181 thoughts on “Your Darn Near Hugo-Free Auxiliary Pixel Scroll 4/27/16 Scrolljira!”

1. ::ticky::

2. Firstee!!

3. Aww. @Soon Lee, you should try out for Jeopardy with that trigger finger.

4. Bonnie,
   It helps that Mike usually posts around my commute home from work or once dinner is underway (it’s Grandma’s chicken stew simmering on the stove right now), so it’s typically during my File770 watchful period.

   ETA: This comment is a sacrifice play so snowcrash can be Puppy-free fifth!

5. Puppy-free fifth!

   ETA: Thanks @Soon Lee!

6. Second fifth!

   (1) SF Hall of Fame: So glad PTerry’s on the list! And, it’s a good list.

7. I signal the virtue of seventh!

8. So given the wonderful rants Ursula Vernon has done on potatoes, I thought this article on tubers, grains and civilization might be of some interest.

   I mean to me, this is not only interesting history and anthropology, but it’s also a world building exercise. I mean, while other people are nattering on about wars and nobility and stuff, to me the important things are stuff like what people ate. Not to mention how they got their food, and what that meant about the society. Call it the archaeologist in me.

9. (1) SF HALL OF FAME VOTING. – Yay Pratchett! Boo, no Discworld.

   (3) HAILED INTO COURT. – John Scalzi laughs at you, Divya and your obsession over the serial comma.

10. *runs off to read more about potatoes*

11. 7) BOOKMARKED. Rachel Swirsky interprets her story “If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love” in a comment at File 770.

    I enjoyed Rachel sharing her rant. I need to find or buy a new copy of the story so I can reread it with this new insight.

    I had a surprisingly good day today. Got to chat with Rachel Swirsky. I pulled Ann Leckie in from lurking to answer a Hugo question. Got both Kevin Standlee and Jared Dashoff on the Hugo signal.

    I was commenting to my husband how much things have changed. Four years ago I was hanging out with wannabe authors mostly going the self-publishing route who for the most part weren’t interested in learning about the publishing industry. Today I was hanging out with Hugo nominees, past Hugo winners and nominees, the guys who chair Worldcon business meetings, and a ton of other cool creative fun people who are knowledgeable on so many topics. And it’s not all that unusual a day around here. It’s amazing.

    I’m really glad I stopped lurking during last year’s Worldcon business meeting. Thanks Mike Glyer for a great blog and community. Thanks fellow filers for being who you are.

12. I misread that first item and thought we were being asked to choose between those creators and works. *clutches heart*

13. @Tasha,

    It’s here.

    Also: what you said.

14. Heh, I’ve been slowly scanning all the issues of Lexfanzine, the clubzine of the LexFA SF club, which I was in while in college. (I even ended up editing it before putting out LOW ORBIT.)

    The club is still around, so it’ll end up on their website. I figured, hey, it’s kind of my duty, since as far as I know I have the only complete copy of the archives.

    (My copies of the earliest ones are third or fourth generation, not sure – the cleanup work has been difficult. Like, issue two, I kept the original last page and put it in the PDF after the restored first page to show was I’ve been up against. Here, if anyone is curious.)

    Fortunately, the later issues are fewer generations down the pike, and much less badly off.

    It’s not exactly an important ‘zine; I don’t even have any personal connection to this era, it’s too early for me. But it’s still pleasant work, and kind of neat reading as I clean them up.

15. (1) Never heard of the EMP museum, but I’m disappointed that it doesn’t stand for electromagnetic pulse.

    (2) I kind of doubt that there are many people ready, willing, and able to drop 2.5 megabucks on a garage-full of old magazines. How many zeros you think he would have to drop before finding a buyer? (Am I the only one who gets more of a hoarder than collector vibe?)

16. Darren: It’s in Seattle, and started out as Experience Music Project. The music portion is still a big deal. It’s a bit of an odd combination, but when you’re Paul Allen (see: Microsoft), well, you can do that sort of thing.

17. (1) SF HALL OF FAME VOTING

    Looks like you get 3 votes in each category. Pratchett has to be my #1 choice, but the rest is a painful choice.

