Archives for August 2009

I’ve blogged before about how text to speech software is the greatest new tool for writers since the invention of the word processor. This software makes it vastly easier to catch typos, and you can sit back and close your eyes and listen to your story being read aloud, which greatly aids in polishing. But nobody I talk to seems to know about or use it, even people who have Macs, which have text to speech capability built right in. So I’m going to show you how to use it. It’s really easy. Give it a try. Seriously.

First click on the Apple icon and select “System Preferences”:

And that’s all there is to it.

So I was just listening to episode 213 of Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe, and one of the hosts, Dr. Steven Novella, starts talking about caffeine. Wow, I had figured that caffeine probably wasn’t great for you, but I didn’t realize it was also so useless (apparently). I think some of my friends really ought to hear this (you know who you are):

What caffeine does is it binds to the receptor for a neurotransmitter called adenocine, and it is an antagonist, that means it binds and blocks a receptor that normally has a calming or inhibitory effect, so therefore it has a stimulatory effect. What happens though is that by blocking these receptors your body just makes more of them. That’s called “upregulation.” So your body will upregulate the adenocine receptors to compensate for the fact that caffeine is blocking some of them, and that then reestablishes the previous equilibrium. Then with the caffeine it just puts you into the normal range. If you upregulate those receptors and then you take away the caffeine, well then of course you’re going to have too much inhibition, that’s when you’ll be sleepy and have trouble thinking, and you will “crash,” and then you need to dose yourself with caffeine just to get yourself back up to normal. Even after a few weeks of using caffeine, all you’re really accomplishing from that point forward is using it just to put yourself into a normal state, so you’re not really getting much of a boost out of it, you’re just crashing when you’re not using it, so it’s actually not that advantageous as a long term strategy. [Edited for space]

A quick anecdote related to the current health care debate: When my friend Adam came to the US from the UK, his dad instructed him, “If you start feeling seriously ill, have someone drive you to the airport and buy a ticket on the next plane home. I don’t care how much it costs. Under no circumstances allow yourself to be admitted to an American hospital.”

The Geeks Are Sexy blog has an article titled Top 5 Places to Get Free Science Fiction Online, which lists a bunch of recommended stories, including my story “Save Me Plz.”

One of the other articles on Geeks Are Sexy brought to my attention the following music video, “Do You Wanna Date My Avatar?,” featuring Felicia Day and the cast of her independent webshow The Guild, about online gamers. Apparently this video is #2 on YouTube, and Joss Whedon has put out a call to all geeks to watch it, in order to bump it up to #1 and depose Taylor Swift.

For H. Paul Jeffers’ “Adventure of the Mummy’s Curse”:

“Death will slay with his wings whoever disturbs the peace of the pharaoh.” This inscription was supposedly found carved on a stone tablet by British explorers Howard Carter and George Herbert when they opened the tomb of the Egyptian king Tutankhamun. It’s said that when the men entered the tomb, all the lights in Cairo went out and Herbert’s three-legged dog dropped dead. Herbert himself soon followed, felled by a mosquito bite. Carter’s pet canary was also killed, in a freak cobra accident, and before long two dozen members of the expedition had died under mysterious circumstances, victims of the mummy’s curse. Or that’s the story anyway. Numerous explanations have been advanced to explain the misfortune that befell the expedition. In 1986 Dr. Caroline Stenger-Phillip proposed the intriguing notion that the explorers had been sickened by exposure to mold and bacteria that had been preserved in the hermetically sealed tomb. However, a 2002 statistical analysis in the British Medical Journal concluded that members of the expedition had not in fact died significantly faster than the general population. The “curse” was a media myth, albeit one that’s inspired a lot of great entertainment, including our next tale.

For Dominic Green’s “Adventure of the Lost World”:

When Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty toppled to their deaths from Reichenbach Falls, the reading public was outraged. People loved Sherlock Holmes, and just didn’t want to accept that he was dead. People have had much the same feeling about dinosaurs, ever since the first dinosaur fossils were widely exhibited in the early nineteenth century. Dinosaurs were just so great, so awe-inspiring, so fun, that people didn’t want to believe that the dinosaurs were all dead, and novelists fed this hunger. Maybe there were dinosaurs in South America. Maybe at the North Pole. Arthur Conan Doyle, author of Sherlock Holmes, wrote one of the best-known of these dinosaur romps, called The Lost World. As exploration foreclosed these possibilities, dino-loving authors resorted to increasingly desperate ploys. Maybe there were dinosaurs inside the Earth. Maybe you could clone dinosaurs from dino blood found in amber-encrusted mosquitoes. Sadly, the Earth has turned out to be depressingly un-hollow, and there’s not much chance of genetic material hanging around for sixty-five million years. This next tale takes us back to a simpler, happier time, when one could more easily imagine gigantic, blood-crazed lizards haunting the forests of the night.

For Tanith Lee’s “The Human Mystery”:

If you were to ask readers what makes Sherlock Holmes such an intriguing character, many people would probably answer that it’s what he knows — his encyclopedic knowledge of mud stains, handwriting, postmarks, poisons, etc. Holmes’s intellect is certainly captivating, and often we can only gape in awe, as Watson does, at the great detective’s recall of some obscure fact. Who doesn’t fantasize about having a mind so well honed? But when you think about it, what really makes Holmes so fascinating is not just what he knows, but also what he doesn’t know. A character who always knows everything would be a bit dull and predictable. Holmes is such a genius that it sometimes seems that he knows everything, but we often forget that Holmes is able to recall so much information relating to detective work because he has purposely remained ignorant about so much else. In “A Study in Scarlet,” Holmes claims not to know that the Earth orbits the sun, because that fact does not directly relate to solving crimes. Fascinating. Our next adventure, which involves a lady, a house, and a curse, takes Holmes deep into one of those territories about which he still has much to learn.

Ha. Here’s my cousin Teddy’s new LJ icon:

Today on the train I saw this sticker: