A wonderful lesson in unintended consequences.
The theme of the desirability or otherwise of forgetting unpleasant experiences is one I tackled in a flash piece, “Forget You”, which you can read here:
http://dailysciencefiction.com/science-fiction/virtual-reality/mike-reeves-mcmillan/forget-you
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/twilight-sleep-childbirth-1910s-feminists
Did you know that there are hundreds of full-text books on science in a wide range of fields available through the National Academies Press AT NO COST?
For my friends in science, there’s sure to be something on your topics of interest there. For my SF writer friends, consider how a booster of information from cutting edge, real-world scientists might impact your predictions about the future of this world and others. Items like GMO crops, human genome editing, and climate change might spark some seriously cool ideas. Even my fantasy writer friends might benefit from understanding the impact of climate on the evolution of species or behaviors from a world-building standpoint. I think that NAP has something for everyone, so check it out.
This ends my regularly scheduled PSA on science topics and trends. Thank you for reading!
More brain interface advancement.
This is a “when, not if” technology.
Originally shared by Singularity Hub
New Tech Makes Brain Implants Safer and Super Precise
Originally shared by Jennifer Ouellette
Benjamin Franklin wasn’t a natural talent. Here’s how he taught himself to write https://qz.com/914305
Community-driven, open-sourced network deployed to the whole city in six weeks.
Originally shared by Singularity Hub
The Cities of the Future Are Smart, Green, Connected Innovation Hubs http://bit.ly/2lHY7e6
I enjoyed the first volume of this. Proceeds to the Society of Women Engineers.
Originally shared by Mary Fan
BRAVE NEW GIRLS Cover Reveal and Story Line-Up!!
Today, I’m revealing the cover and story line-up for
BRAVE NEW GIRLS: STORIES OF GIRLS WHO SCIENCE AND SCHEME, coming August 2017!
This YA sci-fi anthology (edited by sci-fi authors Paige Daniels and Mary Fan) features
stories about girls in STEM (Science, …
Dangling modifiers always lose writers points with me when I’m reviewing, because they imply that the writers are not thinking through their sentences.
I hit one the other day along these lines: “As the only young lady on board, the captain had been very solicitous of her comfort.”
Originally shared by Laura Gibbs
When they are funny, they really ARE funny:
Oozing slowly across the dish, Kevin watched the egg yolk.
[don’t you want yolk to be a verb? ha ha]
Gasping for his last breath, the professor killed the cockroach.
Grooming each other, my professor and I saw the kittens.
Originally shared by Yonatan Zunger
It’s really nice to be able to share good news for once. A new study in JAMA Pediatrics studied the effect of same-sex marriage laws on teen suicide rates. They looked at 32 different US states which changed their laws at different times, as a way of disentangling this effect from other effects.
The net result? Legalizing same-sex marriage leads to a 7% overall drop in teen suicide attempts, and a 14% drop among LGBT teens.
It turns out that being publicly told that you’re an accepted member of society and not a pariah does make a difference in people’s lives, especially teenagers. Who woulda thunk?
But the upshot of this is: All of you who worked on this, in one way or another? You just saved some lives. Well done.
The article itself is available online: http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2604258
(NB: For clarity, that’s a 7% drop in the rate, not a seven percentage point drop drop. We should be so lucky as to have any one thing eliminate seven percentage points. As a baseline, a weighted 8.6% of all high school students, and 28.5% of LGBT high school students, attempted suicide in the year before same-sex marriage legalization. Suicide is the second most common cause of death among people aged 15-24 in the US.
For those who want technical notes: The paper seems to have done a very careful job on statistics, testing a wide variety of alternate hypotheses and ruling them out from the data. One test worth calling out: the two-year leading indicator (suicide rates two years prior to law changes) was not correlated to suicide rates, indicating that this was not triggered by general changes in the state which were also leading to this; the two-year trailing indicator (two years after), however, was correlated, with the same correlation as the immediate future, indicating a lasting effect rather than a one-off.)
Another good piece from standoutbooks on giving your writing more depth, weight, and significance.