    I think I nominated Banks in the first stage, so I’m a little disappointed not to see him make this list. Maybe next year!

    (5) CHINA PRESS COVERS HUGO NOMINEE

    Excellent for her. Although it didn’t quite make my personal final five, it is a fine story and she deserves the plaudits.

    —

    I just got my copy of the latest Uncanny, and the cover by Galen Dara has to be the most gorgeous art they’ve had so far – and that’s a high bar.

18. Hey, so what about this reactionless drive business anyway? Do we think it’s really proving out? Was there news? Meaning, new news – there have been hey-maybe items for months now.

19. Why people have to use these elaborate polysyllabic phrases, like “virtue signalling” instead of “hypocrisy”, or “politically incorrect” instead of, say, “racist”, I have no idea.

    The only exception I might raise to Mr Scalzi’s otherwise excellent point is the case of mass shaming online – one of the more terrifying incarnations of cyberbullying. A recent Atlantic article argues that we shame others to show what nice, trustworthy people we ourselves are. (Those of us who’ve been under the dogpile at some point will deduce the opposite.) James Bartholomew didn’t have this in mind when he coined the phrase as a lazy way of casting doubt onto people’s sincerity, but it is a way of “signalling” our “virtue”, at the expense of others, and at the expense of the moral and political issues being misused.

20. @Jim – there’s been a lot of inertia about the emdrive in the scientific community.

    Sorry.

    Apparently someone has come up with a theory as to how it works – seems to do with inertia having step levels in it, not a curve. IANAS so I don’t understand but I found this the other day.

    http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/227146-a-new-theory-of-inertia-could-explain-the-em-drives-anomalous-thrust

    I’m not convinced. I’m also not convinced that the thrust is real, and not some sort of artifact from differential heating, vibration, experimental error, etc. Apparently the next step is to put the chamber the other way round to see if the thrust direction flips.

    It all seems a bit handwavium driven to me – but if there is a real effect, it would be kind of cool (but probably not a working starship drive, as the thrust levels are barely detectable above background noise).

21. I’ve nothing to say about the em-drive, no reaction at all.

22. Speaking of PTerry, we finally got around to watching the final episode of the most recent series of Endeavour (the Inspector Morse prequel). I was happy to learn that DI Fred Thursday, young Morse’s mentor, began his police career under the steady guidance of a wise older policeman named Vimes. Best Guv’nor a young plod could ask for, IMHO.

23. The EMdrive was mentioned a week or two back, and I posted this excellent (but year old) summary from a poster on Reddit. I see now that there is a (sparsely) active Reddit forum on the subject.

    (My non-physicist, non-engineer gut feeling is that the EMdrive will turn out like “cold fusion”–some people will claim some small signs of something that will be hard to reproduce and be mostly abandoned except for a few fringe dead-enders.)

24. It’s too bad that “Folding Beijing” will probably be NoAwarded. After all, Hoa did get her nomination by being on both the Sad Puppies and the Rabid Puppies lists.

25. #3 Fun interview, but Rachel Swirsky left out an Oxford comma in Question 3 of the interview. Accident or subversion? Discuss.

26. Mark: I just got my copy of the latest Uncanny, and the cover by Galen Dara has to be the most gorgeous art they’ve had so far – and that’s a high bar.

    Oh, wow, that is just an absolutely stunning cover, what fabulous detail and color!

27. That Galen Dara cover for the newest Uncanny is amazingly eyecatching. She just gets better and better.

28. Oh, for your Hugo-free zone podcast listening pleasure, the Three Hoarsemen had me on to discuss the work of C.J. Cherryh

    http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2016/04/three-hoarsemen-episode-34-works-c-j-cherryh-paul-weimer/

29. The current plan for the em-drive is to build an en-drive and then make it slightly longer.

30. Paul

    Duly favourited for evening listening; the crossrail work in the City is very, very loud…

31. The Oxford comma is useful for disambiguating meaning. Useful aspects of written language should be kept.

    Today’s read — What If?, by Randall Munroe (nonfiction)

    Randall Munroe gives thought-out scientific answers to absurd questions in the enjoyable style one would expect from the creator of XKCD. The closest equivalent I can think of is Mythbusters, if Mythbusters wasn’t confined by anything but the limits of imagination. Sometimes thought-provoking and always fun, I learned more than one thing I didn’t know before reading it. Thumbs up.

