Welcome to November. And that means it’s time to crunch some numbers.
For Ballistics By The Inch, we had a total of 293,427 hits in October. That beats September by about 12,000 hits, and puts us within about ten thousand of our all-time-high month when the site first launched – that amounts to about one day’s hits. The total overall hits is now 3,818,460 – we should break four million in about three weeks, about the time of our second anniversary. Wow. Thanks everyone!
And a personal note: I’ve mentioned in passing that sometime in the very near future I will sign the final contract for the commercial publication of Communion of Dreams, with the book to be rolling off the presses in just a few short months. When I sign that contract, we’ll need to pull all the downloadable content from my homepage – but no worry, because the book will be available in electronic formats for different readers at a very reasonable price, as well as being available in both hardcover and paperback versions. Word of this has helped prompt a surge in downloads in the last month, and October’s totals were double that for September – overall, some 1,200 downloads of the complete novel. A nice affirmation, and puts the total downloads of the book at something approaching 29,000. Thanks, everyone – I hope you decide to get the updated version and/or a hardcopy of the book when it comes out soon!
So, happy November!
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to the BBTI blog.)
Filed under: Astronomy, Bad Astronomy, Fermi's Paradox, Phil Plait, Predictions, Publishing, Science, Science Fiction, Seth Shostak, SETI, Space
The Fermi paradox is at the heart of Communion of Dreams – given what we know, where are the extra-terrestrials?
What do I mean “given what we know”? Well, the Drake equation has been a staple of science fiction (and at least part of the justification for SETI) for decades. Filling in the factors in the equation has always necessitated a lot of guesswork – the Wiki entry goes into that fairly well – but now we have more solid information on at least one of the more important components of the equation: how many terrestrial (Earth-like) planets are there in our galaxy?
Phil Plait has a good rundown on this, coming at the number from two directions, using the latest astronomical observations:
How many habitable planets are there in the galaxy?
By now you may have heard the report that as many as 1/4 of all the sun-like stars in the Milky Way may have Earth-like worlds. Briefly, astronomers studied 166 stars within 80 light years of Earth, and did a survey of the planets they found orbiting them. What they found is that about 1.5% of the stars have Jupiter-mass planets, 6% have Neptune-mass ones, and about 12% have planets from 3 – 10 times the Earth’s mass. This sample isn’t complete, and they cannot detect planets smaller than 3 times the Earth’s mass. But using some statistics, they can estimate from the trend that as many as 25% of sun-like stars have earth-mass planets orbiting them!
And what does that mean? Here’s the closing calculation from Plait:
2 x 1013 / 8000 = 2,500,000,000 planets
Oh my. Yeah, let that sink in for a second. That’s 2.5 billion planets that are potentially habitable!
How many of them would host indigenous life? How many of *those* would develop intelligent, technological civilization? There’s a nice interactive on the PBS site which allows you to play with this. Using that 2.5 billion number, but assuming that only half the planets which could support life will actually develop it, and that only 1% of those will develop intelligent life, and that only 10% of those intelligent lifeforms will develop technological civilizations capable of interstellar communication . . . you wind up with 125,000 such civilizations. You then have to make some assumptions about how long such a civilization would last, and what the likelihood would be that they would be around now (at the same time we are), but still . . .
I’ve complained previously that I worry that solid evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence will be discovered before Communion of Dreams makes it into print. That window is now closing. But you know, I really wouldn’t complain too much now if such evidence beat me to press.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Astronomy, Bad Astronomy, NASA, Phil Plait, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Space, tech
One of the main technological features of the setting of Communion of Dreams is the Advanced Survey Array – an artificial satellite in orbit around Titan, which is searching for likely planets to colonize in nearby star systems – planets which would be able to sustain Terran life. When I started writing CoD, finding such planets was still very much beyond our current tech – exoplanets of any sort were still just being inferred from other data.
