text:
Monday, August 31, 2015

Musical Monday - The Doomsday Machine by Five Year Mission

I'm going to line up a couple of humorous songs next, so I'm okay with going to a song here that is a little darker at this point in the set, so I'm going to put one of my favorite Five Year Mission songs about one of my favorite Star Trek episodes in this slot. The Doomsday Machine is a bleak and harsh episode that doesn't really have a happy ending, which seems kind of fitting as it seems to have been inspired by Fred Saberhagen's Berserker series of stories (which I would recommend as being quite good, albeit in many cases dark and grim). Even though Kirk ends up figuring out a way to halt the implacable doomsday machine, the price Starfleet pays for the victory is quite high.

But Five Year Mission was able to transform this bleak episode into a really great song, so it has that going for it. And then they made a great video to go along with it. But really, this is a great song and the band doesn't seem to play it live often enough any more. In my version of reality, they do, and so it gets stuck right in the heart of the imaginary set.

Previous Musical Monday: Miri by Five Year Mission
Subsequent Musical Monday: I, Mudd by Five Year Mission

Dream Five Year Mission Set

Musical Monday Playlists     Five Year Mission     Musical Monday     Home

Saturday, August 29, 2015

Book Blogger Hop August 28th - September 3rd: The Roman Emperor Hadrian Executed Four Ex-Consuls in 118 A.D.

Book Blogger Hop

Jen at Crazy for Books restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another, but then couldn't continue, so she handed the hosting responsibilities off to Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them.

This week Billy asks: What time of the year does your library have its library sale?

I am lucky enough to live in an area where there are multiple good libraries within a fairly short distance. Most of these libraries hold two sales per year, one in the spring, and one in the autumn. I don't leave the issue up to chance, as there is an excellent website that I highly recommend named Book Sale Finder that one can use to locate book sales all across the United States, listed by state.1 The site doesn't only list library book sales, but library book sales do seem to comprise most of the entries. The site has a function that allows you to set it up to send you weekly e-mail alerts letting you know when sales are taking place in specific states. As I live near all three, I have e-mail alerts set up to tell me what books sales are taking place in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington D.C. As a result, I am usually able to go to one or two library book sales per month every spring and fall.

1 I don't know if there are similar websites set up for book sales in other countries.

Book Blogger Hop     Home

Friday, August 28, 2015

Follow Friday - King Ardashir I Destroyed the Parthian Empire in 224 A.D.

It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:
  1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
  2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Books Are Life and One Book Two.
  3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
  4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
  5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
  6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
  7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
  8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!
And now for the Follow Friday Question: Share a random quote from the book you are currently reading.

I am currently reading Lovers & Fighters, Starships & Dragons, a collection of twelve pieces of short fiction by Tom Purdom. Here are quotes from the first three stories in the collection
They were good subjects. They would keep him occupied for decades. He had now lived over three hundred years. Nothing lasted forever. He had his whole life ahead of him.
               - from the story Fossil Games
It was a very civilized hijack.
               - from the story Haggle Chips
The King's sleeve flicked again. " Think you can understand the difficulties we will face if the people of our new province feel they have been rescued by a Hapsburg who offered herself as sacrifice. You must show them that Prussian discipline - and Prussian firepower - are a better defense than the skirts of a Hapsburg princess."
               - from the story Dragon Drill

Follow Friday     Home

Thursday, August 27, 2015

Random Thought - Things to Consider for 2016 Hugo Nominations

As most people in the genre fiction world are aware by now, the Sad and Rabid Puppies created a campaign slate and bloc voted in the nominations phase of the 2015 Hugo Awards to pack the ballot with candidates of their choosing that ranged from mediocre to incredibly awful. At the awards ceremony the WorldCon voters let the Puppies them know just how much they appreciated this effort and relegated virtually every Puppy nominee to a position behind No Award.

Many people have looked at the raw statistics and have used various methodologies to try to "un-Puppy" that Hugo ballot and figure out who would have been nominated but for the unethical slate -based tactics used by the Puppies. That is a worthy effort, and I may do that at some future point, so that I can have a central place to keep track of my reading for those authors whose works were shut out of Hugo nominations by the actions of the Puppies. But that's not what I want to do today, because quite frankly this year's Puppies have become quite tiresome. Today, I want to look forward to the 2016 Hugo Awards.

It is almost certain that the Puppies will return for the 2016 Hugo Awards and do the same routine again. The Rabid Puppies will put forward a slate. The Sad Puppies will dance around the issue a lot, but in the end, what they come up with will be a slate. The Puppy supporters will be nominating out of spite - as some Puppy commenters have tried to rationalize, even though their nominees were humiliated in the voting, at least they managed to keep other people off the ballot. By loudly declaring their intent to use next year's nominating process as "revenge" for losing the vote in the actual awards this year, any pretense that their actions are anything other than organized thuggery evaporates. The Puppies have revealed themselves to be vandals, and nothing more. No matter what happens, their selection of nominees will both be generally terrible and dominate the ballot. For the most part, no matter what anyone else does in the nominating process will matter.

As depressing as this fact is, this does not mean everyone else should simply throw in the towel and not bother to nominate anything. The Hugo Awards are the end of the process, not the beginning. Most voters nominate works they love, and people whose work they loved. To do that, you have to read it and love it during the year prior to the nominating process. The reward for the author (and the fan) is loving the work, not the decision of who gets the hardware.

With all that in mind, I am starting a list of the eligible works that I have read (in the case of written works) or watched (in the case of dramatic presentations) and either have already reviewed, or will review shortly after they are added to the list. This is an ongoing list: Works or people will be added to the list as I read them, watch them, or become familiar with their work (in the case of nominees for categories like Fan Writer, Fan Artist, or the Campbell). Anyone who wants to suggest potential nominees should do so in the comments, and I will try to get to as many as I can.

Note: Although I have endeavored to place all of the stories and people in the right categories, I'm not a Hugo Administrator, so I cannot be certain of the accuracy of my placement. In the case of the short fiction, I am placing them in the category the publication the appeared in said they were, but sometimes that doesn't align with what the Hugo rules say they are. I'm not going to sit down and do a word count of every story to be sure. I'm also mostly guessing at what does and does not qualify to be a Semiprozine. I know Clarkesworld doesn't qualify in that category any more, but the ones I've listed here still do, I think.

Best Novel (a work of fiction greater than 40,000 words)

Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie
The Buried Life by Carrie Patel
Cress by Marissa Meyer
The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu (translated by Joel Martinsen)
Dawnbreaker by Jay Posey
Dearest by Alethea Kontis
Empire Ascendant by Kameron Hurley
Fairest by Marissa Meyer
The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
Flex by Ferrett Steinmetz
The Flux by Ferret Steinmetz
Galápagos Regained by James Morrow
Golden Son by Pierce Brown
The House of Shattered Wings by Aliette de Bodard
Kalahari by Jessica Khoury
Karen Memory by Elizabeth Bear
The Left-Hand Way by Tom Doyle
Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente
Raising Caine by Charles E. Gannon
The Rebirths of Tao by Wesley Chu
Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho
Seraphina and Shadow Scale by Rachel Hartman
Seveneves by Neal Stephenson
Time Salvager by Wesley Chu
Updraft by Fran Wilde
Uprooted by Naomi Novik
Winter by Marissa Meyer

Best Novella (a work of fiction between 17,500 and 40,000 words)

On the Night of the Robo-Bulls and Zombie Dancers by Nick Wolven, found in Asimov's Science Fiction: Vol. 39, No. 2 (February 2015)
Slow Bullets by Alastair Reynolds
The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps by Kai Ashante Wilson
Trixter by Alethea Kontis
What Has Passed Shall in Kinder Light Appear by Bao Shu (translated by Ken Liu), found in Fantasy & Science Fiction: Vol. 128, Nos. 3 & 4 (March/April 2015)

Best Novelette (a work of fiction between 7,500 and 17,500 words)

The Gun Between the Veryush and the Cloud Mothers by Anna Tambour, found in Asimov's Science Fiction: Vol. 39, Nos. 4 & 5 (April/May 2015)
Lightning Jack's Last Ride by Dale Bailey, found in Fantasy Science Fiction: Vol. 128, Nos. 1 & 2 (January/February 2015)
Lock Up Your Chickens and Daughters - H'ard and Andy Are Come to Town! by Michael Swanwick and Gregory Frost, found in Asimov's Science Fiction: Vol. 39, Nos. 4 & 5 (April/May 2015)
The Long Goodnight of Violet Wild by Catherynne M. Valente, Part 1 found in Clarkesworld: Issue 100 (January 2015)
The Mantis Tattoo by Paul M. Berger, found in Fantasy & Science Fiction: Vol. 128, Nos. 3 & 4 (March/April 2015)
Pareidolia by Kathleen Bartholomew and Kage Baker, found in Asimov's Science Fiction: Vol. 39, No. 3 (March 2015)
Prisoner of Pandarius by Matthew Hughes, found in Fantasy Science Fiction: Vol. 128, Nos. 1 & 2 (January/February 2015)
Portrait of a Witch by Albert E. Cowdrey, found in Fantasy Science Fiction: Vol. 128, Nos. 1 & 2 (January/February 2015)
A Residence for Friendless Ladies by Alice Sola Kim, found in Fantasy & Science Fiction: Vol. 128, Nos. 3 & 4 (March/April 2015)

