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THE EXCITING ROLLER COASTER RIDE OF TRADITIONAL PUBLISHING I have had a long string of rejections, and as usual, the good news seems to come in clusters. This week brought a new book launch. Today brought an email with an acceptance and contract offer to publish a new story in an upcoming anthology. This is one of those stories I stuck with through previous rejections and refined and tweaked it. In a twisted sort of way, the rejections make the acceptances more meaningful. WRITE! SUBMIT! REJECT! PUBLISH! REPEAT |
BOOK LAUNCH! BOOK LAUNCH! BOOK LAUNCH! A publisher just released a new anthology with my story, BONE STEW. Itβs been a while since I have had a new one go out. Feel free to purchase and publish great online reviews of my story.
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| If WDC is interested in upgrading the Authors in Print, it would be nice if it could go beyond six entries. |
ReplyDead Presidents and US Currency The decision to place a person's likeness on US currency, including coins, has been a decision treated with dignity and careful thought. The US Treasury is considering a one-dollar coin commemorating the 250th anniversary of independence (1776-2026) for next year. Of course, dead presidents were considered the front-runners. In 2016, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco confirmed that "a living person may not appear on U.S. currency." "To avoid the appearance of a monarchy, it was a long-standing tradition to only feature portraits of deceased individuals on currency and coin." (Emphasis added by me.) Front-runners amongst presidential historians are said to be Teddy Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. Imagine their shock and awe, surely, when the US Treasury recently confirmed the proposed design of the new coin is, yes, of course, the current president. The reverse side of the coin is particularly fetching, the president's fist raised with words FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT. I wonder whose idea this was? I would direct any discussion and commentary to the forum "TABOO forum: politics"  |
Amethyst SkellyBones Angel  - He's not kidding. It's not even the most disgusting thing the King Orange One has done this week. |
| Amethyst SkellyBones Angel - See news articles www.politico.com/news/2025/10/03/treasury-department-trump-dollar-coin-00593368 www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/10/03/donald-trump-commemorative-coin-legal/86504452007/ |
Perception is not Reality A common saying with a certain truth. I have been thinking about something over the last few days that has nagged at me off and on for years. It started with the suggestion from a professor decades ago that the pen he dropped onto the table top could pass through the table. There was a calculable probability; he was trying to force us to abandon our real-world perceptions as we took on the SchrΓΆdinger wave equation and quantum tunneling. You remember that an atom is made up of neutrons, protons, and electrons. You probably think of them as tiny billiard balls, very tiny particles. Tiny, but they donβt pass through solid objects. Yet they do pass through barriers; solid-state electronics relies on electrons βtunnelingβ through barriers. They donβt punch holes; they just appear on the other side. Without this nonsensical βreality,β your mobile phone and laptop would not be possible. The wave equation tells us that the neutron, proton, and electron are waves, not particles. With a position and speed (momentum) that are not precisely defined. The position is smeared out probabilistically; some of those positions are on the other side of a barrier. They are either particles or waves, right? No, itβs our intuition that is tricking us into believing that our observation and cognition of what we see in the macro world can be applied to the quantum world. Just as our intuition fails us on the grand scale of the universe, that time was not absolute when Einstein defined space-time and a new theory of gravity as curved space-time. These fuzzy areas of reality also provide opportunities for speculative fiction, especially science fiction, where you want the reader to suspend reality. For me, itβs frustrating to realize things so fundamental are so far from grasping. |
Dark Age of Science? It seems laughable to imagine that the vast majority of people believed that the Earth was the center of the universe. The sun, moon, and stars circling the Earth. Not so long ago, until Copernicus, Galileo, and finally Newton nailed it shut around 1700. Just a few hundred years ago. Another few hundred years from now, people will likely be laughing at "us" and Dark Matter and Dark Energy. If you arenβt aware, the term dark just means unknown. Unknown matter and energy that make up 95% of the universe. One hypothesized because of repeated observations of acceleration rates of universal expansion, and the other because of the rate at which galaxies rotate. Yes, our greatest and most brilliant minds understand 5% of what is out there. Now, they know a lot about that five percent, but still not so great. Not to mention the awkward world of quantum mechanics where gravity doesn't seem to exist. Welcome to the dark age of science. |
