Writing and the Pareto Principle by Ray Tabler The Pareto Principle is a statistical rule of thumb, which many natural processes seem to follow. Also known as the 80/20 rule, or the law of the vital few, it observes that roughly 80 % of outcomes follow from about 20 %…
Category: Uncategorized
Robocops
Robocops By Ray Tabler It is interesting to note that Robocop, from the movie of the same name, is not a robot. Technically, he’s a cyborg, part man, part machine. Robocop is a mechanically-enhanced Frankenstein’s monster. Victor Frankenstein creates his monster in pursuit of science. Knowledge? Because he can? The…
Qualified Ignorance
Image: https://link.sbstck.com/redirect/5ae1b5b8-af39-4192-9367-e9ea1ac9209a?j=eyJ1IjoiM2tzZWxuIn0.5Gnf0Lu2f_9Ths3_4_vYGrQUKSTuTxE1pnXPnSwNOKo Qualified Ignorance By Ray Tabler I don’t know everything. A condition I share with most of humanity. Some people do know it all. And they’ll make sure you’re aware of that. But, not me. Which is a problem for a writer. Because often writing involves telling stories about situations and…
Pocket Universes
Pocket Universes By Ray Tabler Fair warning, there will be a lot of handwavium below. Because, we only know for sure about the one universe, so far. There may be others out there, or curled up into dimensions we do not perceive. Plenty of complex mathematics suggests such possibilities. But no hard…
8.34 Pounds to the Gallon
Image; Amazon.com By Ray Tabler It will not come as a surprise to some of you that a gallon of water tips the scale at 8.34 pounds. This is an immutable fact that I was first introduced to in engineering school, and it has lodged in my head like a…
So You Wanna Change the World
Image: https://www.reddit.com/r/heroscape/comments/k6rwba/roman_legionnaires_x_airborne_elite/ Perils of Temporal Activism. By Ray Tabler The other day I thought about a book I read a few years back, Accidental Warrior-The Unlikely Tale of Bloody Hal, by Colin Alexander. It’s a pretty good story, about an ordinary university student who stumbles through a portal to an…
Generation Ships
Image from The Starlost fansite By Ray Tabler I just finished reading Braking Day, by Adam Oyebanji, a hard science fiction novel set on a generation ship coasting its merry way to Tau Ceti. I didn’t realize before I started that it’s a YA book. Which I usually avoid, being…
Samizdat Goes Respectable
Image: Final scene of Fahrenheit 451 By Ray Tabler Samizdat is a single coin from the linguistic inheritance bequeathed to us from the cold war. Other questionable treasures of that hoard include words and phrases like iron curtain, gulag, overkill, and mutually assured destruction. It was a crazy time. In…
Tour Guides to Dystopia
Image: Office renovation in the movie Brazil by Ray Tabler This post seems to be appropriate for Black Friday, the day of the year when our flimsy veneer of civilization wears thinnest. Fair warning, the following is a catalog of real, historical dystopia, which could be used to model fictional…
Widely- Vs. Well-Read
By Ray Tabler Image: pbs.twimg.com Author Pam Allyn wrote that “Reading is like breathing in and writing is like breathing out…” It’s tough to live without doing both. Breathing, that is. Unfortunately, most people can get along just fine neither reading nor writing these days. But that’s a subject for…