"Out Of Ambit": Diane Duane's weblog

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Sunday, July 31, 2005

Glasgow Worldcon: How We Have No Schedule
...This would be because, at the last Glasgow Worldcon, we were the ToastMr. & Mrs., and had more than enough to do.

This time we're chilling out. This time we have no signings, no panels, no structure. This time we get to go see other people's programming. Astonishing!

If you're going to be in Glasgow next weekend and you want to see either Peter or me for something -- to chat, get a book signed, whatever -- here's how to do it.

(a) Leave a message of intent in the comments to this message.

(b) Email me at diane.duane@gmail.com. (That address will work for both of us.)

(c) According to the unwritten rules of British conventions ("If it's not on program, it's in the bar..."), check the bar in the Moat House from time to time. As an alternative, leave a message with the hotel desk in the Moat House: that's our hotel. If you leave a book or whatever with the desk to be signed, we'll take care of it and leave it there for you to pick up.

We will be in Glasgow only from Saturday afternoon to Tuesday morning, because we suddenly have a new kitten (Pip is his name: I haven't blogged about him yet) and we don't want to leave him in the kennel for too long.

Everybody...have a super time next weekend, if we don't see you.

posted by Diane: 7/31/2005 10:56:00 PM | link to this post

Saturday, July 30, 2005

A tenth planet...!
Woo woo!

The planet, which hasn't been officially named yet, was found by Brown and colleagues using the Samuel Oschin Telescope at Palomar Observatory near San Diego. It is currently about 97 times farther from the sun than Earth, or 97 Astronomical Units (AU). For comparison, Pluto is 40 AU from the sun.

posted by Diane: 7/30/2005 09:45:00 AM | link to this post

Friday, July 29, 2005

NASA? Not NORAD?

...(the film features one pyrotechnic blast so massive it could be seen from space, forcing the filmmakers to contact NASA before conducting the stunt).

So maybe the "making of..." feature about this film will be cool to see. (As opposed to the film itself, which doesn't seem to be getting very good reviews...)
posted by Diane: 7/29/2005 12:37:00 PM | link to this post

Monday, July 25, 2005

All right, now my brain hurts
Get this:

"Fred Thompson is advising Supreme Court nominee John Roberts but plans to perform as usual on 'Law & Order.'"

As a result, TV viewers may witness a surreal blurring of fact and fiction this fall, with newscasts showing Thompson at real-life confirmation hearings, followed in prime time by Thompson's make-believe D.A. wielding a firm hand over prosecutors and masterminding criminal cases.

Not so much reality TV, as surreality TV...
posted by Diane: 7/25/2005 10:44:00 AM | link to this post

Sunday, July 24, 2005

Meanwhile: Yes, I laughed
There has been much ruckus in the Potter "shipping" communities regarding an interview J.K. Rowling did in the wake of the launch of the sixth HP book. J.K. apparently went on the record -- not unkindly, as I read it -- as stating that a given pairing of characters was canonical and another one wasn't. Then there befell much weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth on one side of the situation, and some unseemly gloating on the other side.

There have been many, many responses to all this -- see fandom_wank for details -- but one of the funnier ones is here:

"(JKR:) Have you ever wondered what might be accomplished by someone with eighty billion dollars and ready access to Google Maps?"

(snort)

posted by Diane: 7/24/2005 06:01:00 PM | link to this post

First of all, apologies to the chat crowd
...at YW.Net's discussion forum, for not being there last night. The house was overwhelmed by one technical problem after another, and I just could not get into the chat area for love or money. Additionally, our long-suffering forum admin, Lee, was in France for the weekend and in no position to help.

I'll be around at the usual time today, instead (3 PM EDT, 8 PM BST); also, we'll reschedule an additional chat for next Saturday. Apologies again.
posted by Diane: 7/24/2005 05:57:00 PM | link to this post

Tuesday, July 19, 2005

Interesting review of I-bet-you-can-guess-what...
...from a fifteen-year-old in Houston.

Rowling's ability to spin complex plots and lay careful clues, to keep readers guessing and elicit "Ohh!" sounds at all the right moments, is the envy of many mystery writers. While this talent has not failed her in Half-Blood Prince, it seems to be on the blink. Trails are set, to simply die out. Answers spring from nowhere. There are questions where there should be answers, answers where there should be questions, and awkward edits where there might once have been clues.

There's more, equally interesting. I wish some people who reviewed my stuff were as clear. (Or -- ahem -- as familiar with the material. You wouldn't believe some of the howlers I've seen in descriptions of merely factual material: you'd think the reviewer had read the alternate-universe version of a given book.)

...And no, I can't tell you what I thought of HP6, because I haven't read it, and won't be doing so. A brief version of the reasons is in here, for those of you not already familiar with them.

(Thanks for the link, Jerry!)
posted by Diane: 7/19/2005 10:32:00 AM | link to this post

Sunday, July 17, 2005

Trinary!!
Now this is cool. (Or, as regards the planet, hot...)
Polish astrophysicist Maciej Konacki has made a revolutionary discovery he believes could send modern astronomy spinning in a new direction -- the first ever planet with three suns....

Konacki's unique planet, which is similar to the gaseous Jupiter, lies in a constellation of three stars identified as HD188753, some 149 light years from Earth.

The largest of the three suns dwarfs ours. The two smaller stars orbit it once every 26 years and each other once every 156 days.

Konacki's planet orbits the largest of the three suns with astonishing speed -- once every 3.3 days -- meaning its year is incredibly brief.

Temperatures on the planet's surface reach 1,000 degrees Celsius.

Wow...