Best Short Story (a work of fiction of less than 7,500 words)

An Exile of the Heart by Jay Lake, found in Clarkesworld: Issue 100 (January 2015)
The Apartment Dweller's Bestiary by Kij Johnson, found in Clarkesworld: Issue 100 (January 2015)
Cat Pictures Please by Naomi Kritzer, found in Clarkesworld: Issue 100 (January 2015)
The Chart of the Vagrant Mariner by Alan Baxter, found in Fantasy Science Fiction: Vol. 128, Nos. 1 & 2 (January/February 2015)
The Gazelle Who Begged for Her Life by Francis Marion Soty, found in Fantasy Science Fiction: Vol. 128, Nos. 1 & 2 (January/February 2015)
History's Best Places to Kiss by Nik Houser, found in Fantasy Science Fiction: Vol. 128, Nos. 1 & 2 (January/February 2015)
How to Masquerade as a Human Before the Invasion by Jenn Reese, found in Fantasy & Science Fiction: Vol. 128, Nos. 3 & 4 (March/April 2015)
How to Walk Through Historic Graveyards in the Post-Digital Age by Fran Wilde, found in Asimov's Science Fiction: Vol. 39, Nos. 4 & 5 (April/May 2015)
Into the Fiery Planet Gregor Hartmann, found in Fantasy & Science Fiction: Volume 129, Nos. 1 & 2 (July/August 2015)
Last Transaction by Nik Constantine, found in Fantasy & Science Fiction: Vol. 128, Nos. 3 & 4 (March/April 2015)
Little Girls in Bone Museums by Sadie Bruce, found in Fantasy & Science Fiction: Vol. 128, Nos. 3 & 4 (March/April 2015)
The Marriage of the Sea by Liz Williams, found in Asimov's Science Fiction: Vol. 39, Nos. 4 & 5 (April/May 2015)
Out of the Jar by Eric Schwitzgebel, found in Fantasy Science Fiction: Vol. 128, Nos. 1 & 2 (January/February 2015)
Paul and His Son by Joe M. McDermott, found in Asimov's Science Fiction: Vol. 39, Nos. 4 & 5 (April/May 2015)
The Quintessence of Dust by Oliver Buckram, found in Fantasy & Science Fiction: Volume 129, Nos. 1 & 2 (July/August 2015)
A Small Diversion on the Road to Hell by Jonathan L. Howard, found in Fantasy & Science Fiction: Vol. 128, Nos. 3 & 4 (March/April 2015)
Telling Stories to the Sky by Eleanor Arnason, found in Fantasy Science Fiction: Vol. 128, Nos. 1 & 2 (January/February 2015)
Things Worth Knowing by Jay O'Connell, found in Fantasy & Science Fiction: Vol. 128, Nos. 3 & 4 (March/April 2015)
This Is the Way the Universe Ends: With a Bang by Brian Dolton, found in Fantasy & Science Fiction: Vol. 128, Nos. 3 & 4 (March/April 2015)
Three Cups of Grief, by Starlight by Aliette de Bodard, found in Clarkesworld: Issue 100 (January 2015)
Tuesdays by Suzanne Palmer, found in Asimov's Science Fiction: Vol. 39, No. 3 (March 2015)
A Universal Elegy by Tang Fei (translated by John Chu), found in Clarkesworld: Issue 100 (January 2015)
A User’s Guide to Increments of Time by Kat Howard, found in Fantasy & Science Fiction: Vol. 128, Nos. 3 & 4 (March/April 2015)
Willing Flesh by Jay O'Connell, found in Asimov's Science Fiction: Vol. 39, Nos. 4 & 5 (April/May 2015)

Best Nonfiction, Related, or Reference Work

The Call of the Sad Whelkfins by Annalee Flower Horne and Natalie Luhrs
Death Rays and the Popular Media, 1876-1939 by William J. Fanning, Jr.
John Scalzi Is Not a Very Popular Author and I Myself Am Quite Popular: How SJWs Always Lie About Our Comparative Popularity Levels by Alexandra Erin
Letters to Tiptree edited by Alisa Krasnostein and Alexandra Pierce

1 These Are the Voyages is a three volume account of the making of the original Star Trek series. Because neither of the first two volumes were nominated for the Hugo Award, the entire three volume series should be eligible to be nominated for the 2016 Hugo Award.

Best Graphic Story

Ms. Marvel: Crushed by G. Willow Wilson, Elmo Bondoc, and Takeshi Miyazawa
Ms. Marvel: Last Days by G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona
Nimona2 by Noelle Stevenson
ODY-C, Volume 1: Off to Far Ithaca by Matt Fraction and Christian Ward
Order of the Stick (Strips 972 to 1016) by Rich Burlew

1 Both volumes of Lumberjanes were published in 2015, and are thus individually eligible to be nominated for the Hugo Award. The two volumes together form a single story arc, which means they are eligible to be nominated together as a single unit, which I intend to do.
2 Nimona's eligibility for the 2015 Hugo awards is unclear. The web comic technically ended in 2014, and if counted from that date, it would not be eligible for the 2016 Hugo Awards. The graphic novel was published in 2015, and if that is treated as a continuation of the prior work, then it would be eligible.

Best Dramatic Presentation: Long Form

The Avengers: Age of Ultron
Jurassic World
Mad Max: Fury Road
The Martian
Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Best Dramatic Presentation: Short Form

Daredevil: Condemned
Daredevil: Cut Man
Daredevil: Daredevil
Jessica Jones: AKA Sin Bin
Jessica Jones: AKA Smile
Jessica Jones: AKA You're a Winner!
Justice League: Gods and Monsters
President Snakes by The Doubleclicks
Sense 8: I Can't Leave Her
Sense 8: What's Going On?
Supergirl: Human for a Day

Best Professional Editor: Short Form

Neil Clarke
Charles Coleman Finlay
David Steffen
Lynne M. Thomas
Gordon van Gelder
Sheila Williams

Best Professional Editor: Long Form

Claire Eddy
Sheila Gilbert
Liz Gorinsky
Anne Groell
David G. Hartwell
Beth Meacham
Patrick Neilsen Hayden

Best Professional Artist

Brooke Allen
Adrian Alphona
Elmo Bondoc
Valentine de Landro
Marc Laming
Takeshi Miyazawa
Steve Pugh
Stjepan Sejic
Fiona Staples
Noelle Stevenson
Christian Ward
Jake Wyatt
Chip Zdarsky

Best Semi-Prozine

Apex Magazine [no longer eligible]
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
Lightspeed Magazine [no longer eligible]
Strange Horizons

Best Fanzine

File 770
Journey Planet
SF Mistressworks
SF Revu

Best Fan Writer

Liz Bourke who blogs at Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
Alexandra Erin who blogs at Blue Author Is About to Write
Natalie Luhrs who blogs at Pretty Terrible
Foz Meadows who blogs at Shattersnipe: Malcontent & Rainbows
Abigail Nussbaum who blogs at Asking the Wrong Questions
Alexandra Pierce who blogs at Randomly Yours, Alex

Best Fan Artist

Savannah O'Connor who did the artwork for these shirts
Brian Patterson who has art on d20Monkey
Lorraine Schleter who has art on Deviant Art, Tumblr, and her website Lor Illustration

Best Fancast

Alethea Kontis' Fairy Tale Rants
The Audio Guide to Babylon 5
Dive into Worldbuilding
Galactic Suburbia Podcast
Sword and Laser
Under Discussion: The Undergophers Podcast

John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer

Pierce Brown
Liz Colter
S.L. Huang
Carmen Maria Machado [sadly ineligible]
Megan E. O'Keefe
Carrie Patel
Noelle Stevenson
Andy Weir [eligibility unclear]
Alyssa Wong
John F. Zeigler

What Are the Hugo Awards?

Go to previous year's nominees: 2015

Random Thoughts     2016 Hugo Award Nominees     Book Award Reviews     Home

Tuesday, August 25, 2015

Biased Opinion - 2015 Hugo Awards Post Mortem

What Happened at the Hugo Awards?

It was a rout.

Strike that. It was a complete and total rout.

