I don’t spend a lot of time watching TV or reading newspapers (except for sport), so I can be a bit out of touch with what’s happening in the UK. This story will probably not be new to many British readers, but hopefully it is interesting to those of you outside the country.

Last week Paul Cornell tweeted about a BBC TV program called Do We Really Need the Moon?. It was an intriguing title, and I marked it for later viewing without thinking much about it. It turned out to be a great piece of popular science TV — the sort of the thing that Brian Cox does, only with more science and fewer moody shots of the presenter. It is still available on the iPlayer.

Much to my delight, the presenter was a woman scientist, Maggie Aderin-Pocock. What’s more, she’s a woman scientist who grew up on a council estate in North London and who, inspired by The Clangers and Star Trek, overcame dyslexia on her way to a PhD in physics from Imperial. She’s even got an MBE. See how out of touch I am? And she’s a great TV presenter.

So, is this going to be the new face of popular science on the BBC?

I do hope so.

(Photo by David Rose from this Telegraph article.)

Also, next Ada Lovelace Day, no question about who I’m featuring.

This is what we had to sit on in Zagreb (I used it for that video interview).

(And before anyone starts, yes, I know I’m getting fat.)

This morning I got a tour of Zagreb, and learned quite a bit about Croatia. The most important thing to know is that, much like the UK, Croatia has several different sub-divisions, each with their own culture and traditions. It is also, of course, on the edge of the Balkans, which brings a whole new level of intensity to ethnic difference.

Here’s an example. The Croatian that you are most likely to have heard of is Nikola Tesla. Although he lived much of his life in America, he was born here. But ethnically he is Serbian, and Serbs are not terribly popular here right now. And for that matter, when he was born, all of this part of the world was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It’s complicated.

While Croatia’s recent history is bound up with the Balkan conflicts following the break-up of Yugoslavia, political issues are still affected by the Second World War. The Croatian government sided with the Axis powers. Many Croats fought against the Fascists as part of the Partisans. Then there was Communism. Steering a path of being anti-Fascist without being seen as pro-Communist, or vice-versa, is not easy.

Then there is the Church. Croatia is a Catholic country. Under Communism the church was stripped of much of its power, and land was confiscated. Now much of this has been given back. A major political issue appears to be the imposition of (pro-Catholic) religious education in schools.

While there is clearly a lot of spirited political debate, what I’ve seen here is a thriving capital city with some beautiful old buildings and lots of tourists. I wish I had time to get out to the coast as it looks gorgeous from the promo films. There are a couple of things I noticed that have a more sfnal tinge to them.

The first is the solar system model. In the center of the city there is a large globe representing the Sun. It is about 4 foot across. Scattered around the city, to scale in both size and distance from the Sun, are representations of other planets. I didn’t get to see all of them, but there will be photos.

Also, on our way back to the car park after wandering around the market, my guide, Goran, got his phone out. He’d realized that we were running out of time on the parking, so he called up the garage on his phone and bought a 15 minute extension. I don’t have a car, so I don’t know if such things are common these days. I guess they may be. But Goran told me that the system in Zagreb was ten years old, which is impressive.

More tomorrow. Now I have to get to the con for some initial panels and the Opening Ceremonies.

Found in the corrections list for Slate magazine:

In a March 2 “Future Tense” blog post, Torie Bosch misspelled the science fiction award won by writer Bruce Sterling. It is of course the Hugo Award, not the Huge Award.

Well the trophy is quite big.

And now I have your attention, don’t forget to nominate. The deadline is Sunday night.

I have a press release from Chicon 7 informing me that London is the only officially registered bid for the 2014 Worldcon. This doesn’t mean that it has won yet. It is still possible for a write-in candidate to sneak in at the last minute. However, the chances of this happening are vanishingly small. Even if someone were to start a campaign, it would still be very hard for a write-in to beat a candidate that is named on the ballot. You can start making your travel plans now.

My theme for this blog has been getting a bit scrappy so I though it was time for a bit of spring cleaning. Things may be a little weird for a while while I chase bugs, but hopefully most of it is OK.

For sentimental reasons I follow the RSS feed of Southampton University. I did, after all, spend five years of my life there. Mostly I’m looking for Oceanography stories, but today there was a history project that caught my eye. Southampton is part of a project involving various universities and Google that is looking to get a better understanding of how the ancients viewed the geography of their world. The tool they are developing is called GapVis. It works by analyzing the text in books about the ancient world, and presenting the data on geography. The current version already includes work by the likes of Herodotus, Livy, Tacitus and Gibbon. Taking a quick look, I was amazed to see that Herodotus’s Histories includes mention of somewhere in North Britain (mapped somewhere on the current England/Scotland border). Anyway, it occurs to me that this could be a great resource for anyone writing historical or fantasy novels, and therefore worth keeping an eye on.

No, this is not about trans politics, it is about publishers, booksellers and fans, and the poor authors who get caught in the middle.

Seanan McGuire’s latest book, Discount Armageddon, is due out on March 6th. Amazon, for reasons best known to themselves, have decided to release it early. Barnes & Noble, not wishing to lose out, have followed suit.

Why is this bad? As Seanan explains here, the primary effect of this on her will be a substantial reduction in her “first week sales”, which is a key metric used by the trade in evaluating the popularity of an author. Early availability of the book will be bad for her career.