The CNN version of this story adds an interesting detail:

Caltech astronomer Maciej Konacki, who wrote the research article, refers to the new type of planets as "Tatooine planets," because of the similarity to Luke Skywalker's view of his home planet by the same name, with its multiple suns, in the original "Star Wars" film."

Heh heh.

(JPL's more detailed article also has animations of the system.)

posted by Diane: 7/17/2005 01:31:00 PM | link to this post

Thursday, July 14, 2005

Hmm. Second time unlucky...?
I don't often veer into the political mode in here. But this, at the bottom of a Seattle Times article this morning, caught my eye:

The leaking of Plame's identity recalls an incident from the 1992 presidential campaign, in which Rove was fired from the elder Bush's re-election team because of suspicions that he had leaked information to columnist Robert Novak -- the same columnist who first reported Plame's CIA role in 2003, citing anonymous administration sources.

At the time, Bush's campaign was in trouble, and there was concern he might not even win his home state of Texas. The Novak column described a Dallas meeting in which the campaign's state manager, Robert Mosbacher, was stripped of his authority, because the Texas effort was viewed as a bust.

Mosbacher complained, expressing his suspicion that Rove was the leaker. Rove denied the charge, but he was fired nevertheless.

Hmm...

posted by Diane: 7/14/2005 10:21:00 AM | link to this post

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

Sunny weatherl
We've already had several days of truly gorgeous weather -- temperatures in the 80's Fahrenheit, not too humid, blazing sun -- and at least a couple more are expected. For Ireland, this is most welcome: too often summer here is mostly gray and in the 60's. ...Down at the pub, I heard one of the neighbors saying, "If this is global warming, bring it on! Let's all go out and run our cars!"

Uh, yeah. Well, it seems some researchers estimated what the sea levels would be in two hundred years if global warming went unchecked, and then consulted Space Shuttle-based topographic data and generated a map of what Ireland would look like at that point.

Hmm. I always wanted to live in Earthsea... (But somehow I have trouble imagining Athlone as the location of Roke.)

(The research was reported in the July 28th edition of the tabloid Irish Daily Star as being part of a documentary done for the UKTv History cable/satellite network; but I can't find an online link to the show itself, or the article in the paper. Apparently the Star doesn't archive, and the UKTv site is kind of hard to dig things out of...)

posted by Diane: 7/12/2005 11:59:00 AM | link to this post

Monday, July 11, 2005

07/07
Some reactions... but not from the locals. And then the locals arrive and start taking the mick, remixing the banner (see Boing Boing for some of the art) and generally snorting in derision.

And here are some more reactions, altogether more representative of the local turn of mind, as far as I can tell.

Not to discount in any way the genuineness of the tragedy. I have all too clear a sense of what the "recovery site" down in that deep tunnel looks like. Additionally, one of our best friends passed through Kings Cross only twenty minutes before the bombs went off... " -- and I'm usually half an hour later," she told us. We still shiver at the thought of the near-miss.

...But there's still something bracing about the general scornful astringency of many Londoners' responses. They have been living at one Ground Zero or another for quite a long time...and the response to this kind of threat is now fairly well-conditioned.

"Tea, dammit!"

posted by Diane: 7/11/2005 03:28:00 PM | link to this post

Thanks, folks...
...to those of you who left helpful solutions to the WizCast template problem in comments. I tried the resetting of the Blogger display options first, and that seems to have cleared up the problem... but please check it in your browsers, if you would, to make sure. In particular, I know too little about Safari, and less about Konqueror. My bad.
posted by Diane: 7/11/2005 10:01:00 AM | link to this post

Sunday, July 10, 2005

Firefox weirdness over at "WizCast"
I'm using an "adopted" template for the WizCast page, and for some reason or another I'm seeing a big, long gap between the first post and the subsequent ones in Firefox. (Not in Netscape, though, and not in IE6.) It occurs to me that something may be wrong with the CSS, or the Blogger tags. My apologies to other Firefox users who're seeing this. (Assuming that you are...) I'm trying to fix it (along with six million other things), but it may take a while to sort out...
posted by Diane: 7/10/2005 02:57:00 PM | link to this post

Saturday, July 09, 2005

This is interesting...
A really long and meaty discussion of legal issues pertaning to "derived works" (i.e., fanfic, etc). Many thanks to executrix for posting it.
posted by Diane: 7/09/2005 11:36:00 AM | link to this post

Okay, the first podcast is up
It's here:

http://wizcast.youngwizards.net/wizcast.rss

The next one -- the reading of "Uptown Local" -- will go up sometime today: I'm having some audio issues (like learning how not to bounce around and make unnecessary mike noise when I read...).
posted by Diane: 7/09/2005 11:34:00 AM | link to this post

Friday, July 08, 2005

Test podcast coming shortly
I'm testing out the recording equipment at the moment. By way of introduction, I'll post a podcast today or tomorrow (assuming I can get the editing software to work right...). The podcast will contain the afterword to the twentieth-anniversary edition of So You Want to Be a Wizard, and the accompanying YW short story, "Uptown Local". The whole shebang should run forty minutes or so.
posted by Diane: 7/08/2005 12:34:00 PM | link to this post

Wednesday, July 06, 2005

Let's see how this goes

Something new at YoungWizards.net: Podcasting!

In each podcast, DD will answer questions from readers and fans, talk generally about the series, and -- starting in mid-August -- will read material from the new YW novel presently in progress, A Wizard of Mars. This material will not appear "in print" on either of the Young Wizards websites until late in 2005, well after the October release of Wizards at War.

(And yes, I know the Apple has no bite. The story's here.)

posted by Diane: 7/06/2005 08:06:00 PM | link to this post

And one other thing...

Wizardry powers Blogger. But you knew that!