At the 2015 Hugo Awards, with 5,950 ballots cast, the fans of science fiction rallied to decisively repudiate the slate-tactics of the interrelated Sad and Rabid Puppy groups, relegating every single non-Dramatic Presentation Hugo nominee from the slates to a dark corner behind "No Award". It was a comprehensive rejection of the idea that as long as a group can work together as a bloc to pack mediocre to miserable nominees onto the Hugo ballot, they deserve to get a trophy as a result.

After using bloc voting tactics to get their nominees on the ballot, the Puppies suffered an almost complete and total loss in the actual voting, in large part because the nominees they put on the ballot were, taken as a group, so very weak. This is something of a missed opportunity for the Pups, as their core narrative was originally either that excellent works by politically conservative authors were being kept off the Hugo ballot by a secret cabal of insiders (for which they provided zero evidence) who were bent on rewarding the "right" kind of books by the "right" kind of authors, or that science fiction had strayed too far from its roots and that rollicking adventure stories with rocket ships and space marines needed to be recognized by the awards again.

But the stories that the Pups placed on the Hugo ballot were mostly neither excellent, nor rollicking adventures. The stories nominated by the Puppy slates ranged from the merely mediocre, such as Kary English's Totaled or Jim Butcher's Skin Game, down to stories that were so awful that they made one wonder how they actually got published. The only real point the Pups made with their nominations is that if their nominees represented the best that conservative science fiction can offer, then they haven't been overlooked by the Hugo voters: They have been accurately judged and found lacking.

Further, very few of the stories nominated amount to rollicking adventures. Butcher's Dresden Files novel fits the description more or less, and maybe one or two of the short fiction, such as Steve Diamond's A Single Samurai, could possibly be described that way, but for the most part the slate-nominated stories simply were not. Anderson's The Dark Between the Stars was plodding and tedious, while stories such as Rinehart's Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust, Earth to Aluvium and Antonelli's On a Spiritual Plain were simply slow and boring. The slate of nominees the Pups offered to Hugo voters consisted of stories that were mediocre to bad and often dull and uninspiring.

This isn't new for the Puppies. In 2014, when Larry Correia ran the "Sad Puppies 2" slate, he managed to get a handful of works on the 2014 Hugo ballot, and they too ranged from mediocre to terrible. And the Hugo voters read those works and ranked them accordingly. The Puppy slate makers have had two bites at the apple so far1, and both times the Puppies have pushed works that were simply not particularly good. The Pups have grabbed two chances to impress the Hugo voters with their selections, and each time they chose to nominate a collection of crap, burning away any goodwill they may have had with the voters. Based upon their established track record, I suspect that in the future, any Puppy-touted nominees will be justifiably regarded with skepticism at best, and quite likely outright derision.

As usual for WorldCon, the Hugo Administrators released the voting data almost immediately after the award ceremony was completed, and the data shows that many of the Puppy narratives that have been bandied about the last several months simply don't hold up to scrutiny.

How Big Was the Rout?

Complete and total. If this had been a little league baseball game, the mercy rule would have been invoked. Not only did no Puppy nominee other than Guardians of the Galaxy win, none of the others even came close.

A brief summary of the rules for Hugo voting: To determine who the winner in each category is, the Hugo Administrators use what is called "Australian Instant Runoff Voting". When each voter submits their ballot, they rank the nominees in preferential order, putting their top choice first, their second choice next, and so on. Under the Hugo rules, voting for "No Award" is always an option, and can be ranked just like any other nominee. After the votes are cast, the first place finishers are tallied. If one nominee gets a majority of votes, they win. Because there are usually five nominees in each category (plus the aforementioned option of No Award), this rarely happens. If no one wins a majority, the nominee who received the lowest number of votes is eliminated and their ballots are redistributed among the remaining nominees using the second choice preferences from those voters. This process is repeated until one nominee has a majority of votes. This process usually requires three, four, or even five "passes" to determine a winner - for example in this year's Hugo Awards, Best Novel and Best Long Form Dramatic Presentation required five "passes" to declare a first place finisher, and Best Fan Artist required three. The Hugo administrators then set aside all of the first place votes for the top finisher and rerun the process to determine the second, third, fourth, and fifth place finishers.

There were five categories in which the only nominees were drawn from the Sad or Rabid Puppy slates. The significance of the fact that "No Award" won on the first pass should be readily apparent. And in most of these Puppy-exclusive categories, the outcome wasn't even close.

No Award VotesOther VotesNo Award Percentage
Best Novella
Best Short Story
Best Related Work
Best Editor, Short Form
Best Editor, Long Form

The closest the Puppy nominees, as a group, came to equaling the total number of No Award votes was in the Best Long Form Editor category, where a switch of 44 votes from No Award to the other candidates would have prevented No Award from taking a first round majority. Looking at the remaining passes through the category, it seems unlikely that even if 44 voters had placed Weisskopf first on their ballot rather than voting for No Award, she probably still would not have ended up beating No Award for the win. Such a switch probably would have resulted in a number of passes being required, but it seems unlikely that it would have changed the ultimate outcome.

As decisive as these figures are, they don't tell the whole story. In any category other than the two Dramatic Presentation in which there were non-Puppy and Puppy nominees, all of the non-Puppies finished above No Award, while all of the Puppy picks finished below it. Not only that, once the placement of the non-Puppy picks was made, it only took one pass for No Award to win over the remaining nominees on the ballot. For example, in the race for position four in the Best Novel category, after The Three-Body Problem, The Goblin Emperor, and Ancillary Sword had placed first, second, and third, the vote count looked like this:

No Award
Skin Game
The Dark Between the Stars

In the best fancast category, after Galactic Suburbia and Tea and Jeopardy had claimed the one and two spots, the race for third place looked like this:

No Award
The Sci-Phi Show
Adventures in SciFi Publishing
Dungeon Crawlers Radio

This pattern is repeated throughout the Hugo results. With the exception of the Short and Long Form Dramatic Presentation categories, No Award won on the first pass any time there were only Puppy nominated picks left on the ballot. In short, the voters comprehensively rejected the Puppy nominees.

Did the Non-Puppy Voters Vote as a Bloc?

In a word, no.

There was certainly substantial consensus among non-Puppy voters that the Puppy nominees were undeserving of awards, and a fair amount of consensus that most of the Puppy nominees were undeserving of their places on the ballot, but imagining this to be a bloc ignores two salient facts (1) consensus is not a bloc, and (2) there was noticeable variability in how non-Puppy voters responded to the slate-driven Puppy nominees.

As I pointed out earlier, for the most part the Puppy nominated works were simply terrible. In a handful of cases, the Puppy slate seems to have almost accidentally pushed something that rose to the level of mediocrity on the ballot. The interesting thing is that in those cases, the voters reacted accordingly. By way of example, both the Best Novella and Best Related Work categories, which were populated entirely by Puppy picks, were widely seen as being comprised of nominees that are fairly bad pieces of work. In those categories the voters picked No Award as the first place choice on their ballot 66.5% of the time in Best Related Work and 65.5% of the time in Best Novella. The overall condemnation of the quality of the nominated works in those categories was resoundingly clear.

By contrast, the Best Short Story, and the two Best Editor categories were seen as having a few nominees who could be regarded as "not so terrible". Kary English' story Totaled was seen as being at least competently written, while Mike Resnick in the Short Form Editor category, and Toni Weisskopf and Sheila Gilbert in the Long Form editor categories were viewed as being at least somewhat credible choices. And this is reflected in the voting. In the Best Short Story category, No Award only placed first on 58% of the ballots. That's a convincing win, but it isn't as huge as it was in Related Work and Novella. In the Best Short Form Editor category, No Award only won with 55.1% of the vote, and in the Best Editor Long Form category, No Award only won on the first pass with 50.9% of the vote. When the Puppies nominated better works, the voters responded by supporting them more. The slate-produced works didn't get enough support to overcome No Award, but it is clear that many of the non-Puppy Hugo voters were making an assessment based upon the quality of the nominees and voting accordingly.

One can also note that a fair number of voters who were probably not Puppy supporters voted for specific Puppy picks, so long as those picks were of at least middling quality. I estimate that the combined strength of the two Puppy blocs represented at most somewhere between 900 to 1,000 voters, but in many categories the Puppy nominees got more votes than that in the first pass, even if they didn't ultimately end up finishing ahead of No Award. And the votes were not evenly distributed among the nominees. Once one edits out the putative Puppy votes, it becomes clear that those nominees generally regarded as being at least passable had more votes than their competition. In Best Short Story, for example, Theodore Beale instructed his slavish followers to vote for Steve Rzasa's Turncoat (published, coincidentally by Beale's own press Castalia House), and it got 525 votes in the first round, but Kary English's Totaled garnered 874 votes, revealing that a fair number of non-Puppy voters found her story to be the best of a fairly weak field. In Best Short Form editor, Beale gave marching orders to his minions that they vote for him for the trophy, and wound up with 586 first place votes, but industry veteran (and multiple Hugo winner) Mike Resnick earned what support could be had from non-Puppy voters, and wound up with 873 first place votes. In Long Form editor, Toni Weisskopf got 1216 first place votes, and Sheila Gilbert got 754. In short, some non-Puppy voters decided to vote for those nominees who were of higher quality than others. In many cases it was picking the best of a bad bunch, but this is clear evidence that many of the non-Puppy Hugo voters were working with what they had and trying to make a decision based upon perceived quality.

