Have a stellar New Year

Blockbuster astronomy stories of 2016 include:

1.  Confirmation that invisible gravity waves exist, as predicted by Al Einstein a century ago.  Two complex detectors, one in Louisiana and the other in Washington State, both picked up waves caused by the merger of two black holes far out in the universe, and the findings became official in 2016. Scientists across the globe hailed it as the discovery of the generation.

2.  The confirmed discovery of a planet in the habitable zone around the closest star to us (other than our own sun), Proxima Centauri, which floats just 4.2 light years away.

3.  The spectacular successes of reusable rockets from two energetic and innovative private space companies, Blue Origin and SpaceX.  The technology will save millions of dollars in space exploration and satellite launching and servicing.

4.  The ambitious Juno flight, the fastest spacecraft ever launched (165,000 mph), arrived at Jupiter to begin its deep studies of that giant planet.

5.  Startling indications that there is a huge mysterious and yet-to-be-seen Planet Nine circling our sun in a strange orbit.

And 2017 promises to be no less fascinating.  The Quadrantid meteor shower will usher in the year, peaking January third with an amazing 120 meteors per hour.  But the big story will be a rare solar eclipse, the sight of a lifetime.  As the moon moves in front of the sun, precisely covering its disc and cutting off all its direct light, the whole sky will darken dramatically, revealing stars in daytime.  It’s a wondrous, magical, deeply moving event.  On August 21 the dense shadow band of totality will carve a 70-mile-wide curved swath from the far northwestern U.S., diagonally across the entire country and exiting through South Carolina.  Anywhere along that route the viewing will be perfect.  You’ll need eye protection, though, and if you travel to that shadow band, you’d better reserve accommodations early.  You can get details online.  Do not miss it.*

I hope you enjoy a stellar New Year in every way.

Phil

* The moon can cover the sun because, although it is 400 times smaller than the sun, it is also 400 times closer to us.

Book promotion

     If you’re a self-published author and have exhausted the usual options for promotion—the Amazon free trial and timed discounts, announcements on social media, requesting plugs from online reviewers and bloggers, e-mailing family and friends, and doing talks and signings for stores and civic groups—all of which can be productive, here are three additional sales boosters you might also try:

     1.   Libraries can be a great market for you.  There are roughly 120,000 of them in America.  My local regional facility has thirteen of my books in circulation, for example.  To mine at least some of that buying power and large readership, I mailed 100 six-by-nine glossy postcards to library networks all over my state (one regional library may have half a dozen branches).  I designed the card myself, using photos of the book covers, brief descriptions of each book, and a paragraph addressed to the librarian noting how well the books have been reviewed, and that the stories take place within the state.  I had them printed at Staples for minimal cost.  You might also offer to speak to a group at any library within reasonable reach.

     2.   Some motels, such as Country Inns and Suites, have their own lending libraries.  I sent 100 signed copies of my short story collection—which contains a good plug for my website and novels—to such hotels, concentrating on those near vacation spots and beaches, where vacationers are especially looking for leisure reads.

     3.   One of the things I do is move yachts for their owners.  Every marina has a small library where boaters can pick up a used book and drop one off in exchange, so I’ve left my signed debut novel in marinas from Key West to Newport, RI, but you can easily do a mailing of signed books to a list of marinas you find online.  My hope, of course, is that readers will try my donated books and thus be motivated to buy the rest of the books in the series.

     In each of these three cases, I’m targeting avid readers and making single books do the work of many in attracting new fans.

     Good fortune with your own promotions.

Phil  

Facts or dangerous fiction?

As I’ve said before, there was a time when the bulk of news reporting was an honorable profession.  My mother was a reporter for The Daily Hampshire Gazette in Massachusetts, and she was bound by tradition and strict editors to objectively report the facts, verifying everything in her stories as much as possible by checking with more than one source.  The idea was to report honestly and in depth and let the people make up their own minds about the implications.  Media back then were under a measure of control because they were the only news organizations available to the public, and those organizations wanted to protect their honorable images.  When I was young there were newspapers, magazines, newsreels at movie theaters, and radio.  No TV.  No computers.

Over recent decades news reporting has gradually become the domain of attractive news celebrities.  And individual giant news networks have taken on agendas, with the result that much so-called news is unabashedly slanted this way or that.  Today it’s obvious which political or social views a network favors and heavily promotes.  We watch the selected ones we like.  The ones that tell us what we want to hear.

The frenzied media scramble to be first with scoops has led incompetent and often unprincipled reporters to air or print information that is simply not accurate and is ever more shallow at best.  My local news anchors routinely make reporting errors that once would not have been tolerated by their superiors.

With the advent and global proliferation of social media, anyone and everyone routinely passes on those news items they favor.  And all restraints are off.

It has been only a short, inevitable transition to individuals stretching the truth and then, lately, to making up their own malicious news entirely.  Fake news.

In consequence, more and more of us are becoming mistrustful of any news, even from once-respected major networks.

And in some cases fake news is having far worse consequences.

Even deadly.

Phil

Seven things kids aren’t learning

1.  How to interpret a map.

With GPS built into cars and tablets and smartphones, map-reading skills have declined, and young people will no longer know the satisfaction of winning a lively debate with a friend or family member about the fastest or most scenic route selection, or being nimble-minded enough to plausibly excuse winding up out of gas at a crossroads named Nowhere, Utah.

2.  How to write cursive.

These days young folk communicate through texts in lazy lower-case, with liberal use of cyber-shorthand contractions, exclamation points, and emoticons.  The closest they ever come to cursive writing is dashing off a totally illegible squiggle on those stupid electronic signature lines in Walmart checkouts.

3.  How to drive a stick shift vehicle.

My first car had a stick shift (and the starter button) mounted on the floor.  Driving was an adventure back then, especially with bald or recapped tires and no air bags or seat belts, on New England winter roads.

4.  How to fix things.

I could fix anything short of an engine overhaul by myself on that first car, and I learned from both my grandfather and father that if you put your mind to it, you can fix most anything, from a misfiring distributor to a leaky pipe to a tin roof.  Today, I fear most young people have no idea what’s under their car hoods, much less how to fix anything in there.  Shop class used to be part of high school studies for the guys, at least to learn basic tool use, and home economics taught the girls how to cook and care for children and home.  Today such gender-focused studies would be considered sexist and thus evil by liberals.  So now few youngsters of either gender can cook or fix anything.

5.  How to balance a check book, or make change.

I learned early on the value of a dollar, by going to work in tobacco fields at age fourteen, by watching my frugal parents manage a budget, and from school classes.  I ran a two-pump country gas station part time by myself starting at age sixteen, washing every windshield and checking every customer’s oil, pumping their gas, doing all kinds of service from fixing flats to installing snow chains, and quickly figuring change for transactions without a calculator.  For example, change for a sale of $8.40 out of a twenty dollar bill would be ten dollars plus one dollar plus half a dollar plus a dime, or $11.60.  Simple, really.

6.  How to dance.

My parents sent me to ballroom dancing classes at twelve years old to learn a modicum of grace, and politeness toward girls.  Today it’s hard to tell if a youngster is dancing or having an epileptic fit.

7.  How to carry on a conversation without using the words like and awesome.

Phil

When donkeys climb trees

Donkeys in trees is the Georgian equivalent to pigs flying, as in: “When are you going to vote Democrat.”(Or Republican, depending on the person you’re questioning.)  And the reply you get is, “When pigs fly.”  Or sometimes, “When hell freezes over.”

Other equivalent expressions from around the world:

South Africa: When horses grow horns.

The Netherlands: When cows dance on ice.

Israel: When hair grows on the palm of my hand.

India: When crows fly upside down.

Latvia: When an owl’s tail blossoms.

Portugal: When it rains knives.

Turkey: When fish climb poplar trees.

Thailand: One afternoon in your reincarnation.

Russia: When crayfish whistle on the mountain.

And my favorite, from Germany: On St. Nevers Day.

Phil

Honoring Hubble

     The Hubble Space Telescope is arguably one of the most influential achievements of science.  During the more than 25 years of its, ah, stellar performance it has let astronomers scrutinize 40,000 objects in the universe, taken a million stunning images, spawned 10,000 scientific papers, been used for an average of 40 doctoral research papers each year, helped earn a Nobel Prize, and has enthralled the world by displaying the mysterious, beautiful universe to us all. 

     It has inspired musical compositions and a variety of art.  Its images adorn T-shirts and murals and everything from album covers to postage stamps.  The single Eagle Nebula image titled “The Pillars of Creation”—as much a work of gorgeous universal art as a revealing study of how stars are born—has been posted in uncounted classrooms to inspire students and has been viewed with awe by billions around the globe.

     Other Hubble images (it can image not only in visible light but also in penetrating ultraviolet and infrared) have given us invaluable new knowledge of our solar system’s eight planets and 182 moons, and of our whole universe.  The Hubble Deep Field image, for example, a long exposure taken of just a minuscule portion of sky equivalent to a grain of rice held at arm’s length—a portion of sky thought to be utterly empty—revealed 1,500 primitive galaxies that assembled when the universe was in its infancy.  Subsequent Ultra Deep Field images have amazed us even more.

     Its scientific leaps in astronomy and physics include proof that supermassive black holes exist, pegging the age of the universe at 13.8 billion years, not only imaging the first planet ever actually seen that orbits a star other than our own but also analyzing its atmosphere (thousands of other exoplanets have been detected by scopes such as Kepler, but have yet to be actually seen), and showing us protoplanetary discs that are condensing into new planets around other stars in the same way our own solar system had to have formed.

     But maybe its greatest achievement is simply to vividly showcase what science can do for us.

Phil

The Music of the Spheres

     There is a mysterious and beautiful correlation between music and mathematics.  There are rhythms in mathematics and there is much mathematical order in music, for example.  And either discipline can stimulate the other. Einstein, an accomplished violinist, credited music with providing the inspiration out of which blossomed his theory of relativity (no longer a theory, of course, but a well-established fact).  There are many more such examples.

     In fact the whole universe seems ultimately definable, and to a large extent explicable, through mathematics, from gravity to distances, to planetary orbits, to quantum mechanics.  The equations of Einstein, such as the simple E=mc², explain profoundly much.  Johannes Kepler, too (whose name graces the current exoplanet-discovering space telescope), keenly felt the symbiosis of music and math.  In his 1619 book Harmonices Mundi, he attempted to explain the harmonies of the world, and he described how music could be pleasingly paired with the kinetic geometry of the solar system.  Pythagoras taught that focusing on pure, mathematically precise tones could calm and illuminate the mind.

     There is also much magical math hidden in the almost musical rhythms of good writing.  The prime number three shows up over and over, for example.  A protagonist in a story tries twice to resolve some central conflict only to be somehow thwarted, but on a third supreme attempt, wins through.  Three also creates an effective and interesting character grouping.  As in The Three Musketeers by Dumas. Or a love triangle in almost any romance story.  Or a sweeping saga told as a trilogy.  Or the standard three-act play (the Setup, the Conflict, and the Resolution). 

Phil