SF Debris - The Unity Saga The Unity Saga Worlds Without End Shadows of the Night Against All Odds Paradise Lost Blood of Heroes Dawn of Forever Optimized for the latest versions of Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Opera HarryPotterFanfiction.com :: Over 80,000 Harry potter stories and podcasts Entangled toy universe shows time may be an illusion - physics-math - 25 October 2013 Editorial: "Solving the eternal mystery that is time" Time is an illusion – at least in a toy model of the universe made of two particles of light. The experiment shows that what we perceive as the passage of time might emerge from the strange property of quantum entanglement . Physicists have two ways of describing reality, quantum mechanics for the small world of particles and general relativity for the larger world of planets and black holes. "It means that the universe should not evolve. In 1983 theorists Don Page and William Wootters suggested that quantum entanglement might provide a solution to the Wheeler-DeWitt "problem of time" . Photon clock For the first time, Genovese and colleagues have demonstrated this effect in a physical system, albeit in a "universe" that contains only two photons. The entangled photons exist in a superposition of both horizontal and vertical states simultaneously until they are observed. Quantum cosmos? Journal reference: arxiv.org/abs/1310.4691
The Things by Peter Watts I am being Blair. I escape out the back as the world comes in through the front. I am being Copper. I am being Childs. The names don't matter. I see myself through the window, loping through the storm, wearing Blair. The world has found me out. There is only one option left. I will go into the storm, and never come back. I was so much more, before the crash. So much wisdom I had. I remember the crash, though. I remember my reawakening, too: dull stirrings of sensation in real time, the first embers of cognition, the slow blooming warmth of awareness as body and soul embraced after their long sleep. —and the world attacked me. I left that place in ruins. I did not stop running until I arrived here. And when I assimilated them in turn—when my biomass changed and flowed into shapes unfamiliar to local eyes—I took that communion in solitude, having learned that the world does not like what it doesn't know. I am alone in the storm. It plunges into darkness as I watch. I am not going home. No.
Harry Potter Christmas Stories Collection by the Author of James Potter and the Curse of the Gatekeeper The Advantages of Being a White Writer Disclaimer: I am writing about YA publishing in the USA. Although I’m Australian I know much more about the publishing industry in the US than I do about Australia. Or anywhere else for that matter. I know that the title of this post is going to lead to some comments insisting that it’s not true that white writers have any advantages and that many white people are just as oppressed as people of colour. Damned if You Do, Damned if You Don’t, Redux There were some wonderful responses to my post attempting to debunk the “damned if you do/damned if you don’t” canard. I did not mean that at all. I know how tiring it is to hear over and over from editors or agents (who are, in almost all cases, white) that they “just didn’t connect with,” or “just didn’t fall in love with” the characters of a mostly-multicultural book. Mayra Lazara Dole makes a similar point: Many POC feel you are stealing their souls. So, to my white brothers and sisters: certainly, write your story. So does Mayra Lazara Dole:
Oracle On his eighteenth day in the tiger cage, Robert Stoney began to lose hope of emerging unscathed. He’d woken a dozen times throughout the night with an overwhelming need to stretch his back and limbs, and none of the useful compromise positions he’d discovered in his first few days — the least-worst solutions to the geometrical problem of his confinement — had been able to dull his sense of panic. He’d been in far more pain in the second week, suffering cramps that felt as if the muscles of his legs were dying on the bone, but these new spasms had come from somewhere deeper, powered by a sense of urgency that revolved entirely around his own awareness of his situation. That was what frightened him. Morning brought a fresh torment: hay fever. Towards the middle of the morning, Peter Quint came to see him. “Many happy returns,” Quint said cheerfully. Robert took care to betray no surprise. If he was cracking, he could at least choose the point of fissure. “Kafka?” “So why bring his name up?”
Heroic characters Disciplines > Storytelling > Characters > Heroic characters The generic hero | Hero sub-types | See also This is a collection of heroic types, by no means complete or definitive, but which illustrate the richness of heroes that may be found in various stories. Heroic subtypes discussed here are: The Generic Hero The generic Hero is the protagonist or main character of most stories, although stories may also have multiple heroes in them (for example Lord of the Rings). The Hero is important in that we identify with him or her more strongly than with other character. A common theme is that the hero demonstrates courage in overcoming external obstacles to their goal. Hero sub-types The Classic Hero The Classic Hero is the person who goes on a quest to achieve some good end that benefits other people in some way. We look up to the Classic Hero but may not fully believe their perfection. The Tragic Hero The Tragic Hero may also fail in their quest, perhaps having bitten off more than they can chew.
Home | Archive of Our Own Reading a Novel Alters Your Brain Connectivity — So What? - Wired Science So, there’s a new study out (pdf) that’s used brain scanning to investigate how reading a book changes your brain. It tripped my skeptic’s radar right away because our brains are changing all the time, and pretty much anything we do influences those changes. And we already knew the power of reading novels, didn’t we? You follow a story, meet characters, learn things. They used a technique known as “resting state fMRI”, which involves scanning a person’s brain while they lie in the scanner doing nothing. To understand what the researchers say they found, we need to rewind a little to take a look at their technique of choice: resting-state fMRI. The important result, according to the study authors – Gregory Berns and his colleagues – is that the participants’ averaged brain connectivity patterns at rest were altered by the experience of reading Pompeii. Celebration over. Brain function ‘boosted for days after reading a novel’ (The Independent). You get the idea!
The line between fiction and fic has never been blurrier When the Silo series first started, the book was free on Amazon. Since I live in Mexico, when I went to Amazon to download tge free book, I was going to be charged full price. I saw that Hugh had a website, and contact email, and I wrote him telling him both my wife and I would like to read the story, but felt that we were unfairly discriminated against, because of our location. In my opinion, Howie's not only a pretty good writer/businessman, he's a pretty good human being too. Fear of a smell can be passed down several generations - life - 01 December 2013 Editorial: "Mouse memory inheritance may revitalise Lamarckism" If a particular smell makes you uneasy but you don't know why, perhaps you should ask your grandparents. Mice whose father or grandfather learned to associate the smell of cherry blossom with an electric shock became more jumpy in the presence of the same odour, and responded to lower concentrations of it than normal mice. This work, led by Brian Dias at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, provides some of the best evidence yet for the inheritance of memories or traits across generations. Previous studies have hinted that stressful events can affect the emotional behaviour or metabolism of future generations, possibly through chemical changes to the DNA that can turn genes off and on – a mechanism known as epigenetic inheritance. Needle in a haystack However, although epigenetic changes have been observed, identifying which ones are relevant is a bit like searching for a needle in a haystack. Brain change