Posts published by “taidoka”
- Zeppelins, dirigibles and blimps: what do all these terms mean?
- The history of airships, starting with an airborne chicken.
- The science of airships, including innovations for flight.
- The failures of airships - what brought them down?
- The future of airships - airships on the drawing board!
Sign up here, and the full schedule is also online.
We're the first panel, at 10am Saturday, and our panelists include:
Laurel Anne Hill [Moderator]
Laurel Anne Hill—author and former underground storage tank operator—grew up in San Francisco, with more dreams of adventure than good sense or money. Her close brushes with death, love of family, respect for honor and belief in a higher power continue to influence her writing and her life. She has authored two award-winning novels: The Engine Woman’s Light (Sand Hill Review Press), a gripping spirits-meet-steampunk, coming-of-age heroic journey, and Heroes Arise. Laurel’s published short stories and nonfiction pieces total over forty. She has served as a program participant at many science fiction/fantasy conventions, including the World Science Fiction Con and World Fantasy Con. She’s the Literary Stage Manager for the annual San Mateo County Fair, a speaker, writing contest judge, and editor. And she’s even engineered a steam locomotive. For more about her, go to http://www.laurelannehill.com.
Madeleine Holly-Rosing
Madeleine Holly-Rosing is the writer/creator of the award-winning Boston Metaphysical Society graphic novel series. Previously self-published, it is now published by Source Point Press. The series also includes the award winning prequel novel, A Storm of Secrets, and an anthology. After running eight successful crowdfunding campaigns, she published the book, Kickstarter for the Independent Creator. Other comic anthology projects include: The Scout (The 4th Monkey), The Sanctuary (The Edgar Allan Poe Chronicles), The Marriage Counselor (Cthulhu is Hard to Spell), The Glob (Night Wolf), The Infinity Tree (Menagerie: Declassified), and the upcoming, The Birth (Stan Yak Vampire Anthology).
Michael Tierney
Michael Tierney writes steampunk-laced alternative historical fiction stories from his Victorian home in Silicon Valley. After writing technical and scientific publications for many years, he turned his sights to more imaginative genres. Trained as a chemist, he brings an appreciation of both science and history to his stories. His latest novel is Mr. Darwin’s Dragon. Visit his blog at www.airshipflamel.com.
Anthony Francis
By day, Anthony Francis teaches robots to learn; by night he writes science fiction and draws comic books. Anthony’s best known for his Skindancer urban fantasy series of novels including the Epic eBook Award winner Frost Moon and its sequels Blood Rock and Liquid Fire, all following the misadventures of magical tattoo artist Dakota Frost trying to raise her weretiger daughter Cinnamon in Atlanta.
Anthony also writes the Jeremiah Willstone steampunk series, following a young female soldier in a world where women’s liberation happened a century early – and so, with twice as many brains working on hard problems, the Victorians invented rayguns and time travel. In addition to her debut novel Jeremiah Willstone and the Clockwork Time Machine, Jeremiah appears in a dozen other stories, including “Steampunk Fairy Chick” in the UnCONventional anthology.
Anthony is co-editor of the anthology Doorways to Extra Time and a co-founder of Thinking Ink Press, publisher of the steampunk anthologies Twelve Hours Later, Thirty Days Later, and Some Time Later. He’s the artist of the webcomic fanu fiku and he’s co-author of the 24 Hour Comic Day Survival Guide. He’s participated in National Novel Writing Month and its related challenges over 20 times, recently cracking one million words written in Nano.
Anthony lives in San Jose with his wife and cats, but his heart will always belong in Atlanta. To learn more about Dakota Frost, visit facebook.com/dakotafrost or dakotafrost.com; to learn more about Jeremiah Willstone, visit facebook.com/jeremiahwillstone; to learn more about Anthony and his appearances, visit his blog dresan.com.
You can also take a look at my previous presentations on the science of airships, which I've been doing on and off for about 10 years now, for more details ...
Hope to see you virtually there, or in the air!
-the Centaur
... came up as my wife and I were discussing the "creative hangers-on form" of Stigler's Law. The original Stigler's Law, discovered by Roger Merton and popularized by Stephen Stigler, is the idea that in science, no discovery is named after its original discoverer.
In creative circles, it comes up when someone who had little or nothing to do with a creative process takes credit for it. A few of my wife's friends were like this, dropping by to visit her while she was in the middle of a creative project, describing out loud what she was doing, then claiming, "I told her to do that."
In the words of Finn from The Rise of Skywalker: "You did not!"
In computing circles, the old joke referred to the Java programming language. I've heard several variants, but the distilled version is "He thinks he invented Java because he was in the room when someone made coffee." Apparently this is a good description of how Java itself was named, down to at least one person claiming they came up with the name Java and others disputing that, even suggesting that they opposed it, claiming instead that someone else in the room was responsible - while that person in turn rejected the idea, noting only that there was some coffee in the room from Peet's.
Regardless, I dispute Howard Aiken's saying "Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." Nah. Once you've forced an idea down someone's throat, they won't just swallow it, they'll claim it was in their stomach all along.
