[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 …
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, …
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 …
[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 …
[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 …
[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 …
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2011/09/The-Black-Death.mp3[/podcast]
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 …
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 …
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2011/08/Analog-and-Digital-TV.mp3[/podcast] Technology changes, new ways of doing things driving out the old. Take digital television. In fact, you’ll have to: by August 31, over-the-air television stations in most major Canadian cities are being required to stop broadcasting in analog and start broadcasting in digital. Merriam-Webster defines analog as “of, relating to, or being a mechanism …
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2011/08/The-Vernacular-of-Fiction.mp3[/podcast] It should come as no surprise to anyone reading this column that I write fiction in addition to non-fiction: specifically, science fiction and fantasy for both adults and young adults. Which is why Ben Zimmer’s recent article in The New York Times’s Sunday Book Review, describing the findings of lexicographers using modern computer databases …
Big news this week: DAW Books, publisher of my three science fiction novels Lost in Translation, Marseguro and Terra Insegura, and my upcoming Lee Arthur Chane fantasy Magebane, has bought the first two-books of a new YA fantasy series, the first book of which is called Masks. Here’s the “high-concept” description from my proposal: In …