32. I fear I have to disagree with Mr. Scalzi – I find the “virtue-signaling” concept to be pretty useful to describe a certain style of highly performative public behavior, designed to demonstrate solidarity with an in-group. Doesn’t matter what in-group; I’ve seen it from all manner of people who were really invested in their online personae. You know, more interested in being seen by the right people to be doing the right thing than in simply doing it.

    Granted, any term is subject to picking up connotations from the kinds of people who use it most often. Not to mention the concept can be ironically self-demonstrating.

33. The Oxford comma is useful for disambiguating meaning.

    “My childhood heroes were my parents, Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale”.

    . . . works much better with an Oxford comma

34. @Jon F.
    I think the distinction is between the behavior and the language.

    Lets think of an example. You know those petition sites by which we can electronically sign our names to something asking the government of Kyrgzstan to enforce their laws about cruelty to honey badgers*, and having done so suggest that one should tweet and facebook about it to encourage others to do the same.

    Doing so is virtue signalling as you describe it, and there’s a certain level, which likely differs according to the reader, which one can accept before it becomes tedious.

    At the point it becomes tedious one might look for ways of muting those tweets, stop following the person, or gently hint to them that their feed is very dull. Or one might start loudly accusing them of being AWFUL people because they Virtue Signal. And then I’m with Scalzi.

    *As far as I know everyone in Kyrgzstan is entirely lovely to honey badgers, which are not native to the area anyway.

35. Bah! The em – drive is just an encrypted rz-drive.

    @Rea – As much as I love the Oxford comma, I must admit that it isn’t needed if you think before typing some lists:

    “My childhood heroes were Sandy Koufax, my parents and Don Drysdale”.

36. @Matthew Johnson Dashed clever sir

37. (6) I didn’t write a lot of letters, but I had some published in Cerebus and American Flagg! (Forgotten that there was an exclamation point in the American Flagg! title.) Of course, back in those days we didn’t have these fancy discussion boards and I had to type my letters. And the only mail box in the county was two miles away at the top of a hill…

    (8) “Look! It’s the Virtue Signal! PC City is in need of us! To the Virtuemobile!”

38. I too have to disagree with Scalzi, because I have myself engaged in virtue signaling.

    I remember calling out online an episode of Game of Thrones for dodgy racial politics when I believed the racial implications to be inadvertent, not a big deal, and, to tell the truth, I really didn’t care all that much anyway.

39. @matthew gets the “High Fen” award today.

    ETA: From me, at least.

40. “Virtue signalling” … is itself virtue signalling. Maybe someone has already noted this.

41. Clack: I too have to disagree with Scalzi, because I have myself engaged in virtue signaling. I remember calling out online an episode of Game of Thrones for dodgy racial politics when I believed the racial implications to be inadvertent, not a big deal, and, to tell the truth, I really didn’t care all that much anyway.

    Who were you trying to impress, that you engaged in virtue signalling? And if you “really didn’t care all that much anyway”, why did you do it despite that?

42. To be clear, wasn’t saying that about @clack. I just find the term itself does the thing it’s purporting to decry.

43. “There is only oneness?” he demanded.

    “Forever.”

    Pendrake swallowed and became stubborn. “But, then, what is the manyness that we perceive?”

    “Illusionary weak and strong virtue signals.”

    “But who are they signalling to?”

    “To each other.”

    – (not entirely) A. E. van Vogt, Moonbeast

44. “Virtue signalling” … is itself virtue signalling. Maybe someone has already noted this.

    In my experience, those who are most likely to use “virtue signaling” as an attack are most likely to be using the attack as a means of signaling their own virtue to a group they want to impress. In short, actual “virtue signaling” seems to be most prevalent among that certain brand of conservatives who deride others for “virtue signaling”.

45. It seems to me that, as with “political correctness”, the question of weather “virtue signalling” is a thing that people do is largely irrelevant to its use as a general-purpose put down and/or dogwhistle.

46. Virtue signaling is a very nice hobby with some positive social benefits which is no substitute for actual action in the actual real physical people-die-here world.

47. You have beamed the Physicist Symbol in the shape of the EmDrive into the sky, and I must answer!

    Previously, on EmDrive: there’s a claimed space drive that works not by shoving stuff out the back (like a rocket) or bouncing stuff off of it (like a light sail) but by bouncing electromagnetic photons inside of a closed cavity. The photons bounce back and forth until they’re eventually lost as waste heat. Somehow this also produces thrust, even though the photons don’t leave the cavity. This is kind of like sitting in a car and pushing against the steering wheel to make it go forward. If this drive does produce thrust, then something wonky is going on with physics that we don’t understand yet.

    Several groups have tested this, although none of the tests are really that definitive and different groups have gotten very different results from their tests. A NASA lab has been testing one of these drives, and is supposed to be putting out a paper detailing their latest results soon, but it’s not yet available.

    Enter Mike McCulloch, who has a theory that inertia is quantized and that that modifies how things move at very low acceleration. He claims that the theory, called MiHsC, explains all kinds of things: galactic rotations, the Pioneer Anomaly[*], the flyby anomaly, and now the EmDrive.

    I took a swing at explaining McCulloch’s MiHsC theory over at Jalopnik, but here’s the thumbnail description. MiHsC involves something from quantum field theory known as the Unruh effect, a theorized but unobserved effect. McCulloch theorizes that Unruh effect leads to Unruh radiation (a further supposition), and that Unruh radiation couples to the Rindler horizon behind you and the Hubble horizon in front of you, and because of how radiation is quantized inside a cavity, when you’re speeding up you get bombarded by more Unruh radiation in front of you than behind. This is, in theory, where inertia comes from. But when you’re only speeding up a little, the amount of Unruh radiation coming at you from the front drops off more than before, so you don’t experience as much inertia as before.

    (I did say this was the thumbnail description. The theory is deep into the cosmological and quantum field theory weeds.)

    This is a really tenuous chain of theorizing, the effect is so small that it’ll be hard to prove, and I’m not convinced by his explanation that we can’t measure MiHsC’s effect the way we normally do. Plus the theory would break parts of general relativity in ways that his theory can’t then account for.

    In short, to steal Brian Koberlein’s line about this whole thing, “Wild speculation explains magic box!”

    [*] Hasn’t the Pioneer Anomaly been explained, and the answer was “power supplies and other heat sources on the satellite were slowing it down”? Yes, but McCulloch disagrees.

48. It’s also instructive to read the repellent piece in the Spectator that made “virtue signalling” a thing. Notice in particular the cards that get palmed in the claim that expressing dissatisfaction is something that happens instead of taking action, rather than being both a spur to action and an action in itself, and the attempt to make the whole thing sound science-y by misunderstanding what a positional good is.

49. Looking back, I think the only time I’ve used the term “virtue-signaling” was in reference to the practice of having a list of creators whose work one won’t buy, read, or review, not on the merits of their creative work but simply because you find them so toxic that you don’t want to support them in any way.

    I think all of us have such a list – I certainly do – but I find the practice of announcing who’s on one’s list to be kind of tiresome. Sometimes you do have to make a moral stance in public, but in a lot of cases it’s more important to quietly obey your conscience and move on.

    Matthew 6:5 seems to be applicable. Although I notice that in most English translations, the pertinent word is “hypocrite.”

50. re: Virtue Signalling

    It had been a useful way to describe, on the left, the difference between people who wanted to appear virtuous in a properly professional/middle-class way and those who actually wanted to do something. I’m thinking that now that the right has adopted it, it’s lost its use, and time for a new term.

    re: Swirsky

    I’ve never been as glad to have made a poorly edited, off the cuff comment as I was when Ms. Swirsky showed up and gave that explanation of her story. It highlighted parts I had missed. And then Ann Leckie showed up! Good day all around.

Comments are closed.