Rereading/re-experiencing increases pleasure and memory

Revisiting books or experiences can enhance memory and the experience, according to researchers from American University.

This is something good readers and good students have known for a long while. Sometimes we don't really know a thing until we do it again.

How to Commit Literary Murder

For fans of mystery, medicine, and forensics is this blog on how to kill off your characters by D. P. Lyle, MD.

Building bridges

A good website on building bridges.

Yeast Multi-celularity

Scientists found a way to force multicelularity on yeast cells.

Writing Motivation

5 ways to get writing from Psychology Today.

Selling books

What are some factors that sell books? Nielsen offers up some clues.

Short animation for book lovers

Here's an imaginative look at the life that books have and give:

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore

Tornados on the Sun

Space.com posts a video showing a "tornado" on the sun:

"For a 30 hour spell (Feb 7-8, 2012) the Solar Dynamics Observatory captured plasma caught in a magnetic dance across the Sun's surface. The results closely resemble extreme tornadic activity on Earth."

For those of us who like to show brief videos to break up the class time, this one's a pain in the buttocks as it will switch to a new video if you let it go all the way to the end, forcing you to refresh the page.

In Praise of Shorter Novels

Robert McCrum extols the better shorter novels and postulates on 21st century bloat.

The future is here and now

The future is here and now:

• Cyberwars/spying in Syria.
• How they so much about you through the computer (a book review)
• What exactly does Google know about your search habits? Find out here.
• Robots write news stories from people's twitterings.
• Bob Mondello of NPR on how our lives resemble an SF story (E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" -- movie version -- audio version)
• TV programming for your dog
  

Physics & Music

Discussion of physics and music as it plays out in SF movie soundtracks.

Magazines of Shorts

These are magazines I've been meaning to look into as friends and writers I've admired landed in them, or something about them struck my fancy:

Ellipsis

Furious Fictions

Linguistic Erosion

Stanley the Whale

Free ebooks

David Marusek, a fine and sometimes hilarious writer of science fiction, is giving away some of his short stories.

Also, Paul di Filippo offers for free his fun novella in the Linear City series, A Princess of the Linear Jungle, which pays homage to many SF classics.

Rocks for Jocks

Humorous Geology professor presents his subject in an enlightening and entertaining manner on Youtube videos. The only problem is that there aren't enough of them.

Make Ice Cream

It's also useful for ambitious science teachers let loose and make something like ice cream. This should be useful for any class of chemistry, physics, or physical science. You can make them discuss how it works or calculate final temperatures--just to ease your mind that it's educational.

One recipe to try.

Incredible Ant City

Pictures and video of a Brazilian, labyrinthine ant city, preserved in cement.

Writing Links

Writing Rules

20 Common Grammar Mistakes

Forthcoming SF books from Library of America (Kurt Vonnegut & key early SF novels, the latter edited by Gary K. Wolfe)

Expanding your Novel's World

Embedded Parts of the Story (more descriptive of possibilities than analysis)

Changes in Publishing: Kristine Kathyn Rusch & Stephen Page @ The Guardian

Articles from the back issues of The Writer

Ben Marcus on Emotions Delivered by Stealth

Neal Stephenson

...on the importance of the big idea in SF. The big idea or conceptual breakthrough can aid student/scientific thinking in getting people think along normal lines of SF. As improbable these ideas may be in reality, many of the impressive leaps in science were jumps such as these.

4 Realizations about SF

...realizations that supposedly ruin SF. Some interesting thoughts/patterns here, but I'm not sure if they ruin SF.

Cats (or their parasites) can make you crazy.

Now the archetype/stereotype of the crazy cat lady makes sense (from the Atlantic Monthly).

Time Won't Give You Time

Cracked has come up seven ways to look at time. Fun stuff--good for interesting students in science although it's not especially useful in the classroom.