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 ...

If your religion does not permit you to “believe in science” then read no further. You won’t like this. I am not of the opinion that scientists know everything there is to know. Quite the opposite. We will always have more questions than answers. That is the nature of science. Being a devotee of science I get a little tired of seeing “aliens” in science fiction shows that look an awful lot like humans. Those of you who follow my blog know that I am a fan of Star Trek. But Star Trek, both the original series and its successors, is probably more guilty of this than anyone. Consider the following: We have Vulcans who look like humans but with pointed ears; Romulans, who look like humans with pointed ears; Klingons, who have changed in the various incarnations but even at their most outlandish, just look like humans with plates on their forehead; Kardashians, who look like humans but with big boobs and butts (sorry I couldn’t help myself); I mean Cardassians, who look like humans wit...

First, let me say that I am a white man. You could say that I am the very epitome of a WASP. This has led to a somewhat sheltered view of the world, when it comes to racism. As a child growing up in the 1960’s. I couldn’t help but notice what was happening in our country, the marches, the Civil Rights Act etc. I was not paying that much attention to the news at my age, but still, you couldn’t help but notice that change was happening. My family, being the family that it was, celebrated that change. My father was actually an active participant, helping to get sundown laws struck off the books in our community. Change was happening, there was no mistaking it. There is an episode of Star Trek (the original series) called “Plato’s Stepchildren.” Kirk and company beam down to a planet where the inhabitants have developed psychic powers. Except one of the inhabitants is a dwarf named Alexander who has no such powers. Alexander has been pushed around and is tantamount to a slave...

Time to dredge out some of my pet peeves. These are words that I hear people say (usually on television or the radio) that are used incorrectly. Enormity: This is one that grates on my nerves every time I hear it used incorrectly. It does not mean Huge, or super big, or ginormous. Enormity means evil, usually a great evil. While it is understandable that an average person might confuse enormity with something that is enormous, I have heard people who should know better (writers, reporters) who misuse this word. It would be appropriate to say “. . . the enormity of the 9/11 attacks . . .” or “. . . the enormity of Hitler’s Holocaust . . .” It would not be appropriate to say “ . . . the enormity of the Sahara Desert . . .” Iregardless: This is not a word. You meant to say regardless. Laid: I will confess that this one tripped me up in my younger days. If you are talking about reclining, the past tense of lie is lay. For the verb lay, meaning to set something down, the ...

Being a cartographer, I have an interest in the history of how places got their names. People take names for granted. Someone might live in Oklahoma all their life without any clue as to why it is called Oklahoma. Sometimes place names have fascinating origins. Here are a few: I live in the United States of America. This name is a rather unwieldy mouthful of words. Where did that come from? There was a minor effort to call our country Columbia. Most people have heard of Christopher Columbus (however you feel about him), fewer have heard of Amerigo Vespucci. But it was Vespucci who led expeditions that first demonstrated that the islands Columbus had found and the larger land mass behind them was not Asia, but was in fact a whole new land. A cartographer of the time decided to call the new continent “America,” after the explorer’s first name (perhaps he thought it sounded better than “Vespuccia”). In any event, the rest of the name just sort of grew with usage. To foster the s...