Tag Archives: art

Cannon Fodder’s Kickstarter campaign is complete

As of the closing of the campaign on March 28, we’d raised $266, or 118% of the $225 goal. Thanks to all the backers, here’s the cover art that you have made possible:

CannonFodder_Type_small

Yeah! Again many thanks to Kelsey King, the illustrator who drew this. E-books of Cannon Fodder with this cover will be available at Smashwords and Amazon very soon. I’ll keep you guys posted.

Art and Science

I found a thought-provoking article on the Science Careers magazine the other day.

Adding an Artistic Dimension to Science

The article profiles several practicing scientists who are also simultaneously pursuing a career in the arts. These two ways of looking at the world, art and science, may seem disparate, but they can exist in the same human mind. I am one of those human minds, or at least I hope to be.

By day, I’m a graduate student at the University of Minnesota. I’m about halfway through a program to earn a Ph.D. in plant biology. I spend the days in a laboratory studying how rice plants transport nutrients over long distances – from the roots and the leaves to wherever they are needed. By night, I’m an aspiring spec fic and science writer. I have a short story and a couple of nonfiction pieces out in magazines, a couple of Smashwords novels, and even a few fans.

How long can one keep up doing both? The prospects of ever earning enough to survive from writing are dismal. Pursuing a career in research science requires ultimate commitment, one that might not leave much room for an artistic pursuit on the side. And yet art and science careers do positively reinforce each other. Writing helps me be more creative in the lab, and I might sneak a few references to antimatter into my writing. The Science Careers article describes people who have made it work, so I should feel hopeful.

This is neat: Chip Art

If you take a pair of pliers to your laptop and crack open the plastic casing, you’ll find a greenish motherboard with all the guts of the computer attached to it.  One of these guts is the computer’s CPU, a little square computer chip that probably has the word “Intel” printed on it.  If you strip the epoxy coating off of the CPU and put it under a microscope, what you’ll see will look a lot like the downtown of a city from a helicopter.  Rectangles and rectangles and rectangles of transistors printed on a silicon wafer.

And this.

Source: Chipworks

When there’s extra space on a computer chip, sometimes the chip designers like to have fun with it.

The practice of putting little pictures on computer chips is called chip art.  Though the practice is discouraged, it’s hard to get caught doing it – you’d have to void the warranty on your computer and put it under a microscope to see that it’s even there.  There were even reports of “bill sux” inscribed on a Pentium chip, but it turned out to be a hoax.

Chipworks, a company that specializes in analyzing computer chip circuitry for copyright infringement, keeps a gallery of all the chip art they’ve bumped into over the years.

There he is!
Source: Chipworks

The Mushroom

I’ve been getting ready to move into a new town (Twin Cities), which involves a lot of digging around in boxes of my things that I haven’t looked at in years.  That digging turned up this:

Cover of The Mushroom

Yep.  “The Mushroom” was the first short story I ever completed.  I was in the sixth grade at the time and I thought it would be cool to write a story about a mushroom that is actually a space alien.  Which prompted the following conversation when I saw this the other day.

Margaret from 2010:  WTF, Margaret from 1999?

Margaret from 1999:  I thought it was funny!

Margaret from 1999:  I like gel pens.

Anyway, here’s “The Mushroom,” for your viewing pleasure.

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