Further, after No Award had won, many of the remaining nominees picked up votes. While every voter does not list nominees after they voted No Award2, some do, preferring to be on the record as to what should be ranked afterwards. In every category in which there were only Puppy nominees, between 314 and 487 voters expressed additional preferences, with the bulk of those preferences being in favor of the works that were generally acknowledged to be the cream of the sour milk that was the Puppy nominees. Totaled picked up 365 out of 487 post-No Award votes. Flow picked up 360 out of 471 post-No Award votes. Of the 314 post-No Award votes in the best Long Form editor category, 134 went to Sheila Gilbert, and 92 went to Toni Weisskopf. It seems relatively clear that even among voters who made No Award their first choice, there was willingness to acknowledge that some of the Puppy nominated works were better than others.

Conversely, works that were generally regarded as the worst on the ballot received a minimal boost from post-No Award rankings. The Parliament of Beasts and Birds only got 12 of 487 post-No Award votes. John C. Wright's three novellas only received a combined total of 53 out of 471 post-No award votes. Wisdom from My Internet, widely regarded as quite possibly the worst Hugo nominee in history, only got 23 of 327 post-No Award votes. Theodore Beale, nominated in both editor categories and whose editing skills have been widely derided, only got a 28 vote post-No Award bump in the Short Form race, and 38 post-No award votes for Long Form. While many of those who chose No Award as their first choice seem to have been willing to reward quality works, very few seem to have been inclined to throw their votes behind the very dregs of the Puppy slates.

Some Oddities That May Be of Interest Only to Me

The big story of the 2015 Hugo Awards was, of course, the domination of No Award over the nominees from the two Puppy slates. Hidden inside the statistics there are, however, a couple of little details that I found interesting.

The first crops up in the Best Fanzine category, where the website Black Gate was pushed onto the ballot by the Rabid Puppy slate. After much deliberation, Black Gate elected to withdraw from the Hugo ballot (much to Theodore Beale's apparent consternation), but did so after the deadline by which they could be taken off of the official ballots and replaced. Therefore, the Hugo ballot went to the voters with Black Gate still on the ballot, but with a request from the editors of the site not to vote for them. Even so, Black Gate got 489 first place votes. Journey Planet won the category, and No Award came in second, but Black Gate ended up in third place, taking the top position among Puppy nominees in the category. Of the people who voted for Journey Planet to take the top spot, 95 of them put Black Gate as their second choice, and of the people who voted for No Award as their first or second choice, 134 picked Black Gate third. I don't know where these votes came from - it is unclear if these votes are Sad Puppy voters simply choosing Black Gate as the best of the choices from the slates, Rabid Puppy voters choosing Black Gate because it was the only solely Rabid Puppy pick to make the ballot in this category, or non-Puppy voters voting for Black Gate either as an assessment of quality or as kudos for their principled attempt to withdraw their slate-garnered nomination, or likely some combination of all of these sources - but what is clear is that Black Gate outperformed every other Puppy nominee in the category. Not only that, it wasn't really a close race: In the competition between Black Gate and Tangent Online, the nominee with next highest vote total in the race for third place, Black Gate finished with 737 votes to Tangent's 415.

In the Long Form Editor category, Beale instructed his minions to vote for Toni Weisskopf first, and placed himself further down his instructional list. Despite this, 166 voters placed Beale first on their ballots, putting him ahead of Jim Minz, who only got 58 first place nods. The really interesting action in this category took place after No Award won and the race was on for second place, which took three passes and let us know exactly who the people who ranked Jim Minz and Theodore Beale first (or second behind No Award) on their ballots voted. The race for second place looked like this:

Pass 1Pass 2Pass 3
Toni Weisskopf
Sheila Gilbert
Anne Sowards
Theodore Beale
Jim Minz

After Minz was eliminated, 26 of his votes went to Weisskopf, 18 went to Gilbert, 9 went to Sowards, 3 went to Beale, and in something of a surprising twist, 14 went to no preference or No Award. Given that Minz and Weisskopf are both editors for Baen, and would generally be expected to draw from the same pool of supporters, the somewhat middling loyalty shown by his voters towards Weisskopf seems unusual. What seems really odd is the number of apparent Minz fans who weren't even willing to cast a secondary vote in anyone's favor, and instead preferred no one get their vote if he did not.

The real interesting action comes from Beale's supporters. When he was eliminated from contention, he had 207 votes. Out of those supporters, 85 went to Weisskopf as an alternate choice, which makes sense given Beale's public support for her nomination. Only 20 chose to throw their support to Gilbert, while a paltry 7 went to Sowards. But the story here is the fact that 95 of Beale's supporters elected to list no one after him at this point. This number is not enough to have changed the outcome of the race but it means that almost half of Beale's supporters chose to leave their ballot blank rather than vote for Weisskopf, Gilbert, or Sowards. I'm not going to say that there was definitely misogyny at work here, but the implication is pretty obvious.

How Many Puppies Were There?

There are theoretically two groups of Puppies. The first group is the Sad Puppies, led by Brad Torgersen, and a number of other mostly conservative, mostly mediocre authors. The second group is the Rabid Puppies, led by Theodore Beale, a loathsome bigoted individual with delusions of grandeur. The two groups overlap by quite a bit, both in terms of leadership and, as far as one can tell, membership. Noted homophobe John C. Wright, for example, was touted by both group's slates, and many of the voters who voted for nominees from one slate appear to have voted for nominees from the other as well. Even so, estimating the relative strength of the two groups is worthwhile, as their long-term responses to the results of Saturday night's awards may vary to a certain degree.3

Rabid Puppies

In most of the categories there was such substantial overlap between Sad and Rabid Puppy nominees that it is difficult to separate out how many from each group voted for each nominee. One thing that makes estimating Rabid Puppy strength somewhat easier is that Beale gave his followers marching orders, telling them which nominee he was voting for, and telling them they should vote for those nominees as well. Notably he stated that the adherents to his cult should vote for One Bright Star to Guide Them in the Best Novella Category, Turncoat in the Best Short Story category, The Hot Equations in the Best Related Work category, and himself in the Best Editor Short Form Category.

The most straightforward markers are the Best Editor categories where Beale put himself forward as a nominee, but the Sad Puppy slate-makers did not. In the Long Form category, Beale directed his minions to vote for Toni Weisskopf, while in the Short Form category he touted himself as the person to vote for. Given that Beale is generally a loathsome individual, and most of the Sad Puppy voters probably voted for other nominees, his vote total in the first pass through the balloting can be taken as a reasonable proxy for the upper limit of Rabid Puppy voters. That number is 586. I suspect that some small number of Sad Puppy voters ranked Beale first on their ballot, and it is possible that some voters unaware of the controversy and unfamiliar with Beale may have ranked him first, but those numbers are likely to be small.

With 586 as an upper bound, we can turn to the other categories and see how many of Beale's supporters followed his lead. In Best Novella, One Bright Star to Guide Them had 556 first place votes, in Best Short Story, Turncoat had 525 first place votes, and in Best Related Work The Hot Equations got 595 first place votes. Given that The Hot Equations was regarded as one of the better works in a miserable field, it seems plausible that a certain portion of its initial support came from non-Rabid Puppy sources, we can discount the 595 number as being an overly large estimate for the Rabid Puppies. The remaining range is between 525 and 586, and while I doubt that every one of those votes came from a Rabid Puppy, it is likely that the majority did, and there's no really good way to figure out what sliver of support came from some other voting population.

So there is a core group of Rabid Puppies that possibly comes in at somewhere between 525 and 586, and probably slightly lower than that who will vote Beale's way. Given the fact that Beale phrased the entire Rabid Puppy slate as nothing more than a culture war, and has stated that his objective was to "leave the Hugo awards a smoking ruin", one can expect that this cadre of voters could mostly stay intact for the next year. On the other hand, they may get distracted by some other culture war target and scamper off to another fruitless frontal assault on reality. For those who stay, running into the stiff-arm of fandom time and again may cause them to become discouraged at ponying up supporting membership fees every year in order to suffer repeated losses, but it may take some time. Although it is clear that they know they have no hope of ever actually pushing anyone to win a Hugo Award, even the most dedicated follower will find a Quixotic campaign in search of a Pyrrhic victory to be difficult to sustain.

