Daft

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I swear some people are blissfully unaware of their surroundings. I am not making this up when I tell you that some unnamed person sent me TWO emails in the same amount of days to tell me that they couldn’t leave me a voicemail. And I’m pretty sure they weren’t going to sing to me.

I wonder though, if this is one of those anxiety things. Does the person have an anxiety that limits their communication options to voicemail only? I guess that’s possible. Or possibly someone a long time ago told them that voicemail was the proper method of communicating with others. If someone filled their head with that sort of odd social programming, that will make future communications very interesting for me, won’t it? Will they only accept voicemails from me as well? Time will tell.

It’s kind of like that time I was at the beach, and on this particular beach they have lockers near the guard station, so I saw a person go up, put coins in to pay for a locker, throw their phone and other valuables in there, along with the key to the locker. Then only a few seconds passed and they were trying to get in the locker. It wasn’t long before this person got the guards in on their self-induced problem—and they started blaming the guards, as if it was their fault. The locker wasn’t opening fast enough for the person who threw the key inside, and they were getting irate.

This sort of attitude in people makes me think of a four letter word:

DAFT.

You have to make yourself daft to not see the obvious that’s right in front of you. You have a communication option and use it to complain about a non-working form of communication; or you lock up the part of a system that gave you access to the secure area; that’s daft, isn’t it?

Oh well, life goes on. I’ll end up instructing this unnamed person on how to use the methods available, and then he’ll end up instructing me on something else later. It all goes around—like a daft virus.

Literary Dysfunction

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One of the peeves I have with the literary world is that they don’t have a lot of agreement between publishers. When you submit a work to one publisher after another it would be nice if they all agreed upon one font. But they have different font preferences between them, and even sometimes within the same company! You’ll have an editor who prefers one font, and a proofreader who prefers another, and then the printing people like a different font! Can’t they all just get together and decide on one thing? The cinematic world has a standard font: it’s Courier. (There is a push for Courier New, but Courier is still the main standard. And Courier New isn’t all that different from Courier.) If the movie making crowd can all agree on one font, I’m sure the literary world can do it.

It’s time, publishers big and small, so get it together!

Can I Ask The Booger-Eater Why?

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Can I ask the booger eater? : Why do you look at the bogey you picked right before you eat it? Are you selective in the boogers you eat? That’s a seriously disjointed set of standards! It’s all pointless to my brain. Boogers are mucus. The mucus wraps itself around the particles of dirt and debris found in the air that you breathe. Mucus and dirt don’t sound like food groups to me. They sound like things you should actively avoid. How does a brain tell a finger, “Let’s dig this filth out of the nostril and feed it to the mouth.” ??? For me, that doesn’t compute. It doesn’t make sense. Not only that, but it gives me a small shudder of disgust. I can’t imagine the thought process anymore. Over and out!

Two Covers

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SOUND DISTORTION cover sample

It’s probably obvious, since the black one is more finished, that we went with the black cover.

Go ahead and let me know what you think anyway. I’m totally cool with constructive criticism. What do you think? Quick, tell me before you read on, because I’m going to say what I think, and what I think about these two covers might influence your opinion.

So, in the process of making this book, we went through several covers. I had a line drawing that we tried to colorize and make look good enough to sale in public markets. No matter what we did to that line drawing, it never looked quite like a professional quality book cover. It was tragic. (Ha!)

After the line drawing fiasco, we started looking at photos that we could use. The problems with that were many, including the possibility of mistakenly using someone’s copyrighted photo. We didn’t, of course. The wise Vince Font of Glass Spider Publishing informed me that some photographers can be really snake-like about it. They put their pictures out on the infonet and then hide in the grass waiting for some unsuspecting person to use the photo—and then they bite! They’ll sue you for using a copyrighted work, even though the photo doesn’t indicate anywhere that it’s copyrighted material.

I even tried taking some of my own photos, but that didn’t work out either. It was catastrophic. (Haha!)

So, finally, (and Vince was probably ready to do me physical harm by then) we got the black cover. I asked to see it in white, because the black one gave me the initial impression of “surly”. Then when they sent me the white one, I passed both around to some people to see what they thought, and got some good and bad reviews on each. My impression of the white one, by the way, was “medical”. And this book isn’t a Robin Cook novel. It’s Sound Distortion, a psychedelic sci-fi novel about a teen who invents a method of speaking by using music as his voice. It’s amazing! (Aha!)

As you can tell, we went with the cover I nicknamed “surly”.

Science for the Young

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Now is a great time to get our young men and women interested in science. Boys and girls of the next generation have a natural curiosity for how the laws of physics and chemistry shape their environment. Not only are they interested, but they’re very capable. They have a great capacity for scientific information. The future scientists have some wonderful events from recent years to guide them. For one thing, we’ve already discovered a lot about Mars, and we may soon have details of the entire Martian landscape. That’s some knowledge Ray Bradbury would have thoroughly enjoyed. We have probes and satellites and rovers, not only on Mars, but traveling all around the nearest planets. One great place to start is on Twitter. Check out Jason Major’s tweets @JPMajor to get some pretty cool ideas of how you can study your galaxy. He’s a “citizen scientist” who studies the generous amounts of data that NASA produces. You can even look up more citizen scientists at solarsystem.nasa.gov to give you more of the rich scientific info you’re looking for. And if you’re older, you can get your young ones interested in this.

We can show the next generation how great science really is. We have amazing resources compiling data faster than ever before. We can inspire the youth of the world to perceive science, not as dull homework, but as fascinating facts to be studied and pondered. We can inject humor and optimism in our discussions about science. Because science isn’t a pursuit for “intellectuals” only. Intelligence does not guarantee creativity. When we play, we get creative, and creativity is one of the main attributes of being a scientist. Science truly is fun—play with it!