“No matter how successful I am, and no matter how many things I have under my belt, it just feels like nothing is enough” – those are the words of the writer and performer Dylan Marron, talking about his own difficulty in finding work and being cast in Hollywood.
We know that Marron isn’t alone. There’s a dearth of non-white actors getting roles in Hollywood. We know because of the statistics, the lack of award nominations and the steps that have been taken to counteract it.
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| Figure 1. (a) A sketched diagram of 193i exposure head. Water fills the gap between the final lens and the wafer. The water injection and confinement system is not included in the diagram. (b) Optical paths of two-beam interference for both "dry" and 193i exposures. |
Topics: Economy, Education, Photolithography, Nanotechnology, Semiconductor Technology, STEM
Solid State Electronics:
Immersion lithography remains the industry’s workhorse technology, Jeff Dorsch
SPIE: 193nm immersion lithography: Status and challenges, Yayi Wei and David Back
Revised payment methods for Kindle Owners Lending Library and Kindle Unlimited, like other Amazon services, are author and reader friendly, argues Orna Ross
“Now will you admit that Amazon is no friend to authors?” said my book-loving friend, who had telephoned me from Ireland for a chat. He’d heard a writer on Irish radio talking about what he called “Amazon attack on author incomes”.
“You know, whenever I see what the media writes and says about Amazon,” I said, “I wonder if the information I’m getting about other topics is as skewed and inaccurate.”
“But this poor writer’s income had been totally decimated, overnight. On a whim. They are only paying writers for the number of pages read now, instead of the whole book. Aren’t you worried?”
Sigh.
I do understand that most people outside our business (and some within) are not au fait with the difference between a reader buying an ebook on Amazon vis a vis borrowing it via Kindle Owners Lending Library (KOLL), or downloading it as part of their Kindle Unlimited (KU) subscription. [Details on these differences, from a writer’s perspective, here, if you’d like to know more]
But this wasn’t an honest misunderstanding. This was, once again, a wide strand of the press and reading public refusing to let facts inform the latest chapter in their “Amazon Is A Scary Monster” story.
My friend is a reader who resents ebooks and his determination to diss Amazon over this latest move was echoed in media, old and new, across the world — UK daily newspapers right-wing ( The Telegraph) and left The Guardian, culture press USA (The Atlantic), business press (Canada Business), tech reporting (Gismodo Australia), not to mention among authors online. In all of these articles, and hundreds more, errors, fallacies, and miscalculations flew, laced with howls of protest from self-interested authors.
They confused sales with borrows, did calculations that overlooked how KENP (Kindle Edition Normalized Page) counts are higher than print page counts, overlooked the leap in the global fund from $3 million to $11 million; and generally assumed bad motives and outcomes.
It was left to author blogs (see Hugh Howey and Catherine Ryan Howard ) and the ever-thoughtful publishing commentator, Porter Anderson, to keep the record accurate.
So Why All The Negativity?
You could put it down to the negativity bias to which, psychologists tell us, we are all prone — do you pay more attention to a good review or bad? — but it’s more than that. What we have here is fear.
Amazon is powerful and has flexed that power in negotiations with publishers. It is at the forefront of technological change that has thrown up big challenges for independent publishers and wholesalers, booksellers and authors. And it keeps on ringing the commercial changes in an industry that is conservative and that, quite rightly, values its cultural role as well as its commercial well-being.
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It’s fair to say that Daniel José Older is having a very good year.
In the first week of 2015, Penguin published his first novel, Half-Resurrection Blues. By the end of January, Anika Noni Rose’s production company had optioned the film and television rights to the book, as well as rights for the following two in the series. This week sees him publish a hotly anticipated young adult novel called Shadowshaper.
To top it off, he got married in March.
Until 2014, Older worked by day as an emergency medical technician in Manhattan. He wrote mostly at night. And he sees himself, explicitly, as an outsider to the literary and publishing scene: “I entered the writing work clearly and strategically to do this thing, to write these books, to get them into the world and fuck with people, and to generally fuck shit up,” he says at a restaurant in Brooklyn.
