2009, issue of the U.K. magazine Cleanroom Technology has a pretty complete list of the coating’s benefits.
First of all, it’s flexible, meaning it can be used to coat, not just hard surfaces like countertops and sinks, but fabric, conveyor belts, medical devices such as endoscopes, and more.
It’s highly durable, able to withstand tens of thousands of cleaning cycles, and heat tolerant, unaffected by temperatures as low as -150 C and as high as 450 C. It also resists both acid and alkaline substances.
It doesn’t kill bacteria, but it also doesn’t provide them with a friendly surface to attach themselves to and multiply. Wash a coated surface with hot water, and the bacteria are wiped away more effectively than you can achieve with bleach on an uncoated surface (as tests in an Austrian cheese-packaging plant have proven).
It’s so thin that it’s invisible to the human eye and can’t be felt; while it’s slippery at the micro level, at the macro level (our level), it isn’t. In fact, since bacteria can be so easily cleaned off of it, a coated shower floor would probably be less slippery, because of the lack of bacteria-produced biofilms.
The stuff is easy to apply: even large areas such as floors, walls and windows can be coated with it in minutes, and no special equipment is needed. And finally (and even more amazingly), it’s cheap: the cost to cover a square metre ranges from about 40 cents to $1.80.
Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? Surely it must be full of little tiny glass particles that are going to get into our lungs and cause asbestos-fibre like problems?
Nope. The coating contains no discrete or potentially harmful engineered nanoparticles.
Spray-on liquid glass is already available in Germany for domestic use, for about $8.50 a bottle. In the home, it could conceivably make existing cleaning products obsolete, since hot water would do the job chemicals are doing now. It could be used in the oven, bathrooms, tiles, sinks, and on almost any other surface, and the coating is expected to last about a year with normal use.
Outside, the uses are endless. A silk shirt coated with it would shrug off a spilled glass of red wine. Stone coated with it could be more easily cleaned of graffiti. Seeds sprayed with it are protected from fungal and bacterial attacks and germinate and grow faster than untreated seeds. Wood treated with it has survived undamaged after being buried in a termite mound for nine months.
A Lancashire hospital has had “very promising” results using it as a coating for everything from equipment to medical implants, catheters, sutures and bandages.
It sounds amazing.
But it also still sounds like a 2 a.m. infomercial product.
I guess time will tell.
Fuel from germs
For years, we’ve been turning crops such as corn, wheat and sugar beets into fuel, using yeast to convert sugar into alcohol.
But there’s an obvious problem with this. That stuff we’re turning into fuel is also food for humans and feed for animals.
(And as an aside, how come we always call it “animal feed” as opposed to “animal food”? And why don’t we ever refer to “human feed”? Hmm?)
A lot of the plant is wasted when you grow crops for fuel or food. The leaves and stems, with their tough cell walls made of cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin, are more of a nuisance than anything else. Wouldn’t it be great if there were a use for what is now plowed under or burned?
There is, or there soon will be, thanks to research aimed at using bacteria to convert this “lignocellulosic biomass” into fuel in its own right.
A just-published article in Nature reveals the state of the art. Titled “Microbial production of fatty-acid-derived fuels and chemicals from plant biomass,” it describes the successful engineering of the common bacterium Excherichia coli–better known as E. coli and generally in the news when it contaminates water or meat and makes people sick–into a producer of biodiesel.
One of the co-authors of the research study is Jay Keasling, chief executive officer for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI). “We’ve got a billion tons of biomass every year that goes unused,” he says, adding that fuel produced from that biomass could make up for as much as half of U.S. oil imports, turning “the U.S. Midwest into the new ‘Mideast’.”
That’s not hyperbole: by one estimate, lignicellulosic biomass could produce more than 7,500 litres of renewable petroleum per acre.
The researchers modified the E. coli genome, inserting genetic code for the production of an enzyme called hemicellulase, which can break down hemicellulose into smaller sugar molecules which E. coli can then turn into fatty acids.
E. coli normally produces only as much of the fatty acids as it needs for its own cell membranes. But the researchers’ E. coli were further modified so that the fatty acids just kept coming, turning each bacterium into a microscopic biodiesel factory.
The process takes place in fermentation vats, into which the bacteria expel little drops of oil. Turn off the impellers, and the oil floats to the top, where it can be skimmed off.
Even better, by tweaking the process, chemical products ranging from solvents to lubricants to jet fuel could conceivably be produced.