| In point of fact, the Greek astronomer Aristarchus of Samos in around 230BCE proposed a model of the universe with the sun at the center and the planets, including Earth, revolving around it. This was generally rejected at the time because of the lack of stellar parallax, unobservable without telescopy. In other words, the "best evidence" available at the time supported the Earth-centered model of Ptolemy. Also, Kepler and his three laws of planetary motion should be included in the list of people who nailed the heliocentric theory. The heliocentric model best explained those laws and was fundamental in Newton's later formulation of the laws of motion and his theory of gravity. A similar chain of connections, starting with Faraday and Michelson/Morley, leading to Maxwell, and culminating with Einstein's theory of general relativity show how more granular observations lead to fundamental revisions in physical models. But your basic point is correct. Our understanding of the universe *should* be based on "best evidence." But our evidence is becoming ever more granular. The Hubble Tension, for example seems to have been confirmed rather than resolved by recent observations from the James Webb Space Telescope. That, and other things it's seen, suggest that the current Lambda-CDM model may be incorrect. That model includes both dark energy and dark matter, which are inferred from observation but not yet actually "seen" (for example, in particle accelerators or in experiments that "should" have detected them). It's likely that observations will lead to advances in theory. This kind connection, connections similar to Faraday/Maxwell/Einstein and and Copernicus/Kepler/Gallileo/Newton, are at work today, via JWST among other data points. We're still at the Faraday stage. Sorry, more rambling...I'm getting old. |
Waltz in the Lonesome October  - Excellent points. What's terrifying is that proven science, like vaccinations, are now under relentless attack from our own government. I just hope it doesn't take an epidemic killing millions to change course. |
| Well... Western "knowledge" and "common sense" promoted by those in control... Google? Wiki? African, American, Oceanic people's knowledge is either ignored, discounted or non-existent to Western-Eastern researchers. |
| A Paradox of Sorts: Importance of Dissenting Views and Place and Time and WDC When I was moving toward adulthood (late 70s, early 80s) I had the disturbing realization that my parents and grandparents were deeply, although not overtly, racist. They grew up in the border south, and it was part of their culture. I managed to break that cycle, but I carried some other intolerant views with me into adulthood. I slowly, slowly learned as society became more tolerant of those with different values and views, into the late 90s and early 2000s. Then something happened about the time social media took off, as I moved into late adulthood, maybe the last fifteen years. Intolerance seems to have become the norm, and the dominant voices have become the extremes on both sides of the spectrum. In three years on WDC, one thing I have slowly learned to appreciate is the calm of the NEWSFEED. At first, I considered it a βhead in the sandβ attitude and a sort of intolerance. However, I think itβs more nuanced than that, a place to avoid the turmoil in the media and other platforms. There should be a welcome place in WDC, where many different views should gather and respectfully debate on the merits. One such place is "TABOO forum: politics" created by KΓ₯re ΰΉΰΈ₯ΰΈ΅ΰΈ’ΰΈ‘ Enga   . More people should visit and start new threads and exchange views. That is my point of view. |
INAPPROPRIATE USE OF AI on WDC? I recently got a public review of a story here on WDC that sounded, well, kind of mechanical. Lots of literary buzzwords. It sounded off. I took a look at this user's public reviews, over two hundred reviews since joining WDC only a few months ago. The ones I scanned were all the same way, stiff, almost as if they were written by an AI review engine. They all contained 260 to 350 characters, in the range for review credit, if Iβm not mistaken. In the world of evidence, this is all circumstantial. Iβm not going to accuse a fellow WDC member of something. I will say that I believe it is highly unethical to give any writer, especially a fellow WDC member, a review using an AI engine. If someone out there is doing it, please stop! If my speculation is wrong, then this goes down as an AI rant. |
| I was thinking about writing something about why identifying AI-generated text is such a challenging problem. However, this rapidly devolved into a discussion of Bayesian risk generators and other complicated mathemtical concepts of which I have--at best--only a surface knowledge. In other words, I know enough to know that it's an incredibly challenging problem. I do have a chapter in my probability book on Bayesian risk in learning theory. If anyone is interested, I can send them that chapter in PDF format, which will give a notion of the theoretical complexity of the detection problem, but I gave up writing a general essay on this topic after wasting about three hours this morning. |
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I'm coming up on my first... Almost out of diapers! J
Happy 3rd WdC Anniversary! 
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