-the Centaur
My eyelids flickered as the orchid petals infiltrated the lock, a jumble of images and feelings flooding back to me as the interlocking parts of the stamen column felt the tumblers. It was hard to see and “see” at the same time, much less guide the— Click. I drew a careful breath, then turned my hand. The petals and sepals closed on the knob and turned it, softly, and I gingerly opened the doors. My vines and their floating leaves shifted as the heavy wood parted, but did not otherwise react: no security system had been triggered. The church was spacious, almost cavernous … but not wholly dark. An eerie blue glow filtered in from the twin rows of stained glass, but the white light glinting off the rows of pews came from a pool of spotlights, pinioning before the altar a gleaming silver coffin. “My friend,” came a quiet Asian voice. “You should not have come here.” Instantly I whirled 270, twisting mana up in my body, murmuring shield just as I came face to face with … a priest? A typical, nay, stereotypical long-cassocked priest, stepping from a confessional, bearing an ornate pectoral cross and carrying a gun … no … a water pistol? “Let this be a warning to you,” he said, and fired. “Begone!”Writing every day. -the Centaur
Growing up in the Bible Belt meant that many of my friends didn't just believe that the Bible was divinely inspired, they believed it was literally true and argued - sometimes, strongly argued - that accepting the Bible as the infallible Word of God was absolutely necessary for salvation.
There's a great Christian word for that point of view: idolatry.
Biblical idolatry, to be specific: worshipping the Bible instead of Jesus. As I said when I started this series, Christianity is about following Jesus (faith), away from your old life (repentance), and towards the kingdom of heaven (goodness), in the hope of salvation (only accomplished by his sacrifice and grace).
Placing the Bible, a book - a collection of books, in three different languages, by dozens of authors, over centuries, collated by a completely different group of people - as the center of your religion is placing an thing - a divinely inspired thing, perhaps, but a thing - in place of Jesus God, and distorts Christianity.
Treating the Bible like a fax from God gets you so caught up in the buzzing of the machinery that you miss the message. People I respect get lost mining the minutiae of the Bible, combing through their Interlinear Bibles to construct their own elaborate castles in the air in favor of simply following Jesus.
But how do you get to know Jesus if you don't know the Bible? You don't, full stop. Yes, you can - and should - read the Apostle's Creed, which summarizes what Christians have learned about Jesus, as approved by the descendants of his own apostles - who have evolved into our modern bishops.
But for us today - and even when the Apostle's Creed reached essentially its current form, 700 years after Jesus died - we must rely on the Bible to tell us who Jesus was. While the Church has traditions about Jesus not recorded in the Bible, even the Church itself doesn't consider these very reliable.
So we're stuck with the Bible to get to know Jesus - which is as it should be, scientifically (if you include history in the "sciences," writ large, which I do) because the New Testament of the Bible is the only extended primary source material we have about Jesus's life.
Before we drill into that, here's a question: Do you believe George Washington cut down a cherry tree?
If so, shame on your primary school history teachers, because it very likely didn't happen. The cherry tree myth was invented 7 years after George Washington's death - and almost 70 years after the alleged incident - by an early biographer, who didn't even include it until the book's fifth edition.
That doesn't mean it didn't happen - but if it had happened, it probably would have been mentioned in the writings of Washington or people who knew him. But the story was first told after everyone who could verify it was dead, by a biographer out to show Washington's success was due to his "Great Virtues."
Historians prefer not to use that kind of second-hand evidence (though, if all else is lacking, they'll grit their teeth and soldier on). They prefer to use primary sources - documents and diaries, art and artifacts, recordings and records that were directly created in the time of study, preferably by the people involved.
Put another way, if you want to know what George Washington thought, you need to look at what he actually said and did. Speculating about what he might have thought or did can be interesting, but unless that speculation can be tied back to actual documents about Washington ... you're just making it up.
In the same vein, students of the "historical Jesus" hunted for writings about Him by His contemporaries, and found only a handful: a few references in the historians Josephus and Tacitus written around AD 90 and AD 115, and just possibly some in the Talmud, collected around 200 from older oral traditions.
All these recount narratives that are brief and generally second- or third-hand. These primary sources let us know that Jesus existed. But if you want to know more about Jesus's life - whether you're a historian or a Christian or both - and you're looking for primary sources, the Bible is it.
We don't need to imagine that the Bible is an infallible fax from God in order to recognize we need to treat its words with utmost respect. If you wanted to learn what George Washington wrote in his diary, you wouldn't make a new diary entry up, now would you? The same is true of the Bible.
There are hundreds of manuscripts of the Old Testament and thousands of the New Testament, with many discrepancies; but this is where we start. I prefer the New Oxford Annotated Bible, others prefer the Interlinear; to help interpret them, I use histories like Ehrman's and Anglican and Catholic catechisms.
Jesus is God. Jesus lived as a human being. The Bible was written by human beings who were met and moved by Him, and was preserved by people who were following in His example of reading and sharing the Scriptures. We don't need to deify the Book; we need to look through it to the God behind it.
-the Centaur
Pictured: a primary source, in this case a 1st-century bust alleged to be Josephus, a historian born shortly after Jesus died, and who wrote about him while Jesus's contemporaries were still living. Whoa. Timing-wise, that'd be like ... like a picture of me in my 60's, if I had written a biography of JFK.
This week has been so bad I feel like I'm under spiritual attack. It was supposed to be a vacation, but both my cats got sick, I got sick myself, and I had to work in the middle of it. I feel like the protagonist of a Neil Gaiman story I read in M is For Magic where a black cat is protecting a home from supernatural assault.
But now both of my cats are coming home. Gabby, the gold guy above, comes home tonight after a serious asthma attack, and Loki is already home after a serious urinary tract blockage.
Here's hoping two cats and prayers put things back on track.
-the Centaur
"The secret is comprised in three words — Work, finish, publish." His well-known advice to the young William Crookes, who had asked him the secret of his success as a scientific investigator, as quoted in Michael Faraday (1874) by John Hall Gladstone, p. 123Well said. The middle part often seems the hardest for many people, in my experience: it's all too easy to work on something without finishing it, or to rush to publish something before it's really ready. The hard part is pushing through all three in the right order with the appropriate level of effort. -the Centaur Pictured: Michael Faraday, Photograph by Maull & Polyblank. Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY.