Friday Links III
After much-needed time off for the holidays, it’s time for me to throw together whatever tidbits have most recently garnered my attention. Without further ado, I bring you:
- A big, big explosion (Big bada boom!) jolted the Earth about five years ago (technically, it happened a little bit longer ago than that, more like 50,000 years ago), playing hell with electronics and making lots of pretty lights in the sky. I’m including links to two articles describing the origin of the blast, a highly magnetized neutron star called a “magnetar.” My favorite quote from the articles: “Magnetars are neutron stars with magnetic fields so powerful that they could kill a person from 1,000 kilometers away by warping the atoms in living flesh.” Wicked awesome.
- If you haven’t read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, you really should. Especially before the movie comes out. Did I mention it stars Natalie Portman?
- Eye candy: National Geographic’s top Ten Space Pictures of 2009.
- Following up on my previous Avatar links, here is an astrophysics professor with some thoughts on the science of Avatar. Fun reading, but do NOT scroll down to the Reader Talkback; that unfortunate portion of Aintitcool is a verminous cesspool where decency, intelligent thought, and basic grammer have been ruthlessly exterminated after only the briefest of struggles.
- A brief essay about the rise of steampunk. I think my introduction to steampunk was almost twenty years, when my love of Gibson’s cyberpunk brought me to The Difference Engine. I may get some shit for saying this, but the genre seems to have been pretty quiet for the last twenty years or so, but it’s exploding all the sudden. I’ll be jumping on the bandwagon, as I’ve got Boneshaker and Leviathan in my “Soon To Be Read” pile.
That’s all for today, folks. If you can’t wait for more, look forward to my review of Guy Gavriel Kay’s Tigana on Monday, and an as-of-yet unannounced book to be reviewed the following Monday (making up for lost posts during the holidays). Stay tuned!