Sad Puppies

Accurately assessing how many Sad Puppy voters there were is slightly more difficult. Since the Sad Puppy campaign didn't have quite as polarizing a figure as Beale nominated who wasn't also nominated by the Rabid Puppy slate, figuring out how many Sad Puppy supporters there are is more complicated. Dave Freer as Fan Writer and Steve Diamond's story A Single Samurai are among the few Sad Puppy nominees that made it onto the ballot without also being Rabid Puppy nominees. In the first pass-through in the vote counting in their respective categories, Freer garnered 251 votes, while A Single Samurai received 386. This gives a rough estimate of Sad Puppy numbers, although it is not completely precise as one might expect some number of Sad Puppies to have voted for the other nominees in those categories.

To refine this estimate, one might look to the ultimate vote totals for A Single Samurai, Turncoat, and On a Spiritual Plain, once all of the passes had been completed. A Single Samurai topped out at 1,111 votes, Turncoat managed 1,064, and On a Spiritual Plain finished with 1,040. Subtracting the Rabid Puppy upper estimate of 586 from these numbers gives figures of 525, 478, and 454. Assuming that some small number of non-Puppies voted one or more these stories above No Award4, means that a rough estimate of upper bound of the total number of Sad Puppies might somewhere in the 450 to 500 range. After No Award was eliminated these three stories picked up a combined total of 110 voters, and presumably very few of them came from Sad Puppy or Rabid Puppy voters. Discounting those votes from the final total reduces the Sad Puppy range to between 340 and 490 voters, which seems like a reasonable estimate.

The question is what these voters will do in the future. Assuming they are fans, and not merely culture warriors, one has to suppose that they hope to actually vote for Hugo winners. This may be overly optimistic - after all many of the Puppy leaders in the just completed 2015 Hugo Awards were unwilling or unable to explain what they actually liked about the books they pushed onto the Hugo ballot with their slate, even when asked directly. If they are actually fans, one has to wonder how long they will tilt at windmills with the knowledge that they simply cannot win. There were 5,950 ballots cast in the 2015 Hugo Awards. Roughly 400 to 500 were Sad Puppy supporters, roughly another 500 or so were their fellow travelers from the Rabid Puppy brigade, leaving almost five thousand non-Puppy voters, the vast majority of whom were perfectly willing to vote No Award when confronted with a ballot of Hugo nominees populated by slate-supported works of dubious quality.

I suppose that they might decide to try to recruit more voters congenial to their point of view, but that seems to be unlikely to bear much fruit. The Sad Puppy leaders spent enormous amounts of time promoting and defending their set of nominees, exhorting their followers to sign up and vote in the awards. Head Rabid Puppy Beale made numerous blog posts on the subject, ginned up phony controversy about editors at Tor, and even gave those followers who became involved badges as a reward for loyalty. In short, they flogged the horse as hard as they could, and came up with about a thousand people willing to pay the supporting membership fee and vote. Meanwhile, mainstream fans signed up to participate at a rate sufficient to result in a six to one majority despite much more modest active recruiting efforts. In fact, the best spur for non-Puppies to become involved and vote were the antics of the various Puppies. It seems clear, based upon the results of the voting, that the Puppy claims to represent "real" fandom were not only wrong, they were very wrong.

I suspect that by this time next year, many of the current Sad Puppy supporters will have quietly separated themselves from the group, abandoning it as a bad idea. It seems likely that very few authors, editors, or artists not already fully committed to one or the other groups will be willing to allow themselves to be put on either slate, and even some who think the Sad Puppies are a great idea may decline as well. After all, getting a Hugo nomination and then finishing well behind No Award is probably not particularly enjoyable, or particularly good for one's career. No one likes to set themselves up for a certain loss. Few people are willing to continue to work for a persistently losing cause. The Sad Puppies have been at this for three years now, and they have lost every time.

I expect there to be slates next year, but I think they will be less substantial than they were this year, mostly because one can already see some of the Sad Puppies becoming fatigued at the effort of maintaining their rage. Some Puppy proponents have claimed that their group represented the silent majority of fans. Now that the numbers have shown that they are actually a relatively small splinter group, I expect some in their number to become further demoralized. I expect that by the time I am doing this type of analysis next year, the number of Puppy voters will be slightly less, and the number of non-Puppy voters will be somewhat more.

1 Sad Puppies 1, which took place in 2013, doesn't really count, as it was mostly unsuccessful at getting nominees on the Hugo ballot.
2 I do not. Once I have determined that No Award is the best remaining choice, my stance is that I simply do not care which of the remaining nominees (if any) end up winning.
3 In the short term, the Puppy reactions are very predictable, ranging from silly declarations of victory because "No Award" was what they wanted all along, to frothy rage over their candidates being denied the Hugo Awards they were due.
4 For example, 27 voters ranked Antonelli's On a Spiritual Plain first, but either expressed no preference or voted for No Award second, while 45 voters appear to have ranked Wright's The Parliament of Beasts and Birds first or second, but ranked No Award below that.

Biased Opinions     2015 Hugo Award Finalists     Book Award Reviews     Home

Monday, August 24, 2015

Musical Monday - Miri by Five Year Mission

After City on the Edge of Forever, the Five Year Mission Dream Set needs something to pick up the pace and lighten the mood. So how about a song about an episode in which kids live for hundreds of years, but suffer from a horrible sickness as soon as they reach their long delayed puberty? Yeah, that sounds about right, so the next song in the lineup is Miri. So go bonk-bonk on the head and enjoy.

Previous Musical Monday: City on the Edge of Forever by Five Year Mission
Subsequent Musical Monday: The Doomsday Machine by Five Year Mission

Dream Five Year Mission Set

Musical Monday Playlists     Five Year Mission     Musical Monday     Home


Content-Type: application/http; msgtype=response

WARC-Identified-Payload-Type: application/xhtml+xml

WARC-Truncated: length

WARC-Type: response

text:
Skip to content

NGA: “Making” Our Future through Manufacturing

Nebraska Capitol BuildingStudents and teachers may ask themselves if there is any future in studying for manufacturing related fields in the United States. A report recently released by the NGA (National Governor’s Association) makes it seem that state governments, particularly, support and expect growth in U.S. manufacturing.

The report, “‘Making’ Our Future: What States Are Doing to Encourage Growth in Manufacturing through Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Investment” examines the ways that states are making an effort to focus on advanced manufacturing to supply jobs and support businesses within their borders.

The study resulted when teams from eight states, some of which border Nebraska, participated in a rigorous year-long strategic planning process, which supported advanced manufacturing.

The Result
These states — California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Kansas, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York and Pennsylvania — did the following as a result:

  • Established new programs that supported manufacturing
  • Redesigned organizations or created new ones entirely
  • Passed legislation
  • Secured funding allocations for their manufacturing priorities

Throughout the process, the NGA collaborated with and received funding from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology Manufacturing Extension Partnership Program and the U.S Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration.

All signs point to state governments becoming increasingly supporting of advanced manufacturing and that the federal government is supportive, as well. Take, for example, the publication of “America’s Investment in the Future” by the National Science Foundation, an independent federal agency created by congress. A portion of this publication states, “The NSF continues to invest not only in the development of manufacturing processes and systems, but also in new approaches to education.”

The NSF’s “investment” in American manufacturing is made clear and it’s one that is substantiated by other recent reports about the dwindling of offshoring and the return of manufacturing to the U.S.

Programs such as Dream It! Do It! Nebraska and the Nebraska Advanced Manufacturing Coalition are making an effort to bring manufacturing career opportunities that exist, and will continue to expand in the future, to students looking for careers involving high achievement, creativity and STEM aptitude. These skilled positions in U.S. manufacturing will continue to require a body of workers and pay top dollar.

photo credit: jimmywayne via photopin cc

Posted in Blog.

Tagged with , , , .

0 Responses

Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.

Some HTML is OK

or, reply to this post via trackback.

warcinfo:
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-179-198-159.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-13
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for March 2018
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf


WARC-Identified-Payload-Type: text/html

text:
Wednesday, June 22, 2011

A quick update

I do have another corner of the kitchen to talk about, but I thought I'd do a quick post about cleaning my desk today.

It looks soooo much better now, don't you think?

Monday, June 20, 2011

Knock, knock?

No, it's not a joke, I'm just coming back in from a long absence and thought it would be polite. :)

I've started up here and there with a plan or a poa or basics, but I just wasn't getting anywhere.  And I could blame it on illness and things, or I could just suck it up and admit that I'm a lazy wench most of the time and just wasn't hauling my ample butt up out of this chair (or bed, more likely) to get any real work done.  I'm not sure what bit me Saturday night, but suddenly I thought I was really ready to get moving.  I decided to start in one end/corner of the house and move out from there doing anything and everything I could reasonably do along the way.