But that’s not really what has got Seanan, and me, upset. As you probably know, Amazon is engaged in a war with publishers, and one of their main weapons is to try to make publishers seem greedy in their approach to ebooks. So while they are releasing the paper edition of Seanan’s book, they are keeping the (presumably cheaper) ebook edition back until March 6th. B&N have followed suit.

What is the result of this? A whole bunch of “fans” writing abusive emails to Seanan accusing her of being greedy by forcing Amazon to hold back the ebook edition. Really, how can people be so clueless?

I updated the Livejournal cross-poster a few days ago and managed to break cross-posting in the process. That should now be fixed, and all of the posts I have made during that period should now be on LJ. Sorry.

It’s a weekend. I should be writing. Instead I have been messing about with WordPress. If you notice something not working, please let me know.

The news has just broken that Ann VanderMeer will no longer be editing Weird Tales. Unlike Cat Valente leaving Apex, Ann is not stepping down due to overwork. Her reason for going is very different. I quote:

The publisher, John Betancourt of Wildside Press, is selling the magazine to Marvin Kaye. Kaye is buying the magazine because he wants to edit it himself. He will not be retaining the staff from my tenure.

I know I’m pretty new to publishing, but this doesn’t look like a sound business decision to me. Judging by the reaction on Twitter, I’m not alone.

Still, I know that Ann and Jeff have a lot of fabulous projects on the go. I’m sure we won’t be deprived of Ann’s talents, and I look forward to seeing what she does next.

Over at Kevin’s LiveJournal there is some discussion of an effort that is currently underway to have the Bay Area Science Fiction Association’s entry in Wikipedia deleted. Wikipedia, you see, is not intended to be a universal source of information, but only a source of information about things that the pathetic little tinpot dictators who maintain the site deem “worthy”. And one of those miserable shits is currently conducting a crusade to remove all references to science fiction clubs because, you know, he can.

Despite three Hugo wins, I don’t have a Wikipedia entry. I’m very happy about that and would like it to stay that way. After all, I’m not hard to find on Google, and if I did have a Wikipedia page an awful lot of time would be wasted combating edits that claimed my Hugo wins were fraudulent, or that I am a freak and a pervert. However, Kevin seems rather attached to BASFA’s entry, and as Wikipedia won’t take the word of anyone who is a member of the club regarding its notability or lack thereof, we need people who are not members to speak up for it.

It does seem all very trivial, but there is a certain satisfaction to be gained from frustrating the machinations of a selfish coward who spends his life persecuting strangers from behind the safety of a pseudonym. If this scumbag went out dressed in a mask and went around spray-painting abuse on people’s houses he’d probably get arrested, but amongst Wikipedia admins this sort of thing is normal behavior. I’d like to see him taken down a peg.

So if you happen to have encountered BASFA in some way, but have no actual connection to the club, and would like to help out, please pop over to Kevin’s LJ and comment. People there will know better than I do how to help.

I wrote a fairly lengthy post yesterday summarizing what George had to say in his GoH session yesterday, but the WordPress app for the iPad ate it, and I’m not sure it is worth re-doing because mostly it said, “there’s nothing new, mainly because George isn’t allowed to talk about it.”

I am still hoping to get an interview, but the convention is working George fairly hard. He had a signing and a 2-hour panel yesterday. He has another signing and two more panels today. And as always there’s a bunch of Brotherhood members here wanting to do things with him and keeping him up late. I’m not going to intrude.

One thing I should mention from yesterday is that George claims to have stayed up late thanks to a magic drink made from the blood of a red bull. The Donn Cuailnge was brown, and Queen Maeve’s bull was white, but it seems entirely likely that there should be a magical red bull in Ireland.

I probably won’t blog again until I get home tomorrow night. Tweetage, however, will happen.

Oh yes there are…

More details from my crazy Finnish friends here.

I’ve just deleted a comment from someone claiming to link to a fund raiser for Haiti. I have no idea whether the link was genuine or not, but what made me decide to trash it was that it used a URL encoding service to disguise where it was actually linking to. This is an increasingly common tactic of spammers. Please be warned, if you do this and I do not know you well then your comment will probably be deleted. I’m not going to bother to click through to what may be a malicious site to check it.

Due to a significant increase in the level of (relatively clever) comment spam I’m receiving on all of the blogs I manage, I have reached the point where it is more efficient to screen all comments and approve the genuine ones than accept comments and delete the spam that gets through the various traps. Those of you who are regular commenters should get through automatically. Everyone else, I apologize for the inconvenience.

So, some very cunning people in Singapore believe that they have developed a system that allows a billboard to detect the gender of the person looking at it and display different material accordingly. (Details here.) What are we to make of this?

The first thing that occurs to me is that if this means that I have to see fewer ads about drunken oafs and fast cars then that’s a good thing. However…

The science graduate in me is immediately wondering what happens if two people of different genders look at the billboard at the same time.

Then my Feminist brain finally kicked into gear. Gendered services can often be a very good thing. We are only just learning, for example, that some medical treatments work very differently on men and women. In such cases knowing the biological make-up of the customer is important. But for advertising? I can see exactly what will happen. There will be few thing that are more socially embarrassing, especially for teenagers, than to have a billboard mistake your gender (and you can be sure that the algorithms won’t be 100% perfect). The primary result of this, therefore, is going to be people trying much harder to be gender conformant so as to minimize the risk of such disasters. Given that the software works off facial recognition, it is time to invest in the plastic surgery business, I guess.