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“If you want to make people accepting of the status quo, give them no news at all, or give them so much they’ll drown in it. Then, nothing will ever have to change.” — Alain de Botton During a drive home, CBC radio was playing an interview with the philosopher Alain de Botton. I only …
Emotions, difficult things they are in real life and in fiction. I was reading one of my trilogy books and realized I could add a lot more impact. It was a scene where a character realizes that his brother has betrayed his family, but also that a beloved daughter is not dead, and that the …
The problem quickly becomes very complex if the usual parallel and series resistor equations are used. It can be done, but there are easier methods. It is quite simple if symmetry is invoked. Suppose a current of 3 A flows through the supply leads. Since the cube has a 3-fold symmetry about rotations through the …
A friend and I were emailing about characters in our fiction. I commented that I have a test for characters in my stories: Does each significant character have a humanizing internal non-defining characteristic that has nothing to do with the plot?I apply that to everything from short stories to novels. For the longer works like …
Most of us are familiar with Clarke’s third law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic However, there are a number of corollaries to that, one of which is: Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science which makes a lot of sense. This leads straight into my forward to my trilogy, asking what …
Most of my fantasy writings are set in one fantasy world: the World of Atria. Atria happens to be the country in which my earliest (1978) creations (characters, stories) resided. In my not-published Tower books, it as the Atosian Empire from 2300 years ago. Magic in that world is repeatable, observable and consistent; therefore it …
Normally, I ignore the very entertainment-oriented news surrounding many commercial web sites. It’s too trivial to bother with, and is usually irritating more than anything else. However, I saw this image and it captured my interest. It just seems to prove that we can live with quality and different options even in the urban jungle. …
This is an old problem; one that I encountered when I was in high school. Nonetheless it can be a challenge if never seen before. Suppose that a group of 12 1.0 ohm resistors make up the edges of a cube. They are connected at the corners of the cube, and on opposite diagonal corners …
The steps necessary to solve the problem depend on the results of each use of the scales. Thus the solution quickly becomes very complicated if mapped out with numbers. Therefore, I present an more abstract solution first and then add the numbers later. There are four points to solving the problem: Let us consider families …
Solution to the Scales and Counterfeit Coin Problem Read More »
A standard cliche we often see in film, and on the page, is the flying car, not just for science fiction but even for futurists. A film that was commonly shown to early grade school children in the early 70s predicted that the average family would have a flying car by the end of the …