Shadowshaper is set in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighbourhood of Brooklyn, where Older lives. The protagonist, a young Afro-Latina named Sierra, learns about her family’s history of supernatural powers. She can, as it turns out, interact with the spirit world. Her family has gone to great lengths to conceal that fact from her, but now it’s Sierra’s responsibility to protect them from what’s coming.
Older’s imagined Brooklyn is full of danger, less gentrified than the real-life version, and decidedly diverse. “We’re doing something very political by deciding whose life matters, where we’re going to focus things, and who we erase from the picture,” he says. This kind of diversity, he feels, is lacking in most other fantasy YA novels. “When we create worlds based on this world that don’t include diversity, we’re lying,” he says. “We’re not being honest as authors. Even if it’s infused with magical powers, or zombies, or whatever you’ll have, we should still be trying to tell the truth. Then, it becomes a question of what truth, how are we telling it, and whose truth do we take the time to repeat?”
Older is critical of books that he says fail to include racial diversity – such as, he says, The Hunger Games. He chalks it up to a “phenomenal lack of imagination” on the part of the author, and a laziness, he feels, that is designed to keep some people out of the picture. “To be able to figure out all these quirky things about what you imagine the future will be like, and not somehow have any folks of colour doing anything heroic or worthwhile in it, what happened?” he asked. “Where did we go?”
I recently uploaded the first 25 pages of my MS on my website: www.snpetro.com/. Below is a description of my novel and a link to the first 25 pages.
Human women are ideal for seeding Castra’s alien army. But the children of such a union are not conceived without a price. One part his mother, and nine parts his father, Lucian is like no other child. With his father absent, his mother faces raising him in squalor, and in a country unfamiliar to her, Monde.
Lucian grows up in a world of politics, religious contention, and spies. But what he craves is war. And he has been gifted with the body, mind, and courage of a warrior. His formidable strength and superior intelligence incite both awe and envy. He earns praise from as high as the king. But not all see Lucian’s abilities as benign. Suspicion soon forms around him. His inborn charm keeps most enemies at bay. But not for long. He struggles to suppress growing, dark urges. And he sees the world as rank with weak men and vain challenges. This leaves him to question why he was born with such gifts. Are they to be wasted on a world he feels distant from?
This book is currently undergoing editing. I hope to have it ready for agent submission by the fall.
Read the first 25 pages (author’s edit): The Warrior from Monde, first 25 pages
Please read the sample, and leave a comment on my site here: https://snpetro.com/
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| Credit: John Moreno/Argonne National Laboratory |
Topics: Applied Physics, Mechanical Engineering, Physics and Pop Culture, Semiconductor Technology, Thermodynamics
1. Vapor pressure
2. Friction
3. Drag coefficient
4. Momentum
5. Rolling resistance
Bonus: Air temperature
Phys.org: Five properties of physics that affect your gas mileage, Louise Lerner
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| Image Source: Spring 8 |
Topics: Optical Physics, Laser, Modern Physics, Quantum Mechanics, X-rays
Physics Today:
Brighter and faster: The promise and challenge of the x-ray free-electron laser
Philip H. Bucksbaum and Nora Berrah
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| Image Source: Wikiquote "Once you have learned to read you will forever be free." "Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave." More at Brainyquote.com |
Topics: #BlackLivesMatter, Civil Rights, Frederick Douglass, History, Human Rights
He who could address this audience without a quailing sensation, has stronger nerves than I have. I do not remember ever to have appeared as a speaker before any assembly more shrinkingly, nor with greater distrust of my ability, than I do this day. A feeling has crept over me quite unfavorable to the exercise of my limited powers of speech. The task before me is one which requires much previous thought and study for its proper performance. I know that apologies of this sort are generally considered flat and unmeaning. I trust, however, that mine will not be so considered. Should I seem at ease, my appearance would much misrepresent me. The little experience I have had in addressing public meetings, in country school houses, avails me nothing on the present occasion.
The papers and placards say that I am to deliver a Fourth of July Oration. This certainly sounds large, and out of the common way, for me. It is true that I have often had the privilege to speak in this beautiful Hall, and to address many who now honor me with their presence. But neither their familiar faces, nor the perfect gage I think I have of Corinthian Hall seems to free me from embarrassment.