But we’ve come a long way in the last decade. From Phil Plait’s latest blog post on Exoplanets:
Direct imaging of exoplanets is perhaps the newest field in all of astronomy. Ten years ago it didn’t exist, and was something of a dream. Now we have images of seven tiny dots, seven blips of light indicating the presence of mighty planets.
And with the advent of spectroscopy, we’ll learn even more: how hot they are, and what they have in their atmospheres. Eventually, with new technology, new telescopes on space, we’ll be able to split their light ever finer, and who knows? Maybe, one day not too long from now, we’ll see the tell-tale sign of molecular oxygen… the only way we know of to have molecular oxygen in an atmosphere over long periods of time is through biological activity. If we ever see it… that, my friends, will be quite a day indeed.
As I have noted previously, this is one of the dangers in writing near-term SF: that actual technological developments can outstrip what the writer envisions all too easily. We’re still not to the tech of my novel, but we’re further along than I would have guessed. Good thing that the book will soon be in print . . .
Jim Downey
Gotta love the geeky stuff. What happens when you drop water onto a superhydrophobic carbon nanotube? This:
The header reference starts about 2:25.
I love this sort of stuff. And it seems really timely to come across it when I am wrapping up work on the minor revisions of Communion of Dreams, since in there I have descriptions of superfluid materials which behave in non-intuitive ways. Kinda fun!
Jim Downey
Filed under: Predictions, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Writing stuff
I noted earlier that I hadn’t heard from the publisher about when Communion of Dreams would be out.
That has changed.
Just a bit ago I got an email with information about moving forward with publication. I’m going to wait to coordinate a formal announcement with the publisher, but the good news is that we’re looking at a very short time horizon before it will be out. I have a couple of weeks to get the manuscript tweaked (some very minor changes were requested), and we’re now jumping into cover design and whatnot.
Yay!
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Failure, Health, Humor, J. K. Rowling, Publishing, Science Fiction
The last couple of days have been a bit busy, a bit rough (some residual annoying pain from the pneumonia getting in the way), so apologies for the light posting.
I did just put up a post about the infinity symbol video at Sixty Symbols. But I am rethinking whether I want to continue the project of writing about each of their videos – we’ll see.
No news to share on the book fronts. Neither word from the publisher about when they’re going to print Communion of Dreams, nor any positive responses from agents about Her Final Year. Feel like I am in something of a holding pattern, and it’s frustrating.
As I have listened to the news of the different Nobel Prize announcements, I did have an odd thought: what if someday they do indeed award the Prize for Literature to J.K. Rowling? If so, I bet in the web searches that news reporters would do, my spectacular (but fun) failure to campaign for that would probably pop up. That’d be amusing. Good thing I can laugh at myself.
And so it goes. I think I’ll give the dog a bath.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Astronomy, Music, Science, Science Fiction, Sixty Symbols, YouTube
“Now it’s complete because it’s ended here.”
That’s from Dune, of course. The context is that it sums up the practical attitude of the Fremen – no dithering, no misgivings, just figuratively take a knife and cut the thing off, so you have a conclusion.
But that is also the attitude of scientists, when it comes to 
, at least according to the Sixty Symbols video about infinity.
It’s a good vid, and I recommend it. No, nothing terribly impressive about the images or production values. But it has a clarity that conveys how scientists think: they may be theoretical, but they’re also practical. They don’t like the concept of infinity, at least not when it is applied to understanding the physical universe. They’d rather leave that to the mathematicians. As a number of the scientists say, when infinity shows up in one of their equations/models, then there’s something wrong with the equation/model.
Jim Downey
Happy October, everyone!
And since it is the start of the month, it’s time to talk numbers.
For Ballistics By The Inch, last month we had 281,920 hits – putting us about 20,000 hits under our all time high of December 2008, when we first launched the site and word spread. That’s not much – at current hit rates, it’s about 2.5 days or one good link at a big gun forum. Whew. And the overall total of hits we’ve seen is 3,525,033 – at this rate, we’ll break 4 million by our second anniversary.