Of course, it’s important to note that the research reported in Nature is just a proof of concept. There’s no commercially viable process for doing any of this yet–but Keasling hopes there will be within a very few years. Work will continue as the researchers search for ways to make use of even more of what’s in the feedstock–not just the hemicellulose.
There’s already a company standing ready to market fuels and other microbe-produced chemicals. Based in California, LS9, founded by a geneticist and a plant biologist, helped fund the research reported in Nature. LS9 points out that the crude oil produced by bioengineered bacteria has none of the contaminating sulfur of regular crude oil, so it’s cleaner. And despite its unorthodox origins, it can be refined like any other crude oil in a standard refinery.
There are other companies pursuing their own paths. Amyris Biotechnologies, for example, says it has also created bacteria capable of providing renewable hydrocarbon-based fuels. There are many more.
Why would this be preferable to ethanol production as it is currently carried out? Aside from the aforementioned fact that we’re presently turning food into fuel, hydrocarbon fuels are more efficient than ethanol, packing about 30 percent more energy into any given quantity. And even better, they take less energy to produce: ethanol production, which involves distilling, requires 65 percent more energy than hydrocarbon production does.
Perhaps the oil industry will slowly evolve away from the purview of drilling companies and into the realm of agriculture.
As for the marketing slogan for this new germ-produced form of fuel, I think I’ve come up with a winner: “E. coli. It’s not just for food poisoning anymore.”
What do you think?
My review of Globe Theatre’s production of Marion Bridge…
…has already shown up online, even though it won’t appear in print until tomorrow. This is the first time I’ve seen something I’ve written pop up that far ahead of the ink-on-paper version, though maybe I just haven’t noticed until now.
The review begins:
I confess that I went into the opening night performance of Marion Bridge at Globe Theatre feeling skeptical.
The premise, after all, sounds like the set-up to a joke: “A nun, an actress and a soap-opera addict walk into a kitchen …”
Not only that, the fact the three are sisters home together — in Cape Breton, no less — for the first time in years because their mother is dying made me fear I faced a turgid evening of stereotypical CanLit dysfunctional-family angst.
But thanks to Daniel MacIvor’s sharp writing, unexpected story twists, and above all top-notch performances, Marion Bridge won me over.
Social contagions
Parents (I don’t think I’m giving away any parental secrets here) worry about peer pressure–not least because parents remember how much their behavior was influenced by peers when they were young.
The fact is, we’re all influenced by the people around us…and we often think of that influence as a bad thing.
As the Bible puts it, “Evil companions corrupt good morals.” And other kinds of companions can have other effects.
For instance, an analysis of 12,067 people that appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2007 revealed that you are more likely to be obese if your best friend is obese. (Overstuffed siblings or spouses also makes a difference, but the greatest negative effect comes from fat friends.)
To a certain extent, it seems, obesity is a kind of societal disease, rather like the mysterious fainting disorders Victorian women seemed to be heir to, or the bizarre disorder koro, which in South China convinces men that their genitals are shrinking inward and they will die once they disappear.
Which they don’t, of course, but the affliction is real even if the symptoms are imagined.
High anxiety, depression, anorexia and bulimia are also contagious, and if you believe all these things are being foisted upon us by a secret government agency, perhaps you have fallen prey to another contagious state of mind, paranoia.
But not all social contagions are bad.
Back around Christmas of 2008 I wrote a column on the discovery that happiness is contagious, spreading rather like influenza. It seemed a particularly fitting column for the holiday season…and the newest research along those lines seems particularly fitting for a post-holiday column, because now comes word that self-control is also contagious.
At the University of Georgia, psychology professor Michelle vanDellen and colleagues were able to measure the effect in the laboratory, through a variety of studies over two years.
In one, they randomly assigned 36 volunteers to think about a friend with either good or bad self-control. They found that those thinking about a friend with good self-control squeezed a handgrip (a standard method of measuring self-control, since you have to force yourself to keep squeezing it as your hand gets more and more tired) longer than those who were asked to think about a friend who had poor self-control.
In a second test, 71 volunteers were again randomly assigned to either watch other people exert self-control by choosing to eat a carrot rather than a cookie when presented with both options, or fail to exert self-control by eating a cookie rather than a carrot. The mere act of watching those acts of good and bad self-control altered the volunteers’ performances on a later test of self-control.
In a third experiment, 42 volunteers were randomly assigned to list friends with both good and bad self-control. Then, as they were working their way through a computerized test designed to measure self-restraint, the computer would flash, for just 10 milliseconds–too fast to be read, but enough to bring the names to mind–the names of those friends. Volunteers who were flashed the name of a self-disciplined friend did better on the test than those who were flashed the name of a non-self-disciplined friend.