The fact is, ladies and gentlemen, the distance between this platform and the slave plantation, from which I escaped, is considerable-and the difficulties to he overcome in getting from the latter to the former are by no means slight. That I am here to-day is, to me, a matter of astonishment as well as of gratitude. You will not, therefore, be surprised, if in what I have to say I evince no elaborate preparation, nor grace my speech with any high sounding exordium. With little experience and with less learning, I have been able to throw my thoughts hastily and imperfectly together; and trusting to your patient and generous indulgence I will proceed to lay them before you.
This, for the purpose of this celebration, is the Fourth of July. It is the birth day of your National Independence, and of your political freedom. This, to you, as what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God. It carries your minds back to the day, and to the act of your great deliverance; and to the signs, and to the wonders, associated with that act, and that day. This celebration also marks the beginning of another year of your national life; and reminds you that the Republic of America is now 76 years old. l am glad, fellow-citizens, that your nation is so young. Seventy-six years, though a good old age for a man, is but a mere speck in the life of a nation. Three score years and ten is the allotted time for individual men; but nations number their years by thousands. According to this fact, you are, even now, only in the beginning of your national career, still lingering in the period of childhood. I repeat, I am glad this is so. There is hope in the thought, and hope is much needed, under the dark clouds which lower above the horizon. The eye of the reformer is met with angry flashes, portending disastrous times; but his heart may well beat lighter at the thought that America is young, and that she is still in the impressible stage of her existence. May he not hope that high lessons of wisdom, of justice and of truth, will yet give direction to her destiny? Were the nation older, the patriot's heart might be sadder, and the reformer's brow heavier. Its future might be shrouded in gloom, and the hope of its prophets go out in sorrow. There is consolation in the thought that America is young.-Great streams are not easily turned from channels, worn deep in the course of ages. They may sometimes rise in quiet and stately majesty, and inundate the land, refreshing and fertilizing the earth with their mysterious properties. They may also rise in wrath and fury, and bear away, on their angry waves, the accumulated wealth of years of toil and hardship. They, however, gradually flow back to the same old channel, and flow on as serenely as ever. But, while the river may not be turned aside, it may dry up, and leave nothing behind but the withered branch, and the unsightly rock, to howl in the abyss-sweeping wind, the sad tale of departed glory. As with rivers so with nations.
History is a Weapon: The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro, Frederick Douglass
Related link: What the Civil War Can Teach us About Patriotism, Jarret Ruminski, PhD Historian, "That Devil History" blog
Okay; this is a rant, and will probably be my only, or one of very few blogs. That's because I have other venues for writing.
Anyway: Here is something that has caused me consternation for a very long time. Albinos in the media have always been seen as other than human. We have been given red demonic eyes, stark white unruly hair and skin that resembles a corpse or a powdered doughnut.
In fact, we have been portrayed as vampires, aliens, an even underground cannibal brainless brutes. Although I do know some brainless brutes with albinism, this is by no means the norm for people like me.
Believe me; if I had the power to make my eyes glow and make people step out in front of trucks, I certainly would. But I can't do that so breathe easy.
If you have ever seen Village of the Damned, The Time Machine, The Omega Man, or read a Marvel comic you know what I mean. If you've seen End of Days (I know that guy) read The Famished Road or Sent For You Yesterday, you are all too familiar with the albino as some otherworldly freak. I'm not even going to talk about Powder. ugh.
There are people who actually think we are witches or magic.Sometimes this is rather funny. I met a man who thought I was a witch and offered to save my soul. But sometimes it can be downright dangerous. People in parts of Africa have been hacking up albino children collecting their body parts for sale. They have had to put children in safe camps for their protection.
But I digress.
There was a man who contacted me about an albino character he wanted to create for a game. I suggested he give the character long blond dreads. That was a long time ago and I haven't heard anything.
So what would happen if there were a character in a comic book that was just a person with albinism? No superhuman powers, not out to conquer the universe. It would be just like putting an evil dwarf in your story who wasn't evil.
It's all about using disability and difference, as a metaphor for "the other".
I'm not going to offer any answers here since I don't have any myself. How do you portray a person with albinism in the comics? Why would you put them in the story? How would you draw them? I'll let you figure that out. I just thought I'd give you some food for thought.
A new social network that uses a points-based system to encourage people to interact with content is closing in on 1 million registered users since it launched earlier this month, according to the company's CEO.
"We've been around for a week. We are already serving significant impressions," said Bill Ottman, the founder and CEO of Minds, in an interview last week. "We're not saying we're an ad network on the scale of Facebook or Google or television: It's the potential of what it might become."
Minds has existed as a blogging platform since 2012, reaching 30,000 users in its private alpha mode. But on June 19, the developers behind it launched a new social network and associated mobile applications for Apple and Android devices. And according to Ottman, it's already wildly popular, with almost 1 million accounts.
Angel Lover
By: Tricia Skinner
I was given a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.
Half-human angels with a mission to kill their fallen angel fathers, oh the DRAMA.
This is the second book in Skinner’s Angel Assassins Series. Even though I missed the first one, it was not hard at all getting drawn in and caught up. The hero of the story, Kasdeja (Kas for short) is the tech savvy Nephilim (half-angel) in a group of Nephilim, abandoned by their fathers as children and sentenced to die for being half human.... MORE
Writers of shorter works could lose out on revenue as company’s Kindle Owners Lending Library and Kindle Unlimited no longer pay per copy downloaded
Self-published authors could be paid as little as $0.006 per page read under new rules planned by Amazon.
Writers who make their works available through Amazon’s Kindle Owners Lending Library, and a similar service called Kindle Unlimited, will no longer be paid per copy downloaded following a move announced last week.
Instead, they would receive a payment based on how many pages had actually been read, with longer books receiving a higher potential payment than shorter works.
In an email to authors, sent on Wednesday, Amazon revealed exactly how little that payment would be.
Topics: Nobel Laureate, Nobel Prize, NSBP, Steven Weinberg, Theoretical Physics, World Science Festival
Amazon.com:
To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science, Dr. Steven Weinberg
And while I'm very proud of my one African American supporter it would be nice to have a few more. I'm only 70 dollars away.
I think I tried this before but this is very close to actually happening. You can read about it and hopefully support it here:
https://www.startjoin.com/writersofcolor3
I would love to review books like this:
(For all 14 images go here. Yes I hate the popups too.)
I just have some initial thoughts about the tragic yet entirely predictable outcome in the Trayvon Martin case.
One, it seems that the prosecution's heart just wasn't in it. They had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the case and it showed. Two, even if it had been filmed or if there were more witnesses there's a very good chance that you would have gotten that same verdict. There have been those cases as well, although I'm thinking of Oscar Grant where his death was pretty much filmed and that cop served a whopping one year sentence. Three, even if Trayvon Martin had lived and could have presented his own version there's no evidence that would have changed the verdict either. Just take a look at the local Jordan Miles verdict where Miles was beaten to an inch of his life and we couldn't get a conviction against the cops. Four, it has become clear to me that black men are Marked for Death in this society. It's clear that we're being groomed for the prison industrial complex at best and just routinely murdered at worst.
I'm really not sure what can be done about any of these things. I guess more decent paying jobs for everyone would help. Perhaps more black men need to carry guns so that predators will at least know they'll be in a fight. But when I reverse the situation in my head -- where Trayvon Martin shoots Zimmerman -- every time Trayvon Martin gets convicted and for a long time.
I was looking through my Facebook feed and found a number of helpful illustrations and images that explain these problems. These images made me feel a little better for some reason. So enjoy the slideshow. Related: The story about the arrest of Dennis Henderson, for, as best as I can tell, being "uppity" tells the problem from a Pittsburgh angle here and here. Somewhat Related: My struggle against Peter Gidas of Gidas Flowers and the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission (PHRC) continues. And justifiably so.
