Viewing profile — rznicolet

It's even funnier that, at least around here, one of the biggest crime problems is people stealing copper wiring... from streetlights...

Small counterpoint to your analogy, as someone who studied astrophysics: I actually did have a requirement to understand general relativity! Deriving all of it independently from s…

In which I expound on a very petty complaint about fictional wormholes.

This reminds me very much of Buffer Time from Star Trek: Lower Decks, but applies pretty well to a lot of life. No slack = no margin for error or the unexpected...

I reread the famed short story recently, and had some thoughts about how we could try to avoid the bad ending in real life.

And, with publishers, you can get both monopoly _and_ monopsony problems. The latter is, I believe, one reason the attempt to consolidate from Big Five to Big Four failed -- I'm fo…

Yeah... for new stuff, I follow authors I already like on social media and see what they recommend from other folks (and why). I've had a miss or two, but that's generally a good s…

As somebody whose first book came out last month from a (very) small indie press... yeah. In trad publishing, once you've got an agent (not an insignificant step), you only have a …

Blood of the Old Kings, by Sung-Il Kim (translated by Anton Hur). Absolutely fabulous fantasy novel -- it's an about folks in an empire literally powered by the dead, and the folks…

You joke, but, alas, there is a _real_ company kinda trying to do this. Reflect Orbital[1] wants to set up space mirrors, so you can have daytime at night for your solar panels! (V…

Yes... but that ocean has a lot of trash and algal blooms to work around. If you're not careful, you end up the sea turtle with a stomach full of plastic. That issue of varying qua…

Watch the source - Avi Loeb has a poor reputation among solar system astronomers _and_ scientists who work on SETI and exobiology, due to poorly supported claims of alien (meaning …

Writing SFF novels! I need to put it up on the ol' blog-thing, but I've signed a contract with a small press for a debut novel, which is highly exciting. That one's urban fantasy f…

The 100 richest people are (by design) going to be very unrepresentative of the whole, depending on how "rich" is defined. How does the balance between inheritance and other source…

Galatea is an old one I enjoyed, essentially as a character piece: https://textadventures.co.uk/games/view/emrhyy7pp0c8bjkjeuhs... I'm not sold on generative AI for this purpose --…

Everything coming in speeds up when it falls to earth. Tiny stuff burns up completely in the upper atmosphere, where the pressure is low, because they have low surface area per mas…

Aside from bog-standard machine learning for work purposes -- novels! (Because I apparently can't restrict myself to just one.) You can see some of my world-noodling about aliens t…

I wonder how this is going to play out. At a company I previously worked for, we ended up not rolling out personalized on-site search because while the results were better in theor…