There may be a flaw in all magic, but there aren’t many flaws in this book. Characters, pacing, worldbuilding and copy editing are all excellent, and it’s pretty close to my own Gryphon Clerks books in its setup. If you enjoy those, you may well enjoy this.
“It is this tradition which has very few female contributions. More importantly, it seems to me that artificially inflating the importance of the few female authors that might have existed would falsify the historical record. After all, the whole point of the feminist critique is that female voices were suppressed. This suppression is important to talk about, but you can’t rely on the suppressed voices in order to do so.”
I…
The…
Ehhh.
Read the whole article. It does have some interesting, and difficult-to-resolve, points about academic freedom, but especially in light of the quoted statement I find it hard to avoid the conclusion that the professor just doesn’t get it.
Originally shared by Laura Gibbs
When I read articles like this, it makes me very glad that I have opted instead for building courses in which the students choose the reading, and it is my job to find a truly wide variety of readings that I can make available to them. The students then choose, and the students learn from their own choices as well as from seeing the choices made by the students with whom they are interacting through their blogs and projects, etc. This top-down approach (by professor and/or by committee) does not appeal to me at all. As for the attitude of the professor, every time I have challenged myself to improve my range of reading choices by going out and looking for more, I have often surprised myself by the great things I found by looking. It sounds to me like he is not looking very hard…
Ignore the men and women behind the curtain!
Originally shared by Singularity Hub
The Hidden Human Workforce Powering Machine Intelligence http://suhub.co/2oLiry9
Want a mechanism to get that neurological interface into your character’s brain in the first place?
Here you go.
Originally shared by Neuroscience News
Nanotubes Go With the Flow to Penetrate Brain Tissue
Rice University researchers have invented a device that uses fast-moving fluids to insert flexible, conductive carbon nanotube fibers into the brain, where they can help record the actions of neurons.
The research is in Nano Letters. (full open access)
I have wondered why, if agriculture was so hard compared with hunting and gathering, so many people made the transition.
Turns out it only works that way if you ignore the kind of work that, in industrial societies like those of the (male) theorists who proposed this, is done by unpaid women. (It was generally done by women in the hunter-gatherer societies, too, I suspect.)
The article mentions the “Man the Hunter” conference. I recently listened to an episode of the excellent food podcast Gastropod in which several female anthropologists pointed out that women also hunted in a number of societies, and that in general the conference ignored or diminished the role of women in making both hunter-gathering and agriculture work.
Originally shared by Winchell Chung
TL;DR: It was not a mistake if you take the amount of food preparation work in to account.
Not as bad as has been widely reported (which I did kind of suspect).
Still not necessarily great.
Now that Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores and Compelling Science Fiction are SFWA-qualifying markets, I believe (if I’ve interpreted the rules correctly) that I’m within one story sale of being eligible to be an Active Member, and have qualified to be an Associate Member. I’ve sold four stories to qualifying markets (two to Cosmic Roots, one to Compelling, and one to Daily Science Fiction), and the minimum for full membership is three sales, but I haven’t quite reached the 10,000-word total that’s also required; I’m at 8200.
I’m not actually going to join, since most of the member benefits are more applicable to Americans, and it’s not worth $90 or $100 to me to get a vote in the Nebulas. But it’s a yardstick of professional progress.
I’m not “emerging” enough to enter this, but you might be.
https://mastersreview.com/short-story-award-for-new-writers/
Originally shared by Irina T.
“The Victorian age is renowned for the wealth of inventions that helped create the modern era such as the telephone, the typewriter, the bicycle, the electric light, the motor-car, moving pictures, the gramophone and the wireless. The inventor who most captured the public imagination was the American Thomas Edison, who became known as the ‘Wizard of Menlo Park’, after his factory in New Jersey.
[…]
This in turn inspired many writers. Magazines became filled with examples of lone, often eccentric inventors coming up with new, often useless, ideas. For instance amongst the inventions in Van Wagener’s Ways (1898) by W L Alden is a way to make cats fly so they can catch birds more easily, or the perfect balloon which however doesn’t descend. One of the more ingenious inventions was tantamount to the first cyborg in ‘The Ablest Man in the World’ (1879) by Edward Page Mitchell (1852-1927) where an inventor adapts the famous analytical engine invented by Charles Babbage to fit inside a man’s head and creates a genius. In 1890 the first convicted murderer was executed by the electric chair. In ‘The Los Amigos Fiasco’ (1892) Arthur Conan Doyle improved the electric chair rather too much so that the victim is supercharged with electricity and seems to have become immortal.”
Excerpted from the linked article
Inventing the future by Mike Ashley/Published 15 May 2014
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/inventing-the-future
I did not know this.
Originally shared by Cyndi S. Jameson
A little textile history