New Digs

Welcome! I’m launching a new blog. Here’s a place for me to opine, share cool infospheric matter, and write the occasional nerdy post. Hope you’ll read and comment. To get the wheels turning, I’ve seeded the blog with a few posts I wrote on Eat Our Brains, a group blog for a handful of SFF writer buddies of mine, which has sadly gone quiet …

While I’m at it, thanks to Pati Nagle for setting up the blog for me, and Mac Stone, for adding art, making some cool mods, and seeding it. Y’all are awesome. Just saying.

Oh! And check out the gorgeous artwork. I have a book coming out next March (Up Against It from Tor Books: space ships! asteroids! planet eating machines and rogue AIs and Martian mobsters! Pre-order it here) and scored a fabulous cover by the incredibly talented and prolific SFF artist, Donato Giancola.

PS, Ignore the Twitterfeed for now. It got hacked a while back and I’m having to do some heavy-accel acrobatics to get it back. I’ll let y’all know when it’s up and running.

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Life, I tell you! Extraterrestrial…. liiiiiiife!

Science News reports that some very clever people have come up with a laser technique for detecting microbial activity. We can not only use it to, say, detect Martian life from orbit, but even use it to detect life on worlds orbiting other suns! Even better, it uses very inexpensive, off-the-shelf equipment. Which means maybe even some enterprising amateurs could conceivably be the first people to discover extraterrestrial life.

How cool is that?

originally posted on Eat Our Brains, October 2, 2009

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Jet Pack Ahoy

In keeping with our occasional “where’s my flying car?” motif, I thought I’d pass along this little goody. The Denver Post reports that daredevil Eric Scott successfully avoided plummeting to his death in Royal Gorge with a 135-pound rocket-powered backpack strapped to him.

The pack, designed by aerospace engineer Eric Strauss, carried Scott across the 1,500 foot wide, 1,053 foot deep canyon. According to the Post, he had 33 seconds of fuel, and made it across in 25.  Plenty of time to spare!

Troy Widgery, founder of Jetpack International, the company that created the pack, is pursuing a childhood dream. Next up, he says, is a pack with three turbines, capable of staying aloft for nine minutes and crossing the Grand Canyon.

Update: CBS News has the story, too. Both the Denver Post and CBS have video of the flight, and CBS has an interview with Scott. CBS is saying the flight took either 21 or 23 seconds, and he had a total of 30 seconds of hydrogen peroxide fuel. Either way, he made it with about 7 seconds to spare. Heh.

originally posted on Eat Our Brains, Nov 28, 2008

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Mars Exploration

NASA and JPL post regularly updated news about the ongoing Mars program, so the public can stay up to date.

The NASA/JPL Mars site gives us one reason why it should interest us:

“Mars today is a hostile world, blanketed in toxic soil and zapped with radiation. And yet, we are on a quest to conquer our fears and make peace with this planet. We begin to brave the hardships because Mars is the only planet on which humans could one day settle, making it a place of hope as well as trepidation.”

Because frontiers are fun.

Image from JPL
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