I woke up Sunday morning, ran over to the dollar store across town (which of course uses "run" in the sense that I drove, because there's no running from me, especially across our admittedly small town), and plunked down a bunch of money on cleaning supplies and came home to get to work.  Incidentally, all that stuff I bought?  2 things I thought I was out of I had several of, 2 things I thought I had I can't find, and in the first 5 minutes the new long-handled duster went missing.  Oh, and I still don't have anything that will cut through grease effectively.  And so it goes.

I really did work yesterday.  Probably a solid 4 hours all together.  What I got done was a generally unused, small corner of my kitchen - but it's DONE, man.  I'll give you the tour:

Oh yes, let's start here.  I was mixing dilutions of a few cleaners into empty spray bottles, when I spilled straight-up bleach onto my navy stretch capris. *headsmack*

I remembered to start taking pics after I moved the popcorn machine out of this corner and picked up the first few things - including the lid to a round, covered trash can which we haven't owned in about 2 years.  This is possibly the "deepest, darkest" corner of my house, kind of an afterthought corner in the back end of the kitchen.  The only thing it's good for is storing the popcorn machine, and as such has been much neglected an abused.

After picking up, sweeping, and scrubbing, this is as good as the floor gets.  The vinyl flooring came with the house all scratched up that badly,  I swear.  The tall piece of wood leaning in the corner is part of the door frame of C's room...a story for another day.  It's staying there, out of the way, until I work my way around to there and figure out how to reattach it decently.  Or maybe it's the one from my room?  One of us is missing part of a door frame.

That's my large freezer on the left, which at one point - when my desk was in this part of the house - was "cleverly" used as a white board.  The last brainstorm session stayed too long and now it won't come off.  At least you can't see it from the rest of the kitchen.  Oh, and one of the kids *coughCcough* added to it later, I found.  The hanging cords were disGUSting.  I barely remembered to unplug them before cleaning, but I did.

There are 2 windows in this corner, which was lovely when I spent the day there at my desk.  Now, they're really just pointless.  Worse, they're awful.  I cleaned the glass and trim inside, but they're no better to look through than when I started.  It doesn't photograph well, but the screens are torn, and there are hundreds of bugs, leaves, and other things stuck between the screens or storm windows and the interior pane.  I don't even know how to clean that all out.  I'll work on that later, when I'm cleaning outside I guess.

Here is the aforementioned popcorn machine.  It, itself, still needs to be cleaned, but it's back in its home now that the surroundings are much better.  It's hiding the cleaned and better contained cords.

Once again I started moving things before taking the opening picture.  Perhaps you can see above that there were random dishes stacked to the left of the microwave and others on top, in addition to Santa there.

The microwave was actually worse than it appears, because half the mess was on the glass plate that I'd already put in the dishwasher with everything else I moved from this area.  This poor microwave, by the way, is from around 1983.  I distinctly remember when we got it; it was such a "new" thing that the appliance store that sold them held cooking classes free with purchase for something like 6 weeks, to teach new owners how to use them.  I used to have the microwave fudge recipe from a class memorized.  The fancy button settings don't work anymore, the meat probe thermometer is long gone, and it isn't even-heating anymore, but by golly it's still kicking.

The left side done...

...the right side, not so much.  Those boxes there have been sitting, unpacked, since my mom moved in, in 2007.  I found Christmas plates, crystal glasses, and an almost full (large) bottle of rum.

The microwave done...

...and there it is.  That's a lot of Pediasure on the left, that used to be stacked on the floor in front of the microwave.  The picture on the windowsill is an old one of the family from when C was a baby; I found it with the boxes and cleaned it up.  Inside the buffet is almost entirely Christmas dishes, so I'll clean those and the interior shelves in November when I get them out.  There's no need to open it until then so I'll leave it alone for now.

So that was my Sunday triumph: one useless corner, one piece of furniture (exterior), and one countertop appliance.  Onward and upward from here.


text:
The Shifting Image of Champagne

Champagne Louis Roederer’s release of its first “Brut Nature” wine, adorned with a minimalist label and a narrative that reads more “grower” than Grands Marques, has cracked open a discussion about the changing identity of Champagne and its values.

We’ve all been cautioned not to judge a book by its cover, and the same principle generally applies to wine. But who hasn’t bought a bottle based solely upon the image printed on the label?

Even if it doesn’t always indicate what to expect from a wine stylistically, label art exists for a reason: Whether in the form of a cupcake or the etching of a fancy chateau, it imparts some kind of story or message that informs our experience of drinking the bottle. Often, the idea isn’t so subtle. It might prove difficult, however, for the average drinker to decode the meaning behind a label like that of the celebrated Champagne firm Louis Roederer’s new 2006 “Brut Nature” bottling.


text:
City Guide to Berlin

22 September, 2014

David Wiedemann, owner of Berlin’s most well-known bartending school, runs this drinking establishment.

Reingold bar was named after a famous luxury highspeed train that was assembled decades, if not a century, ago next door in the former Borsigwerke (train station).

The bar has young and eager staff, a great spirits and cocktail selection and a loyal following. To cope with the increasing number of event requests, Wiedemann has just added a separate micro club to the location.

Reingold is definitely a fixture in Berlin Mitte’s nightlife.

Amano BarAuguststr. 43, Berlin

Established by Mario Grünenfelder, Amano bar is somewhat the darling of Berlin’s bar scene. You’ll very likely bump into other Berlin bartenders on their day off here.

The reason for that is its central location, the great and friendly staff and the attention to detail applied to every cocktail produced.

Amano bar is a hotel bar without the feel of one. Towards the weekends it becomes a packed clubby space with DJs taking over the reins. If you don’t get a seat at Amano you can now simply walk over the street, where Grünenfelder has opened another ambitious bar project called Dean.

Stagger Lee, Nollendorfstr. 27, Berlin

This beautiful Western themed bar was opened by former Reingold employees and managed to claim a Bar of the Year award in the minimum of time.

It has been named after a popular American folk song. A beautiful old cashier greets patrons on entering the space.

Staying within the American theme the cocktail programme centres around bourbon and rye with the house cocktail being a delicious julep variation. But Stagger Lee does offer Bavarian beer from the tap, too.

It’s an easy-going place frequented by many regulars. Berlin is still a city where you can smoke in bars and Stagger Lee is no exception. The bar offers a separate room for smokers.

On the weekends Stagger Lee often has live music. It’s definitely one of those places that has managed to fill a gap in Berlin’s bar portfolio.

Immertreu, Christburger str. 6, Berlin

No Berlin district has been derided by the German ‘feuilleton’ to such an extent as Prenzlauer Berg.

Twenty years of heavy gentrification have turned the former rugged liberal refuge for artists into a clean and shining bourgeois haven.

The illegal bars and clubs of the 90s are long gone. Now, a vegan and organic food-craving, noise-sensitive middle class populates the area. Accordingly, Prenzlauer Berg’s culinary scene is regarded as saturated and boring.

So it’s somewhat of a relief that there are bars like Immertreu. Owned and run by award-winning mixologist Ricardo Albrecht, Immertreu is a place that so far has managed to steer clear of the branded limelight of cocktail competitions and industry events.

It’s a place that simply is about the customer.

Tier, Weserstr. 42, Berlin

This bar is a newcomer to the premium cocktail bar scene and it deserves to be pulled into the spotlight.

Joe Bates

A mixed bag looking ahead

There is a refreshing sense of optimism surrounding the travel retail business which I haven’t seen for quite a few years.

Click for more »


text:
Blog Post

2004 chevy Aveo Manual

Recent Uploads 2010 repair manuals if looking book chevy aveo repair manuals form, that case come correct site. 2000 Ford Focus Zetec 16v Owner’s Manual 1996 Mustang 2004 Cadillac XLR Chevy Transfer Case Shift Lever 4Wd Clip we underneath vehicle. 1992 Cavalier Sunroof Seal on account of the eve 1997 Truck Brakes first disconnect battery using 10mm wrench. How To Replace A Power Steering remove 2 bolts bracket top using12mm 15mm bottom. Success! You ve found OEM replacement parts at 1AAuto save $2,642 aveo. Com search over 1,400 listings find best deals.

2010 Chevy Aveo Repair Manuals logisticsskillsservices com

Always Free Shipping cargurus analyzes 6 million daily. 100% Satisfaction Guarantee used parts the following models offered by 2500 pickup - 30 3100 3500 3600 3800 astro avalanche 1500. Ships from USA suwannee salvage handles all foreign domestic car truck parts. Message boards for Aveo, Sonic and its global siblings Daewoo Kalos / Gentra, Holden Barina, Pontiac Wave G3, Suzuki Swift+ General Motors Company, also known as GM, is largest auto company headquartered in United States America specialize gm are constantly updating our inventory continuing effort to.

How do you replace starter on 2004 Chevy Aveo

Founded 1908 Flint, Michigan, company reviews 2011 where consumers can detailed economy, transmission safety. This Service uses Car-Part Interchange By clicking SEARCH you agree to Terms chevrolet. ©Car-Part don’t risk your safety driving silverado with dim headlights. Com McCarthy Olathe stocks a huge variety new & used cars sale have halogen hid bulbs need well led conversion kits.

