A speculative mind

So, I was sick this weekend. Not unexpectedly. My sickness was the result of a vaccine I had taken on Friday. The literature on the vaccine said 1 in 6 people will have a reaction strong enough to miss work. I guess I am number six. Yay. My reaction, while uncomfortable, was not all that serious. Like the literature said, I had fever, chills and muscle aches for a day. If I had to do it again, I would. The reward outweighs the risk. If I were to get the illness that this vaccine protects me from, I would miss a lot more than one day of work. So this is not an antivaxer blog. This is a provaxer blog. Antivaxers are people who do not believe in vaccines, who think they will give people autism, or are a government conspiracy, or who just generally don’t like putting foreign substances in their bodies. Antivaxers span the political spectrum. Antivaxers can be found among conservatives, liberals, Greens, and Libertarians. How unifying! There are risks to getting a vaccine as there...

Different people have different tastes. That’s what makes us all unique. If all writers wrote the same type of story, literature would become quite boring. So I am going to discuss some of the things I like to write and some of the things I don’t like to write. By the way, this may or may not have anything to do with the things I like to read, or the things I like to watch on TV or movies. There is obviously some overlap, but it is not complete. More than any other genre, I like to write science fiction. I grew up on science fiction. I watched all the Scifi TV shows as a kid, and some of the earliest adult books I ever read were science fiction. There are a lot of sub-genres to science fiction: dystopian, space opera, post-apocalyptic, hard science fiction, sociological etc. (and for the moment we will set fantasy off as a separate genre from science fiction, though they are related). I have written some space opera, in fact my novel, Star liner, is of that genre. I have ...

Back when I was in Junior High School in the early 1970’s, my father bought our first hand-help calculator. It was a Texas Instruments TI-2500 Datamath, and I remember it cost about $60. That is equivalent to about $350 in 2019 dollars, so purchasing it was no small thing. It was not something every family could afford. It was a novelty and I thought it was so cool that we now had a “computer” (yes, that’s what we called it). I actually still have that old TI-2500 Datamath and it is pictured here. Within a few years, new companies were making calculators. The price dropped like a rock, and soon everyone had one. I even bought one with my own money to use in my high school chemistry class. I think it cost about $6 and did twice as much as our old $60 one did. The novelty was gone. Around the same time digital watches were coming on the scene. Like the calculator, digital watches quickly dropped in price to where they were affordable and everyone had to have one. Douglas Adams ...