mojoe

I really appreciate your kind words, and thank you for backing the hardcover anthology! Getting the stories out there is a lot of work, and comments like yours provide significant motivation.

Thanks! I haven't yet read "Asimov on Numbers", but I just bought a used copy, I appreciate the recommendation. And I don't have an email list yet specifically for this project, but if I get this book off the ground I'll definitely be sending an email to the list that you can join on the bottom of this page: http://compellingsciencefiction.com/. In any case, I'll post again on HN if anything comes of this.

This was well-articulated, and your example was good. I'm not vegan, but I dislike the vitriolic 'jokes' that many of them are subjected to -- voicing your beliefs is certainly an admirable trait to me.

I did a brief LinkedIn search, but I think that's the most promising avenue at this point, and I'm digging deeper.

Thanks, I hadn't considered chatting with a former HarperCollins employee, that's a good idea. I'm looking through my 2nd connections on LinkedIn now.

Thank you! I've been trying to find an appropriate person to contact over at Harper Collins, but don't have any contacts over there. I'll definitely try and go through their front office reception if I can't find a more direct contact, but they're a pretty massive organization.

The article talks about private, public, and commercial voices as if they're discrete things, but it seems more like a spectrum to me. For instance, my zine is ostensibly commercial (compellingsciencefiction.com) but I have specific goals about the kinds of stories I want to get people reading, which limits my audience pretty drastically. I think in most true commercial ventures businesses adapt their products to find a market (which makes money) rather than try to adapt the market to their product (which is harder and makes much less money). This is just one example of a point on the spectrum of private-to-commercial.

I host http://compellingsciencefiction.com statically from an S3 bucket. The thing scales remarkably well, never had a problem during spikes, and costs only a few cents per month.

You mention your son getting negative social reactions from people -- I don't know how old is is currently, but he may grow out of that in time. I personally started getting much more positive reactions from people in my mid to late 20s, after lots and lots of social practice.

I agree with all your statements above, though. I think evolution has left us with some social behaviors that can be very frustrating.

I was on a mountain ride here in Colorado a few years back when I got a little too exuberant -- I was going about 45 mph when I hit a corner that was sharper than I thought, and the tires slid out from under me. I tumbled for quite a way, and when I stopped I was missing a lot of skin and my shoulder was dislocated (tore through my labrum in the front). Fortunately a nice woman stopped and took me to the emergency room (her three year old daughter told me "I only ride my bike on flat ground" which I deserved). I got off lucky, only 3 months of physical therapy. I'm more careful these days.

I love the fact that these guys were so dedicated to their craft in the face of zero money and all the ridicule. I always enjoy seeing that kind of extreme motivation.

I lasted about halfway through the first season of Discovery before the nonsense was too much for me, but looks I'll be paying for CBS again!

Thank you!

Not op, but I'm a big fan of both authors. I enjoy Vinge more, but I wouldn't say his science is any more plausible than Liu Cixin's (with the exception of "A Deepness in the Sky"). I actually enjoyed "The Dark Forest" and "Death's End" more than the Three Body Problem. All three books have some fun, novel ideas. While the plot arc is not very traditional, it is complex and interesting -- lots of characters with vastly different motivations interacting in interesting ways. The main plot driver over all three books (that the universe is a dark forest) is highly plausible.

Those two are fantastic, and if you like Vernor Vinge check out "A Deepness in the Sky" -- I think it's his best work, and is much more plausible (centered around slower-than-light travel).

I have a few more recommendations in that vein here: http://compellingsciencefiction.com/blog/2016-12-18.html

it's always seemed to me that a likely endgame of automation is government bureaucracy continuing to make more and more busywork jobs in order to keep people doing something for their income. I think it's a more likely outcome (although distasteful to me, personally) than universal basic income, given historical political trends.

This is all assuming we'll reach a level of automation where the majority of humans don't actually have to work to produce goods.

I use Jinja2 to template all my static sites -- it helps me host compellingsciencefiction.com straight from AWS S3 very, very cheaply.

Bringing back metals to earth is fantastic, but the real prize is manufacturing in space itself -- less hauling of goods at high prices out of our huge gravity well.

Out of the 100 or so data scientists in my division, I know of less than 5 people who still occasionally use SAS. It's all either (decreasingly) R or (increasingly) Python.

edit: scala with spark is increasing in use as well.

R is good for one-off analysis problems, but is really bad for large distributed production systems. My team moved a large internal analysis application from R to Python because Python works well for both statisticians and software engineers.

Right now the algorithm basically looks at the most upvoted items on HN in the last 24 hours, and then searches those articles for certain STEM related keywords. Please feel free to reply to any of the emails with suggestions/questions, I'd like to continue refining this project!

I believe this concept was where the term "meme" came from (coined by Richard Dawkins in "The Selfish Gene" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene)

The Enchiridion by Epictetus (and basically every other book on stoic philosophy).

http://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/epicench.html

My own opinion is that a lot of mental toughness can be developed simply by realizing what you can control and what you can't. This is known in stoic philosophy as the "dichotomy of control", and is put this way in the Enchiridion:

“Some things are within our power, while others are not. Within our power are opinion, motivation, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever is of our own doing; not within our power are our body, our property, reputation, office, and, in a word, whatever is not of our own doing.”

The author mentions that ebikes in China run around $500. Has anyone here tried importing one of those models?

I wonder how much temporal awareness a greenland shark has. Does it have any inkling of how long it has lived? Apparently some sharks can be trained: http://www.aquariumofpacific.org/blogs/comments/target_train...

I watched the video and read some background, basically my understanding is that the entire series of events went like this, at a high level:

The guy in the hotel room had been showing someone his pellet gun. Someone saw this through the hotel room window, thinking it was a real gun, and called the cops.

The cops arrived, expecting someone armed and dangerous. They seem really amped up on adrenaline.

A woman and the man come out of the hotel room, and the cop with the assault rifle screams at them to get down on the ground. They comply, but seem scared and confused. The cop asks if they are drunk, which they deny. He asks if they'll be able to understand all his commands, and they say yes. He keeps screaming at them and cutting them off when they try to talk.

The woman follows instructions and is successfully cuffed and taken away. The man tries to comply, but is sobbing and appears drunk. The cop gives him some (what seemed to me) not entirely clear instructions, and then tells the man to crawl toward him. After about 5 feet the man seems to lose his balance and try to pull up his pants, at which point the cop repeatly shoots him.

At the end the two cops try to get in to the hotel room, but the key cards they are given don't work. The second cop drops a key card after trying it a handful of times, picks it up, and keeps trying, seemingly extremely agitated. The video then cuts out.

I think you're on to something. Probably spark some kind of mania.

Nice, thanks! Interestingly, I could only see the grid pattern on Bikini and Enyu.

Consciously avoiding FOMO is something I also try to do. Takes a certain amount of mental discipline, but reduces stress significantly (for me, at least).