VanDellen believes that the influence is great enough that hanging around with friends who exhibit self-control could help us keep from eating an extra high-calorie snack at a party, or drive us to go to the gym for a workout at the end of a hard day at work. It’s only a nudge, but sometimes a nudge is all that’s needed.
And just why are we so susceptible to peer pressure?
Because we’re primates, and, as science writer Meredith F. Small puts it, “A primate’s day is all about everyone else.”
Chimpanzees and other primates spend all their time touching each other, keeping track of each other, and building interpersonal relationships…and in a very real sense, so do we. We are constantly influenced by those around us…and influence them, in turn.
Rather alarming, if you ask me. I think I’ll just sit in my office from now on and not talk to anyone.
I wouldn’t want to catch anything.
Why I’m not Stephenie Meyer
I’m a full-time writer, but not, alas, a fabulously wealthy and/or successful one. James Cameron isn’t bugging me about film rights; Oprah isn’t plugging me on TV; fans aren’t lugging great stacks of my books around, chasing me for autographs.
It’s easy, when you’re one of the little guys in any creative field, be it fashion, books, movies or music, to envy the runaway successes and wonder what, for example, Stephenie Meyer’s got that you ain’t got. Are her books, objectively, truly so much better than everyone else’s? Or, more to the point, than mine?
Probably not, suggests recent research: in fact, runaway successes are runaway successes in part because they’re runaway successes…and efforts to figure out what “the next big thing” will be are largely wasted, because there’s no way to know.
That’s because people simply don’t make decisions as independently as we like to think.
A recent research project at Columbia University, led by Duncan Watts and Matthew Salganik, showed just how big an impact social influence can have on the popularity of something.
Through a website called Music Lab, the two registered more than 14,000 participants for their study. These participants were asked to listen to, rate and, if they chose, download songs by bands they had never heard of.
Some participants were only shown the names of the songs and bands. Others also saw how many times other participants had already downloaded the songs. Those who could see how often songs were downloaded were further split into eight separate “social-influence worlds”: they could only see the number of downloads a song received from other members of their “world.” This allowed the popularity of songs to evolve independently, eight times over.
If people made their choices completely independently, the scientists predicted, the most successful songs would draw about the same market share among both the participants who saw only band and song names and those who also saw how often the songs had been downloaded. As well, they predicted, the same songs, the “best songs,” would become hits in all eight social-influence worlds.
Instead, the most popular songs were much more popular, and the least popular songs less popular, in the social-influence worlds than in the independent group. Not only that, different songs became hits in each of the separate worlds.
This is where the idea of “cumulative advantage” comes in. Initially, all the songs were equal. But random choice by the participants soon meant that some songs were downloaded more than others. And once that happened, more participants started downloading them than the other songs, because they thought there must be a reason for their popularity–even though that popularity arose mostly by chance.
It may offer some slight solace to those who cling to their belief that they can’t be swayed by mass opinion that perceived quality did play some role in popularity. When downloads across all eight social-influence worlds were added together, songs the participants rated as higher in quality–“good” songs–had higher market share on average than “bad” ones. But the effect was miniscule. One song squarely in the middle of the quality rankings was number one in one social-influence world and number 40 in another one.
Or, as Watts put it in his New York Times article about his research, “A song in the Top 5 in terms of quality had only a 50-percent chance of finishing in the Top 5 of success.”
All of this indicates that things don’t become popular solely because they meet some previously unsuspected public desire or somehow match up with the public’s changing tastes. Instead, things become popular almost by chance, and then their very popularity changes the public’s taste. The market, in other words, influences itself.
Or, as the publisher of Lynne Truss’s bestselling book Eats, Shoots & Leaves put it when asked to explain its success, “it sold well because lots of people bought it.”
I’m not entirely convinced, so I’d like all my readers to help me conduct an experiment. I’d like each of you to go out and buy a dozen–better yet, two dozen–better yet, 100!–copies of my science fiction books Marseguro and Terra Insegura, just to see if we can artificially drive them to the top of the bestseller charts.
I’ll compile the royalties…um, I mean, the results…and report back just as soon as I can.
Well, if Oprah and Cameron will quit pestering me long enough, that is.
My preview of Globe Theatre’s upcoming production of Marion Bridge…
…is in today’s Regina Leader Post. It begins:
The 18th-century French poet Jacques Delille famously noted that while we can choose our friends, “Fate chooses our relatives.”
More than one family has fractured because siblings discover they have nothing in common with each other … which is exactly what has happened to the family in Marion Bridge, Globe Theatre’s next mainstage production, running Jan. 20 to Feb. 6.
