Category: Blog

The science of ebooks vs. print books

[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads//2011/10/Ebooks-vs-Print-Books.mp3[/podcast] Once upon a time, the word “book” meant only one thing: a stack of paper printed with text and bound together along one edge. These days, though, the word “book” has developed two meanings. You can still read a bound-stack-of-paper book, but you can also read a book without ever touching anything that was …

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Of mice and man-flu

[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads//2011/10/Of-Mice-and-Man-Flu.mp3[/podcast] As any wife will tell you, men are lousy at being sick. They swear they’re on death’s door when it is quite apparent to their long-suffering significant other that in fact they are suffering from nothing more than a cold, nowhere near as bad as the one she had the week before when she …

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Magebane hits bookstores today!

Is it October 4 already? It is, and that means that Magebane is officially available, published (of course) by DAW Books. You can buy it in all the usual places: Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Chapters, Barnes & Noble, to name just a few. And it’s available in both paperback and popular ebook formats. Here’s the blurb from …

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The 2011 Ig Nobel Prizes

[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads//2011/09/2011-Ig-Nobel-Prizes.mp3[/podcast] Ah, it’s my favorite time of the year, a time when this column practically writes itself. It’s Ig Nobel Prize time. The Ig Nobel Prizes are presented by the science comedy magazine Annals of Improbable Research, to honour achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.” At the ceremony, genuine (and …

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My Mayor’s Mega-Minute Reading Challenge speech

As writer-in-residence at the Regina Public Library, I was asked to give a brief speech at today’s launch of Regina’s annual Mayor’s Mega-Minute Reading Challenge at Jack MacKenzie School. And rather than ad-lib, as is my wont, I actually wrote something down (not that I read it word for word). Here it is: *** Hi, …

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Test Drive: Ford F150 FX4

Way back in August, just before we headed off on vacation, I was given the opportunity to test drive a Ford F150 FX4…and I haven’t written about it until now. This is rather embarrassing for someone who, as you may recall from my last test-drive post, has long been a wannabe Car & Driver road …

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Seeing through someone else’s eyes

[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads//2011/09/Recreating-Brain-Video.mp3[/podcast] Whenever I say anything is impossible, I always think of Arthur C. Clarke’s First Law: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.” Up until recently, I would have said mind-reading was impossible…but, even …

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Gait recognition

[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads//2011/09/Gait-Recognition.mp3[/podcast] Twelve years ago, I started a science column with this sentence: “Are you fed up with having to carry 2,762 separate plastic cards in your wallet for buying gas, getting Air Miles, withdrawing money, renting videos and collecting frequent-ice-cream-eater points?  Then you’ll be glad to hear about biometrics…” More than a decade later, I …

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Just-below pricing

[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2011/09/Just-Below-Pricing.mp3[/podcast] I’ve been toying with the idea of getting a MacBook Air (my old Samsung netbook has just about had the life pounded out of it after churning out half a million words or so, including all of my upcoming book Magebane), and I noticed that the 11-inch MacBook Air is listed on Apple’s Canadian …

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The Black Death

[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2011/09/The-Black-Death.mp3[/podcast]

Magebane gets starred review in Publishers Weekly!

Talk about a pleasant surprise. I fired up the iPad briefly before my concert at WorldCon in Reno today (I sang the Donald Swann-composed cycle of songs from Tolkien, called The Road Goes Ever On) and discovered the first review I’ve yet seen of my upcoming Lee Arthur Chane fantasy novel Magebane: but it’s not …

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The Space-Time Continuum: Steampunk

Here’s my latest column for the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild’s newsletter Freelance… *** They’ve become a fixture at science fiction conventions: people wearing goggles, leather coats, high laced boots and aviator caps, carrying strange devices of glass, brass and leather. They look old-fashioned and futuristic at the same time. They’re aficionados of a sub-genre of science …

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