Title: The Ca$h Ninja Grant
By: Grant Chambers
Image Credit: KDA
To: Descendants of Counter-Inversion Veterans
It is neither our intent, nor desire to cause controversy. However, history provides little insight into the early life of the war hero, Antoine Clark, aka ‘Tha Ca$h Ninja.’ Contemporaneous records re-inflated from submerged computronium memory cores indicate that he was, at best, a middling third age hip-hop troubadour. Like other members of the genera superset, Tha Ca$h Ninja existed in a fragmented entertainment space deeply riven by notions of sub-genera purity and domain exclusivity. Pre-Inversion Artists frequently eschewed popular appeal, and Tha Ca$h Ninja was no different. For most members of various crews, clans and assorted musical combines, the widespread acclaim reached by classical artists (e.g. B.I.G., The Notorious) was considered a betrayal of artistic integrity. Musical balkinization resulted in flourishing, if not necessarily lucrative, hyper-local music scenes.
History should not judge the Tha Ca$h Ninja harshly for his lack of commercial success, both for his later contributions to the Second Refactoring of the Western Convergence, and the fact that artists who did achieve some measure of cross-genre appeal usually did so through a combination of exploitative cultural appropriation and deployment of unregulated memetic-catalyzed Langfordian Syrens. Given the gross storage and algorithmic processing requirements necessary to deploy such vectors, Tha Ca$h Ninja, despite assurances regarding his personal net worth, would not have been financially able to support such domain violations.
Instead, Tha Ca$h Ninja’s core support grew out of a loyal fanbase cultivated from the dense urban conglomerations doting Bayou Country. He innovated a fork of ‘southern’ hip-hop that incorporated الدحية and full VR simulacrum of mundane events and various prior sexual conquests engaging in Dabke-style erotic dancing. To wit, his seminal hit “Ca$h Ninja is günna’ Ninja that A$$!” featured amelodic, and at times rambling, exposition on the nature of ontological empiricism paired with bass loops and FVR recordings of interactions with surgical and germ-line modified gender-fluid individuals and constructs.
As our hypothesis (attached) posits, etho-phrenol recognition shows that many of the exotic dancers were likely Greco-Syrians recruited from the large populations settled in and around Mobile after the Burning Sands War. If conclusively proved, it lends an explanation as to why the later incarnations of the Tha Ca$h Ninja Mercenary organization contained analogous command structures with various Levent-originated ‘Free’ forces.
By Tha Ca$h Ninja’s own statements, he was an avid and enthusiastic student of both Bushido and Wing-chun. While other historians take these statements as boastfulness in keeping with the hyper-masculinity of the genera, we aim to prove these claims. What is not in dispute is that Tha Ca$h Ninja did exhibit considerable proficiency in light energy weapons during the Reclamation of Texarkana from Class 2 autonomous, non-metabolizing carnivorous forms.
During the later stages of the Inversion, when the Silicon Lords retreated to western Rockies, Tha Ca$h Ninja Mercenary was one of the first outfits commissioned by the Distributed Republic to halt the advance of Semi-sentients across the Mississippi. Though apocryphal, it is said that Tha Ca$h Ninja, accompanied by his most loyal retainers "These Amazonian Bitches!", could be seen battling amphibious-mechs on the river bank, his white mink coat trailing behind him and his crisp athletic shoes caked with red mud.
We hereby submit this grant to the Descendants of Inversion Veterans and ask permission to excavate the sites indicated, and recompile any imprinted data structures such that a complete understanding of the Second Battle of Vicksburg can be had.
For more short fiction Friday please visit http://moorsgatemedia.blogspot.com/
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| Source: Facebook meme |
Topics: Civil Rights, Human Rights, Philosophy, Thermodynamics
Sources:
1. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/heacon.html#heacon
2. http://physics.about.com/od/thermodynamics/a/lawthermo_5.htm
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| The MIT researchers' prototype for a chip measuring 3 millimeters by 3 millimeters. The magnified detail shows the chip's main control circuitry, including the startup electronics; the controller that determines whether to charge the battery, power a device, or both; and the array of switches that control current flow to an external inductor coil. This active area measures just 2.2 millimeters by 1.1 millimeters. |
Topics: Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Internet of Things, Semiconductor Technology
Phys.org:
Ultralow-power circuit improves efficiency of energy harvesting to more than 80 percent, Larry Hardesty