For Communion of Dreams, last month 515 people downloaded the full original novel, 56 people downloaded the revised version, and there were over 160 downloads of at least one of the MP3 files. That puts total actual downloads over 27,000, with something like another 3,000 downloads of at least one of the MP3 files.
Thanks everyone for helping to share the info about both sites!
Jim Downey
(Cross posted on the BBTI blog.)
Filed under: Art, Blade Runner, movies, Predictions, Science Fiction, Society, tech
I’ll often re-watch a favorite movie. But seldom will I do so in the span of a couple of days.
However, this weekend I watched something which was so visually compelling, and which had me pondering a number of different issues, that I held onto the NetFlix envelop for an extra day so that I could watch the movie again after I had time to digest the first viewing of it. That movie is Renaissance.
OK, there are a lot of things to like about this movie. But first, let me say a couple of things about its weaknesses. The plot has minor problems. The dialog is uneven in places. Some of the characters are cartoonish.
Yet overall the movie is a success. As noted, most of the visuals are incredibly compelling – which is quite a nice accomplishment in using black & white (and grey tone) animation. When I re-watched the movie last night, I found myself pausing it just to take in some scenes more completely, and a bunch of the movie I watched at half-speed, just so I could appreciate how the artists did what they did.
I was also intrigued to see the vision of the near-term future the movie is based on. It’s set in 2054, just two years later than my novel Communion of Dreams is set. And a lot of the tech they foresee is the same sort of thing I do, at least that’s implied by what shows up on the screen. I found myself wanting to know a *lot* more about that world and how things worked – a good sign, and part of the reason I wanted to think about the movie for a couple of days before watching it again.
Another good thing about Renaissance are the references it makes to other highly regarded science fiction stories, as well as some of the less well-known ‘arthouse’ movies. But it doesn’t beat you over the head with those, or drop them in gratuitously – they serve a purpose, and are part of the overall look and story of the movie.
If you like good science fiction, if you like film noir, if you like animation not intended for children, then track down and watch Renaissance.
Jim Downey
“Christ, did you see the size of that thing?”
“Keep focused on the task. One mistake and you’ll regret it for weeks.” I paused, looked up. “If you’re lucky.”
* * * * * * *
“It’s getting worse,” I said, taking a drink and then setting down the glass. “A lot worse.”
“How do you mean?”
“The toxin is getting more intense. You have less time to seek treatment.”
“Ugh.”
“Yeah, but that’s not the fun part. The fun part is that it has also become more virulent.” I took another drink. “Grows faster, larger. I’ve seen it as tall as a man recently. With leaves of concentrated evil that’d cripple you, given half a chance.”
She shuddered. Her face had gone pale.
“And it is penetrating even our supposedly secure perimeter, where I thought we had eradicated it.” I gave a laugh. “What a joke.”
“What can we do? Poison?”
“Nah, even the strongest stuff will only knock it back for a while, and at the cost of everything else in the vicinity. And the authorities would look down on the use of nukes.” I looked at her, my gaze hard. “Only one thing you can do – send someone in to rip it out by the roots.”
She said nothing, just looked at me.
“That means me, getting in there in the thick of it.” I slung back the rest of my drink. “It’s what I do.”
* * * * * * *
The bush towering above me shook, threatened to rain the late season leaves down on my head. I eyed it carefully.
This was going to require just the right kind of motion.
Grasping the running tap root, a mass as big as a man’s thumb, I pulled while standing up and stepping back. It resisted being torn free, grasping all the other ground vines in a desperate attempt to survive. My heart pounded with the effort, and from the frightening prospect of the huge leaves just inches from my face. But then, all of a sudden, it pulled loose.
I let out my breath. Carefully I coiled up the huge poison ivy plant and shoved it into the trash bag.
Because that’s what I do. I’m a Poison Ivy Hunter.
Jim Downey
(With apologies to Harry Harrison. And yes, poison ivy is getting both more toxic and more virulent.)
Communion Of Dreams 