Find low prices trucks other near Kansas City need cruise control kit chevy, buick or gmc vehicle? visit cruise control store large selection kits many different models. [PDF] 1984 Yamaha Vision Manual waste time hunting tahoe. Pdf 2013 Hyundai Elantra Aveo Guide whether it’s scheduled maintenance job, we what need. Lee Administration Read Motor Trend s Chevrolet review get latest information models, prices, specs, MPG, fuel economy photos below will free pdf files select years s-10 automobile john elway dealer englewood, serving denver nearby areas.

Conveniently compare local dealer dealership today call now! 2010 Repair Manuals If looking book chevy aveo repair manuals form, that case come correct site


text:
Saturday, June 1, 2013

Hey so we started this blog because we have all graduated and are going to be headed to LA and who knows where else.  Hopefully this blog will help us stay in touch with our awesome original fan base!  Follow us and share us because we love your support!
Here is what we are up to lately:
Provo Girls Vlogs:

Galaxy Chronicles:

And some more videos headed your way like Truth or Dare Brenden, Maya Angelou and more favs!

1 comment:


text:
Hot Shot Watering Nozzle

Watering Nozzle
£28.80 inc VAT

Hot Shot watering nozzle.

Considered to be one of the best nozzles available on the market.

Super heavy-duty construction features aircraft aluminum with high-impact composite components.

Fully-adjustable flow control from a strong jet stream to a mist.

Quick on/off. 1" female inlet. 132 litres per minute flow.

Price: £28.80 inc VAT


text:
Thursday, 13 January 2011

I can smell the Moon

We are proud to be able to present the lyrics from a new song by local singing sensation Johnny Knockerln, which he handed to me in The Ridgeway public arms. Here are:

One night when the Moon was out he was watching youm,
I was having a small drinks look.
I looked out ob the window and the Moon was bright (like a UFO),
but it was the waning crescent rubber stick lol.
I can smell the Moon.

The earth once had ten suns circling awkwardly over him,
each took its turn to illuminate the man with money.
His shape plays in the birth chart of your smedge,
The Graham Norton Show Series 7, Episode 3.
I can smell the Moon.

Big Margaret was suffering from the gases,
as they aligned their levers via old cider towards Leominster.
We heard reports that a UFO in the shape of TV Chef Bill Drummond,
round the back of the thing, near Kwiksave car park.
I can smell the Moon.

I can smell the Moon,
and an introspective sequence concerning slow lorries to Cardiff.
I can smell the Moon,
and Big Margarets rubbery gases.
Was there a horse in here last night?

No comments:

Post a Comment


text:
Little Ethiopia' takes root in D.C.

Inside Dukem, one of the city's best-known Ethiopian restaurants, the bustle on the street seems far-removed as burning incense mingles with the aroma of spicy stews.

On a small stage, performers in sequined white gowns thump on drums and sing traditional music from the East African nation. Patrons sitting nearby use their fingers -- no forks here -- to tear into spongy pancakes and scoop up exotic cuisine such as awaze tibs, which is lamb marinated with jalapeno, tomato and garlic.

"You feel like you're in your own country when you come here," said Tefera Zewdie, the owner of Dukem, who left Ethiopia as a teenager 20 years ago.


text:
I’m so excited to bring a devotional written especially for you, Moms!

Find Unhurried Grace on Amazon January 22nd!

Are you a mom struggling to connect with God in what’s often an incredibly busy, exhausting, lonely season? Have you given up on devotionals because they’re either too time consuming or too shallow?

Let me help! As a mom of eight kids born less than thirteen years apart, I can relate. It’s difficult to find a devotional that isn’t overly time consuming, but is still deep enough to help us grow in our knowledge of the Word.

We can find what we need in the scriptures! I’ve often found myself diving directly into God’s Word, seeking wisdom for marriage, motherhood, and homeschooling my children. In writing this devotional, I am sharing what God has so graciously shared with me over the years: timeless truths and their application to motherhood and homeschooling.

You’re not alone, Mom. Let’s dive in together! In a world that is becoming increasingly confusing and chaotic, it is imperative that believing moms understand and embrace the unchanging truths of God’s Word, learn to discern His voice, and walk in courageous obedience.


text:
Search latest news, events, activities, business...

Saturday, February 27, 2016

Miss India 2016 finalists

Unveiling the fbb - fashion at Big Bazaar Miss India2016  Delhi finalists
L-R ( Standing):  Rinki Ghildiyal, Niharika Anand, Whitney Bedi, Vidhushri, Saumya Singh, Zeba Baig, Geetanjli, Natasha Singh
L-R (Sitting) : Shivangi Kapoor , Gauri Mehta, Aditi Shukla, Soumya Saxena, Priyadarshini, Sharon Alexander(on the floor) Akshita Yadav,

Photography - Hemant J Khendilwal; Stylist - Surabhi Sharma; Outfit by MandiraWirk

Thanks for your VISITs

How to Configure Numbered Page Navigation After installing, you might want to change these default settings:


text:
Technical Difficulties from on Top of the Mountain
  Strange Materials
Besides nanotechnology machines (like accelerometers and micromirrors), the other great play in molecular engineering is in material science. Researchers are either building or discovering nano structures like Aerogel, Airglass, Cerbide, Foamed Aluminum, and Nanosteel (developed in Idaho of all places). My newest discovery is Zeolite.

Zeolite is actually a family of aluminosilicate ceramics which are porous, leading to their use in filters (air and water), molecular sieves (for separating gases or liquids), desiccants (trapping water and keeping the environment dry), or even molecular storage. I ran across it first looking for alternatives to alcohol distillation since standard distillation can only reach 96.8% purity. Zeolite filters however can be acquired with 3 Angstrom openings as a way to separate alcohol and water since water molecules are 2.5 Angstroms across while Alcohol is 4.5 Angstroms.

Various forms of zerolite are being tapped for the chambers their lattice creates. One potential application is the safe storage of hydrogen (requiring neither excessive pressure or cryogenic temperatures). The DOE is looking at zeolite as well as activated carbon as a mineral carrier for hydrogen. One gram of zeolite (ZSM-5) which is like a spec, has a surface area of 430 square meters (4600 sq feet or 1/10th of an acre).

Its property as an absorbent is used in this cool cryogenic vacuum pump, where by cooling the absorbent material, it literally sucks all the air out of a chamber and traps it in its matrix. By heating it back up, it releases all the gasses trapped inside and can be used again. One of these can easily evacuate a 100 liter chamber, and three can do a 200 liter volume in just under ten minutes (by staging them). No moving parts, no electricity, and under normal operating conditions they'll last forever. Pretty darn cool.

Though if you're into cool, you might also check out this self cooling beer keg.

Operating similar to an icy-ball, the zeolite is used as an absorber for water, letting it boil off and chill the beer in the center of the container. Actually, a zeolite/water chiller might make a great alternative to the salt/ammonia

  Learning and Teaching
Having a couple kids around, I spend a lot of time being a parent and some time thinking about being a parent. While in general having been a kid is of limited use, occasionally I remember bits and pieces of my childhood to good effect. Teaching new concepts and skills is one area where it is real hard to find the right balance between showing and guiding. I am reminded of my dad's attempt to teach me how to drive, and his initial approach just to let me discover the physics of driving on my own. After taking me out into the middle of nowhere (where another car was only seen once every ten or fifteen minutes), he handed the car over to me and we got moving down the road. He then decided to let me make a turn.
"How slow do I need to go to make the turn?" I asked.
"Just make the turn and see," he suggested.

I'm not sure what he was thinking I would do, but I decided to see if a toyota pickup could make a hard right turn at about 40MPH. Needless to say this was not a smooth maneuver. Luckily there was flat level dirt beyond the other side of the road so I was eventually able to get the truck back on pavement without incident.

After re-calibrating my leeway, I was able to get further information in response to my questions and I managed to pass my driving test a couple of years later without any serious damage to the truck. (All the damage I inflicted to the truck came later on after I got my license.

  Inductors are cool
I've been reading a bunch about power electronics and I've rediscovered the inductor. Basically, out of the three types of passive components (resistors, capacitors, and inductors), inductors are the hardest to understand, but also the coolest. Back in my early days I was mostly playing with DC voltage where an inductor isn't very interesting. But start working with cycling or pulsing circuits and inductors can do all kinds of cool things.

Basically when you start putting power through, the coil sucks some of the energy to start building a magnetic field. After the field saturates (if you let it), then the coil just ignores you and just acts like a wire. Until you try and cut the current.