Written by Canadian playwright Daniel MacIvor, Marion Bridge is set in Cape Breton, where the three MacKeigan sisters have come together to care for their dying mother.
Aside from their last names, they have nothing in common. Theresa (Laura Condlin) is a nun. Agnes (Liz Gilroy) is a struggling actor.
And then there’s the soap opera-obsessed youngest, Louise, played by Judy Wensel, a recent graduate of the University of Regina’s drama department.
“She’s the only sister who still lives in the home where they all grew up,” Wensel explains. “She feels a bit of frustration. They’re in her space. But over the course of the play they find some common ground and they become sisters again. They lost sight of how family is important, and by the end of it they discover that again.”
The scientific case for live music
Music today is ubiquitous, both in public spaces like malls, elevators and offices and in the very private space between an individual’s ears, courtesy of personal music players.
But that’s all recorded music. Live music remains far rarer. Live musicians may occasionally show up in a public space, but you generally have to seek them out.
Which raises an interesting question. Do we perceive music differently when we watch it being played than we do when we are only listening to a recording?
Michael Schutz is both a noted percussionist and a noted researcher. Currently an assistant professor at McMaster University, he runs a research lab dedicated to studying the cognitive science of music, and the visual component of music is something he’s very interested in.
As he notes in an article published by the Acoustical Society of America, “while purists may argue that music is an auditory experience and therefore visual information is irrelevant, the enormous investment in clothing, lighting, smoke machines and other visual effects in live concerts demonstrates audiences clearly respond to and appreciate visual information as part of the musical experience.”
“Clothing, lighting, smoke machines and other visual effects” is rather too broad a collection of items to serve as the focus of a practical experiment, so Schutz decided to look at a much narrower question, i.e., “Do the gestures used by percussionists have any musical value irrespective of their acoustic consequences?”
This has long been a matter of debate. Some percussionists are adamant that using a sharp wrist motion produces a more staccato sound than a fluid motion. Others are adamant that gestures don’t matter: a percussion instrument will make the same sound if struck with the same amount of force no matter what gesture is used to produce the blow.
It turns out that they’re both right–or both wrong, depending on how you look at it–because there’s a difference between sound (acoustics) and the way that sound is experienced (perception).
Schutz and colleagues conducted two experiments. In the first, they recorded a world-renowned percussionist performing notes using long and short gestures on a professional-quality marimba. Participants rated the duration of each note twice: once while viewing the gesture, once just by listening.
The result: notes produced by long and short gestures were indistinguishable when judged by audio alone, but were judged to be significantly different when the accompanying gesture was seen…even though the participants had been specifically instructed to ignore visual information when making their ratings. Or, as Schutz puts it, in what at first glance seems a self-contradiction, “while gesture fails to alter the sound of the note, it…alters the way the note sounds.”
Earlier studies had suggested that visual information does not influence ratings of note length, but Schutz suspected his experiment revealed such an influence because of the particularly strong visual connection between the gesture of the marimba player and the sound produced. He predicted the results would only apply to percussive sounds, where the motion producing the sound is clearly visible.
To test that prediction, the researchers paired the original videos with notes produced, not only by the marimba, but by piano, French horn, clarinet and voice. A second set of participants followed the same procedure as before…and found that non-percussive sounds were unaffected by the visuals…not too surprising, since we obviously know that a man hitting a marimba won’t produce the sound of someone singing. (Interestingly, some visual influence was found in the piano…which is technically a percussive instrument.)
All of which seems to indicate that, at least for percussion, there is a very strong link between the sight of a live musician playing an instrument and the listeners’ perception of the sound…and that watching a percussionist play live is a very different experience from listening to a recording.
Percussionists, Schutz suggests, use this “musical illusion” to “align audience perception with performer intent.”
Quite likely, other musicians make use of similar illusions. Pete Townshend’s wind-milling arm may not produce any different sound from an electric guitar than the less flamboyant display of another musician–but that’s not the way we perceive it.
Our brains are so strongly affected by visual stimuli that we literally cannot ignore them…which means that, while recorded music has its uses, it can never replace the impact of hearing, and seeing, music performed live.
Bonus: no silly, uncomfortable earbuds required.
Writers’ guidelines for Fine Lifestyles Regina and Saskatoon
Are you a freelance writer in Saskatchewan (or at least knowledgeable about Saskatchewan)? Then it could be I’ve got work for you.
