Nathan Tyree: Terminator X

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Last night I was in the local Hastings looking to buy season 10 of The Simpsons. While browsing I noticed that they had on their shelves several copies of something called Flavor of Love. Flava Flav was on the box art, so I assumed (wrongly) that it was that show in which Old Flav is doing Brigitte Nielson. I had seen about five minutes of that show at a friends house and was shocked to find that someone found this entertaining. It turns out that the program for sale at Hastings is like a dating game show featuring Flav. This sounds even less fun.

All of this got me to thinking. Really, Chuck D was the brain behind Public Enemy. Flava was just the clown out front. I liked PE as a kid but really haven’t listened much in the last few years.

In totally unrelated news:

Social Disease
I finally received my contributor copy of The Flash from Social Disease Books. I have to say that Social Disease produces a lovely book. The thing looks and feels great. The binding is solid, the cover art is beautiful, it has a nice heft. All in all they did a great job.
I’m particularly glad about this since I am going to be featured in the new 3:AM anthology, which is also being published by Social Disease. That one will be coming up pretty soon and I’m really looking forward to it.

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Nathan Tyree: Pawns

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I’ve been playing chess against a computer. It’s been a long time since I had gone up against a machine and I had forgotten that it is, normally, less challenging than playing against a human opponent. The computer tends to play a solid, straight forward game. It doesn’t improvise or experiment the way a human can. In a real game a player can throw in a randon move just as you’ve clocked their strategy and confuse you. A computer never does that.

Also, the machine never gets drunk as quickly as I do.

In Other News:

The new writing project is called (for the moment) So Much for the Afterglow, which is a title I ripped off from Everclear. I estimate the final length at 60,000 words. This one will take a while. It feels good to be back into a big project that I can obsess about for a time.

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Nathan Tyree: Martin Eden Ain't Got Nothin' on Me

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Jack London committed suicide. I learned of this yesterday and was a bit surprised by the news. I had never given much thought to London’s death, but guess that in the back of my mind he had gone down with a sinking ship or been eaten by wolves or stabbed in a bar fight or something. After reading that he, like Hemingway, off’d himself I started thinking about it. Martin Eden came to mind. Considering how Martin ends up, I guess I should have seen Jack’s demise.

Anyway, all of this talk about good Ol J.L. came about because I was doing some research to determine if London’s works were in the public domain or not. It turns out that they are.

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Nathan Tyree: Vampire Math

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I read a very interesting article in Skeptical Inquirer last night. The authors took a fun look at the logical possibility that vampires and other popular mythological baddies exist in reality. Interestingly, they chose not to attack the biological problems with the vampire myth. They actually just left science out of the equation. Instead they used simple math and a bit of logic to assail the existence of vampires.

The authors began with the (rather conservative) estimate that a vampire would need to feed once a month. Further, they posit that each time a vampire feeds it removes one human from the population and adds one vampire. It doesn’t take long to see that this leads to a geometric progression in the growth of the vampire population (and in the shrinking of the human population). It short order (29 months or so) no humans would exist.

Given this, the authors claim that based on the Anthropic principle we can conclude that vampires do not exist.

It’s a persuasive argument. There are a few problems with it, though. They ignore human birth rates (as well as mortality rates from non-vampire related causes). I’m not really certain that it is fair to assume that each instance of vampire feeding must both kill the human prey and generate another vampire. In most of the (obviously fictional) accounts of vampirism I am familiar with the vampire will kill on a regular basis, but rarely creates a new vampire. In that sort of scenario the vampire population would remain small and the death rate from vampire would be unlikely to overwhelm the human birth rate.

This reasoning is more effective when used against mindless zombies.

Still though, it was quite a fun article.

In other news: Marvel is using their comic book characters as part of a traveling exhibit to teach kids about science. It’s in St Louis right now.

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Nathan Tyree: 2 Bits

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I opened my email today to find two bits of good news. First I saw that Word Riot is taking a flash fiction piece of mine. Then I discovered that Midnight Horror is going to publish Flight of a Bee. FoaB was first published in Flesh and Blood magazine back in 2004. It’s one of my personal favorites and I’m glad to see it being reprinted.

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