Category Archives: Shameless Self-Promotion

Dieselpunk Nugget

Sometimes, when you’re doing research for a novel, you come across a passage that gives you chills. For example, take this quote from a lecture that Alan Turing gave to the London Mathematical Society in 1947:

Finally I should like to make a few conjectures as to the repercussions that electronic digital computing machinery will have on mathematics. I have already mentioned that the ACE will do the work of about 10,000 computers.* It is to be expected therefore that large scale hand-computing will die out. Computers will still be employed on small calculations, such as the substitution of values in formulae, but whenever a single calculation may be expected to take a human computer days of work, it will presumably be done by an electronic computer instead. This will not necessitate every-one interested in such work having an electronic computer. It would be quite possible to arrange to control a distant computer by means of a telephone line. Special input and output machinery would be developed for use at these out stations, and would cost a few hundred pounds at most.

Controlling a computer through the telephone lines. This was 1947. Damn.

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* The word “computer” had a different sense before the invention of modern digital computers. Here he’s talking about humans, usually young women, who were hired to do math problems all day.

John of the Rhine is based on a real scientific experiment

This week, I’m promoting an e-short-story, “John of the Rhine,” that’s free on Amazon here.

Parts of this short story are based on real life. (Not the part about a piece of river mud coming alive.) But Mr. Kaufman’s research is based on a real experiment that was done by Thomas Young in the early 1800’s. At the time, scientists couldn’t agree whether light was a wave or a particle. In 1803, Young did an experiment where he forced light to split by passing it through a card with two pinholes in it, like so:

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Image courtesy of Wikipedia

When the light came back together, the two beams either added to each other or destroyed each other, which is something that only waves do. Everybody believed that the matter was settled, that light was only a wave, for about a hundred years. Then a more sophisticated version of the experiment found that light behaves like a particle, too.

So is light a wave or a particle? Yes.

Free Ebook: John of the Rhine

John_OfThe_RhineHello, everyone! I wanted to let you know that I have some new writing out, and just for this week, it’s free.

“John of the Rhine” is a longish short story about a golem who works as an assistant to an alchemist. In his spare time, John teaches himself how to cook.

Here’s where you can get your free copy on Amazon.

Don’t have a Kindle device? There’s a couple of things you can do. You can download a free program from Amazon that will let you read the file on your mac or PC. Or, wait a couple of months. To do this promotion, I agreed to put “John of the Rhine” only on Amazon for 90 days. When the 90 days are up, I’ll put it on Smashwords as well, where it’ll be available in just about every file format imaginable.

Come and get it!