Here’s the release I’ve been sending out today seeking additional writers for the magazines I edit, Fine Lifestyles Regina and the about-to-launch Fine Lifestyles Saskatoon:
***
Edward Willett, editor of Fine Lifestyles Regina, continues to seek freelance writers to work on the magazine, and is now also seeking writers for Fine Lifestyles Saskatoon, a sister publication launching this spring.
He’s looking for two kinds of writing: features (longer stories not tied to a particular advertiser) and advertorial (typically business profiles; these are part of a an advertising package purchased by a client and subject to the client’s approval).
On the feature side, he’ll be looking for or assigning lead articles for each of these sections:
- Wheels
- Style
- Dining, Entertainment and Arts
- Sports, Recreation and Leisure
- Health and Wellness
- House, Home and Property
- Business, Financial and Legal
Feature articles are typically about 1,275 words. Advertorial can vary, but typically runs either 425 words (one page) or 850 (two pages) with only a few going longer.
Rates start at 10 cents a word, but can rise with experience. The magazine also pays $25 per photo used.
For features, the magazines buy one-time print rights and non-exclusive web rights (the magazine appears in facsimile online). Although most stories will be specific to one of the two cities, those with a more general focus may run in both magazines. Advertorial is work-for-hire: the magazine buys all rights.
Past issues of Fine Lifestyles Regina can be viewed at http://www.finelifestylesregina.com/keyword/Magazine/.
***
If you’re interested, you can contact me at edward(at)edwardwillett.com.
Winter issue of Fine Lifestyles Regina now online!
You can view the most recent issue of the magazine I edit, Fine Lifestyles Regina, in its entirety online.
I recommend pages 124 and 125, which is where you’ll find the new wine column my wife and I are co-writing, “The Willetts on Wine.”
I’m also going to be editing the new sister publication, Fine Lifestyles Saskatoon, launching this spring.
(As we approach the release of the next issue, I’ll post “The Willetts on Wine” and my cover-story interview with ex-NHL player Mike Sillinger on this blog, as well.)
Edward Willett is a Subscribe to my weekly science column
Terra Insegura
Marseguro, a water world far from Earth, is home to a colony of humans and the Selkies, a water-dwelling race created from modified human DNA. For seventy years the colony has lived in peace. Then Earth discovers Marseguro, and a strike force is sent to eradicate this “abomination.” But Marseguro has created a genetically tailored plague to use against Earth’s Holy Warriors. With the enemy defeated, the people of Marseguro feel they are safe. But Chris Keating, the traitor who signaled Marseguro’s location to the Holy Warriors, has fled to Earth, unknowingly carrying the deadly plague within him. The people of Marseguro feel they must send a ship to Earth with a life-saving vaccine. Only time will tell what awaits them when they reach their destination.
Marseguro
Winner of the 2009 Prix Aurora Award for Best Long-Form Work in English
Water world Marseguro is home to the Selkies, a water-dwelling race created from human DNA. When an unmodified human seeks revenge on a Selkie by activating a distress beacon taken from the remains of the original colony ship, a strikeforce is sent from Earth to eradicate the genetic abomination. Yet Marseguro will not prove as easy to conquer as the Earth force anticipates…
Lost in Translation
Kathryn was a human empath whose world and life had been destroyed when the alien S’sinn slaughtered her parents before her very eyes. Jarrikk was a young S’sinn, an unproven warrior who’d seen his flight mates slaughtered by the humans who’d sought to colonize his world.
As humans and S’sinn found themselves on the brink of war, these two Translators had to work together to find a common ground and avert catastrophe. But whether their Translators’ oath and training could overcome the enemies leagued against them was very much in doubt…
Archives
Historic Walks of Regina and Moose Jaw
Ten walks to points of historic and architectural interest in the cities of Regina and Moose Jaw (eight walks for Regina, two for Moose Jaw).
Disease-Hunting Scientist
The true stories of six real disease hunters. Epidemiologists travel the world trying to keep us safe from deadly diseases—from high-tech labs in Canada to remote villages in Africa. Learn how these “disease detectives” are coming up with new ways to fight disease, and find out if you have what it takes to become an epidemiologist, too!
The Bounty Mutiny
The Bounty was a British ship visiting Tahiti in 1789 when some of the crew overthrew the captain, William Bligh, and set him adrift in a tiny boat with sailors loyal to him. The mutiny resulted in a number of trials–both of the men who mutinied and of Bligh for losing command of his ship. These fascinating events have been the source for numerous Hollywood movies, most recently The Bounty. The Bounty Mutiny: From the Court Case to the Movie explores the famous case and the movies it inspired.