Then the inductors says, "Oh no you don't," throwing itself on its magnetic field in order to maintain the status quo. And it does it with a vengance too. Even if you were only powering it with 12V originally, it can generate infinite voltages in an attempt to keep the current flowing (subject of course to parasitic capatitance and internal resistance). A coil without a path to discharge its current can start breaking down insulation, burning through local semiconductors, or even arcing through the air. Now you don't get anything for free: the current is going to be much smaller that before (so that power is constant), but higher voltages and lower currents are actually very handy for reducing conduction losses, so this can be put to good use.

While these are typically used for short term energy storage (milliseconds), scientists are experimenting with creating giant superconducting versions that can store gigawatts. There's even products for evening out temporary spikes in power use for industrial customers.

A much more boring use is using these things for filtering out high or low frequencies, or creating resonant circuits for radios. I mean who cares as long as my cell phone works.

  Really big compact flash cards
Somebody hit a bump recently, because the price of compact flash cards just dropped quite a bit. 512MB cards were hovering around $99 for about the last year, and 1GB sometimes would drop down to about $199. Now, think bigger.

SanDisk's competitors must be having a fit, cause they just pulled the rug out. Now 2GB is $136, with the same price/mb prices applied down the line to 1GB and 512MB. (The smaller cards go up a little in $/mb just cause you have to pay for the case & handling, etc.) For some reason the same prices haven't hit USB drives (and the 4GB card is still a little pricy), but I'm hoping that given time they'll get cheaper too. A 1GB SD card is a little higher at $98, but that's down quite a bit too (though I'd rather have 2GB for my hoped for Treo 650).

Strangely, this was not driven at the top end, but rather by SanDisk's attempt to make Flash memory so cheap that it replaced film. Their target was a $9 32MB flash card (which would store about 50 pictures). This makes it competitive with film (especially when you consider the ability to erase junk pictures). They're hoping that people will buy these like peanuts, and just toss them in a shoebox or drawer when they're full. Not sure if that's going to happen, but I'm happy to get 2GB for a little more than a hundred bucks.

Tim is grumpy cause flash is now cheaper than DDR RAM.

  Wonderful way to do business
Dwayne Phillips is quoted from is book, It Sounded Good When We Started:

The best thing that can happen to any software project is to have people who know what they are doing and have the courage and self-discipline to do it. Knowledgeable people do what is right and avoid what is wrong. Courageous people tell the truth when others want to hear something else. Disciplined people work through projects and don't cut corners.

That just sounds awsome. I'm pretty good about doing what is right, even when its not appreciated. I can also be courageous when I believe in something. But under less than ideal conditions, my discipline is not always what it could be or what it should be for the sake of my customers. Dwayne is going to be speaking at the AYE Conference. I really should get my registration in.

Thanks to Niranjani for the quote.

  Cursed buttons
For a long time I was using Ctrl-F4 to close tabs in Netscape which was killer on my fingers (I have a bad habit of using the same hand for the key & modifier). Then, while trying to find someway to save files without bringing up the stupid save dialog box, I found the ctrl-w for closing windows/tabs which works great.

Except that W is next to Q, and ctrl-Q shuts down everything.

Now I was already in the habit of trying to keep bookmarks for open pages and other steps for recovering from a crash, but now I have to worry about shutting everything down on accident when I'm not careful with my fingers.

Its very annoying.

  I am a flower.
Hmm, it turns out that Woolstar is a flower. And a desert one at that.

From the Phlox family. (Isn't that the doctor on Enterprise?)

  Far out trek science fiction made reality
Out of all the ideas in the SciFi universe, one of the coolest sounding was Transparent Aluminum. Didn't really think it would ever happen however, but those crazy material science guys actually made some. Now its actually based on Aluminum Oxide (alumina) but that's still cool. Not stronger than steel yet, but then steel is only 10% as strong as it could be (and people are working on that as well, see NanoSteel).

Thanks to: The Geek-Spot which included other great news such as Open-destination quantum teleportation, Solar Jet causalities, Super Lightning Bolts on Saturn, and Caltech breaks the Internet2 land speed record, transfering 859 GB in 17 minutes. With speeds like that, you could transfer the entire seven seasons of Stargate SG1 in less than 60 seconds (its only 53GB).

Life in the middle of nowhere, remote programming to try and support it, startups, children, and some tinkering when I get a chance.

January 2004 / February 2004 / March 2004 / April 2004 / May 2004 / June 2004 / July 2004 / August 2004 / September 2004 / October 2004 / November 2004 / December 2004 / January 2005 / February 2005 / March 2005 / April 2005 / May 2005 / June 2005 / July 2005 / August 2005 / September 2005 / October 2005 / November 2005 / December 2005 / January 2006 / February 2006 / March 2006 / April 2006 / May 2006 / June 2006 / July 2006 / August 2006 / September 2006 / October 2006 / November 2006 / December 2006 / January 2007 / February 2007 / March 2007 / April 2007 / June 2007 / July 2007 / August 2007 / September 2007 / October 2007 / November 2007 / December 2007 / January 2008 / May 2008 / June 2008 / August 2008 / February 2009 / August 2009 / February 2010 / February 2011 / March 2011 / October 2011 / March 2012 / July 2013 / August 2013 / September 2013 / October 2013 / November 2013 / December 2013 / December 2014 / February 2015 / March 2015 / July 2016 / September 2016 / December 2016 / April 2017 / June 2017 /

Paul Graham's Essays
You may not want to write in Lisp, but his advise on software, life and business is always worth listening to.
How to save the world
Dave Pollard working on changing the world .. one partially baked idea at a time.
Eric Snowdeal IV - born 15 weeks too soon, now living a normal baby life.
Land and Hold Short
The life of a pilot.

The best of?
Jan '04
The second best villain of all times.

Feb '04
Oops I dropped by satellite.
New Jets create excitement in the air.
The audience is not listening.

Mar '04
Neat chemicals you don't want to mess with.
The Lack of Practise Effect

Apr '04
Scramjets take to the air
Doing dangerous things in the fire.
The Real Way to get a job

May '04
Checking out cool tools (with the kids)
A master geek (Ink Tank flashback)
How to play with your kids

Powered by Blogger


text:
Several Tigers perform strong at GPAC Championships

Several Tigers perform strong at GPAC Championships

LINCOLN, Neb. – The Dakota Wesleyan University men and women track and field teams were back in action on Friday and Saturday at the Great Plains Athletic Conference Indoor Championships at the Bob Devaney Sports Center in Lincoln. Neb.

Senior Jessica Fossum (Canton, S.D.) started the GPAC Championships off for the Tigers competing in the pentathlon on Friday. She finished just off of the podium in ninth place.

Senior Skylar Forgey (Colome, S.D.) continues to lead the way for the Tigers. Forgey had a second-place finish in the 800-meter run finishing with a time of 2:19.10. Freshmen Kamber Lamer (Hartford, S.D) and Kristen Longville (Lake Preston, S.D) competed in the long jump. Lamer had a final leap of 5.14m for a sixth-place finish and Longville finished in ninth with a jump of 4.95m.  Longville also had an eighth-place finish in the triple jump, jumping 10.28m.

Freshman Ben Hammer (Dell Rapids, S.D.) finished the shot put in sixth with a throw of 15.56m. Senior Daniel Porter (Plattsmouth, Neb.) jumped his way to an eighth-place finish in the long jump with a leap of 12.92m. Sophomore Lane Tibbs (Kenesaw, Neb.) ran the 5,000-meter run in 15:48.82 for an eighth-place finish.  Tibbs also competed in the 3,000-meter run, running a 9:09.37 finishing in 13th. Sophomore Jeremiah Panec (Kenesaw, Neb.) had a ninth-place finish in the 1,000-meter run with a time of 2:36.72.

As a team the Tiger women finished in 10th place. The DWU men had an overall finish of 11th place. Doane College swept both the men's and women's team titles.

NAIA qualifiers for the Tigers will compete at the NAIA Indoor Track and Field National Championships next month in Johnson City, Tenn.


text:
Dynatech Engineering Corporation

Contact Us

About Dynatech

Dynatech Engineering Corp. has been involved in the environmental and material  testing  consulting field since 1986, performing  all  levels of materials testing and inspection services as  well  as environmental   assessments  to  complete  remedial   actions.

Our   asbestos consulting service encompasses a complete  turnkey  operation.  Our clientele ranges from Lending Institutions,  Contractors, Engineers, Architects and private owners.

Dynatech Engineering Corp. has conducted seminars to   educate   the public and lending institutions   about  the   hazards  and  liabilities  associated with  contaminated sites.  We  are  always available to help you in whatever your consulting needs may be at a time and place that is convenient for you.

We appreciate the opportunity to service you and look forward to hearing from you in the near future.   Please feel free to  contact us if we may be of further assistance to you.

Dynatech Engineering Corporation .750 W. 84th Street. Hialeah, FL 33014. Ph: (305)828.7499. Fax: (305)828.9598