Breakfast & T-Shirts by Harry Bell
Harry Bell will have five works in the Newcastle Artists Society’s gallery show “Prefabricated Dialogues” at Citbase in Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK starting this weekend.
A preview will be held April 8 from 6-9 p.m. and the exhibition will remain in place through June 7.
Many examples of Harry’s painting can be seen on his blog Boogie Street or his page at the Newcastle Artists Society website.
The Square Kilometer Array will be world’s largest telescope when it’s up and running in 2024.
The SKA it will be a collection of around 3,000 dishes, each 15 meters in diameter, and tens of thousands of smaller receivers, all spread across an entire continent, able to detect electromagnetic radiation at a great distance:
Could it really help us discover aliens?
SKA says its instrument will be able to pick up airport radar on a planet 50 light-years away — if such a thing exists.
The SKA will require the support of a supercomputer capable of 100 petaflops per second. Sure, I could Google up the definition of that word, but I prefer to think it means the computer is going to roll over a lot faster than my dog.
There are sf stories about trying to send warnings to the far future. As difficult as it is to preserve the information, it’s even harder to make later generations pay attention to it.
People have been trying to solve this problem for a long time. The poem “Ozymandias” mocks those who did it for selfish purposes. But what if you’re trying to save your children’s children? Consider the tsunami warnings on these 600-year-old Japanese tablets:
Modern sea walls failed to protect coastal towns from Japan’s destructive tsunami last month. But in the hamlet of Aneyoshi, a single centuries-old tablet saved the day.
“High dwellings are the peace and harmony of our descendants,” the stone slab reads.
“Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis. Do not build any homes below this point.”
It was advice the dozen or so households of Aneyoshi heeded, and their homes emerged unscathed from a disaster that flattened low-lying communities elsewhere and killed thousands along Japan’s northeastern shore.
Hundreds of such markers dot the coastline, some more than 600 years old. Collectively they form a crude warning system for Japan, whose long coasts along major fault lines have made it a repeated target of earthquakes and tsunamis over the centuries.
Six novels have been shortlisted for the initial Terry Pratchett Anywhere But Here, Anywhen But Now First Novel Prize.
Over 500 entries were submitted for the £20,000 prize (an advance on a publishing contract) according to the announcement on Pratchett’s website.
The winner will be judged by Sir Terry Pratchett, Tony Robinson, Michael Rowley from Waterstone’s, Marianne Velmans, Publishing Director of Doubleday and Simon Taylor, Editorial Director at Transworld Publishers. The winner will be announced on May 31.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter for the story.]
Denise Dumars
Denise Dumars, an Author’s Representative for the Ashley Grayson Literary Agency, has announced her retirement as a literary agent. “Don’t worry; I’m not going away,” she reassures everyone. “I’m just trading in my ‘Agent’ hat for my ‘Writer’ hat.”
I have realized that in the years I’ve been a literary agent my own writing output has declined by about 90%, and since the only thing I’ve ever wanted to be is a writer, I have decided to retire from agenting in order to work on my own writing.
Dumars is a versatile writer who is especially well-known in the sf poetry field. She is a featured columnist for Star*Line, the journal of the Science Fiction Poetry Association.
Mike Glicksohn’s passing shook fandom as few have. Many fans added their own memories as comments on the remembrances and tributes posted here.
Still, these sublime thoughts did not keep us from the usual venting about the Wikipedia and the Hugo Awards…
Here are the 10 most frequently viewed posts for March 2011 according to Google Analytics.
1. Mike Glicksohn (1946-2011)
2. Service for Mike Glicksohn
3. Wikipedia, Fandom Waving Goodbye?
4. Hugo Nomination Campaign for Twitter Account?
5. Murray Moore: Glicksohn Memorial Report
6. Andrew Porter: Mike Glicksohn Photo Gallery
7. April Derleth (1954-2011)
8. Today’s Thought Experiment
9. Taral Wayne: After the Piper Played
10. Gerhartsreiter Indicted for Murder of John Sohus
I started to get a little bit excited when I read this memo Michael Walsh received at work:
Hopkins Fulfillment Services (HFS) is pleased to announce that Miskatonic University Press (MUP) has selected HFS for distribution services, effective April 1, 2011…
I thought zombies were interested in eating brains, not improving them, before I read “Using the Living Dead To Teach Information Literacy” at Library Journal.com.
Students arrive on the McPherson College campus chronically unprepared to use the library. The director of library services and his assistant, an experienced illustrator for small press comics, hope that students will read their new 23-page library guide in graphic novel format — Library of the Living Dead – and no longer have to spend so much time answering the same basic questions.
[The guide] features students taking cover in the library from zombies run amok on campus, and the flight to safety becomes a point of departure for a blood-stained lesson, replete with decapitations, in the Dewey Decimal system and other library tools….
[The] story line… includes a desperate flight through the stacks during which the characters, who are modeled on real students and staff members, incinerate zombies while simultaneously doing research (Zombies in Haitian myth? “Religion…the 200s. Follow me.”)
I asked Michael Walsh, who sent me the story, what’s in it for the zombies?
“Maybe this will help them get smarter brains to munch on,” he guessed.
[Thanks to Michael J. Walsh for the story.]
LASFS was the first science fiction club to own its own clubhouse and very likely the first to have a pay phone on its premises. The value of this may seem a little blurry in an era when so many people carry a personal phone. However, in the 1980s it was the club’s lifeline to the outside world.
The pay phone was useful in “emergencies” to call parents to pick up their teenagers, or take calls from club officers who at the last minute were going to miss the weekly meeting. And the LASFSians who answered incoming calls had their own freewheeling ideas about phone etiquette.
Let David Klaus tell you about his experience:
At LASFS I used to answer the club telephone by singing the initials to the five-note theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I did that once and the voice on the other end said “This is Robert Heinlein calling long-distance. May I please speak to Bruce Pelz?”
After a moment of panic at the thought of being lightning-struck for being smart-assed to GOD, I teleported around the clubhouse until I could find Bruce, usually a much easier task than it seemed in my franticness that night.