For all the weightlifters out there.
My dog helps me write by lying on my feet under the desk. She also seems to know when I need a break from writing. If only she could read.
Original image here.
Yes, I have now experienced the bitter pill that is publishing. I’m not that fussed, as the short story wasn’t in the publisher’s hands long enough for them to have actually read it. Having submitted scientific papers to journals, I know that rejections are often just due to having had enough submissions already. Time to resubmit!
The Way of Shadows by Brent Weeks
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I tried to like Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, tried but couldn’t help but feel the story was being dragged out far too much. This series, by Brent Weeks, had called to me from the bookstore shelves. Every other book in the fantasy section had all black and red covers, usually with a dragon or girl, or girl riding a dragon. This promised what I had looked for in The Wheel of Time series.
So did it deliver? No. It gave me something else completely, which I enjoyed more.
With a fantasy I was expecting elves: nope. From the cover art I was expecting ninjas: not really. From the blurb I was expecting a Karate Kid story line: thankfully not.
This was a very enjoyable, whilst dark, fantasy novel that had me hooked from about page 10. Normally my reaction to finishing a book is to think about how much I liked or disliked it. In rare instances I immediately jump online and order more books by the author (Lee Child, Matt Hilton, Robert Crais, Matthew Reilly: noticing a pattern there?). The only question now is, do I read the rest of the series right now, or space it out between a few other novels?
Expect reviews of the rest of the series soon…
If there is any one thing that Hollywood does well, it is taking terrific books and turning them into terrible movies. When was the last time someone said “Well the movie was better than the book”?
I’ve opined on this issue before: Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher; why movie studios bother with buying a book when they make a movie that doesn’t resemble the book in any way.
And here it is happening again:
Any movie starring Katherine Heigl is always doomed. She ranked in my article on actresses you don’t want in you book adaptation. Clearly Janet Evanovich signed the movie rights before she read my article. So you have to ask what is happening in Hollywood, aside from the hookers and blow?
Clearly the first thing that is happening is the movie rights. Author agents are clearly trying to make some money for their authors so that the author can give up the day job and write more. Sorry, that should read, they want a commission. The movie studio hands over some spare change they have lying around and grab the book. Then they ask a script writer to give them a script, usually in the same amount of time it would take the script writer to actually read the book. So the script writer hands over a script they already have lying around, after changing a few of the character names to match. The studio then launders finds some money from “business associates” to start casting and shooting. The casting agent looks at the budget and sorts through the least desperate actors in the appropriate pay scale, to find the person who least embodies the main characters.
By the time the movie hits cinemas there have only been two people in the entire process who realise the movie is based upon a book, one of whom may have read it. This, of course, doesn’t really matter because the ten people who have read the book that go to see the movie are sitting in a packed cinema with people who don’t read and are generally confused by plots that can’t be explained in a one-to-two sentence monologue from a minor character.
Clearly Hollywood knows what it is doing, I mean, they cast Tom Cruise as Lestat. And authors love getting money from Hollywood, they can actually afford to pay the rent that month. So maybe it is time writers started writing for Hollywood. Oh wait, they already do that….
I’ve never quite understood the people who read on the toilet. If you are spending that much time on the toilet that you need a book to keep you occupied, I’d really question how much fibre you are getting in your diet. That said, if I had a toilet with this view I might consider spending a little longer in the brace position.
The Broken Shore by Peter Temple
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I was having a chat with a friend at a party when Peter Temple came up as a must read author recommendation. I’m rather naive when it comes to new and established authors, I don’t seem to have the inside scoop on Aussie writers the way I do with overseas talent. It wasn’t long afterwards that Peter Temple was mentioned again at the Perth Writers’ Festival. So I bought two of his books, Truth (ebook version) and The Broken Shore.
Now the recommendations for Peter Temple came from literary people, people whose recommendations I try to avoid like trips to Canberra and prison showers. But these recommendations carried weight, as one of them was a Lee Child and Michael Connelly fan. I can see why Peter is an award winning novelist, but I can also see why he is highly regarded amongst authors – like I said, naive. This is a crime novel, but not quite like most crime novels. I’d put Peter in the same category as James Lee Burke, Ian Rankin and Michael Connelly, except his work is more literary.
Also, it is sad that Peter isn’t as internationally recognised as those authors I have likened him to. This book was equal to any of those authors. So read Peter and make sure his work hits the international market, where it belongs.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Picking up a James Rollins thriller is a guaranteed good read. He has the knack of providing a solid thriller that moves along at a fast pace.
Now, we aren’t talking Matthew Reilly pace, and not Andy McDermott either. Rollins is in that pacey category with (his good friend) Steve Berry and Clive Cussler. So this is “does my side have air-bags” as opposed to “my parachute isn’t opening”.
Map of Bones is part of Rollins’ Sigma Force series. I like that the heroes are highly intelligent military operatives; it is a nerd’s wet dream. This is the second book in the series and the first to feature Seichan, the nemesis of protagonist Gray Pierce. You know you have a good series when the bad guy is this interesting.
Hell’s Kitchen by Jeffery Deaver
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
There is something about a mystery novel that can be either entertaining or dreary. Ultimately you want the mystery and suspense; but not too much. If the mystery is too simple, then *yawn*. If it is too complicated then you start to think it is all too hard or that the author had finished the mystery and realised they had another 200 pages to fill.
This is my first outing with Jeffery Deaver and I can see why he is so highly regarded with his mystery writing. He treads that fine line between too much and too little with a cool hand. There was much more to this story of catching a fire-bug for hire, with the climax really pulling me in.
Part of the balance came from Jeff’s use of Hell’s Kitchen as the setting and the local residents as layers of story. For the most part the exposition felt necessary and served the larger mystery.
The version I listened to was read by Paul Birchard who did as many accents as an American can in his reading.
I like to think of myself as smart. My friends and work collegues would refer to me as that annoying know-it-all. Being smart is not actually as good as you would think. For example, having knowledge and understanding puts you at a severe disadvantage in an argument, as you are trying to be correct, rather than win the argument with made up nonsense. And, lets face it, everyone hates a know-it-all.
So here are 5 reasons being smart sucks (Original article from Cracked.com with some edits by Tyson Adams. Original here).
Recently, scientists discovered a quirky side effect to having a high IQ: You tend to stay up until later hours and get up later in the morning. That’s right – the more intelligent are also much more likely to be night owls. Which isn’t such a surprise when you consider that intelligent people are infamous for burning the midnight oil to cram for tests, write papers, touch up those earnings reports, etc.It appears to just be evolution – the more intelligent members of a species are, in general, the first to change habits. Since humans have been day-dwellers during most of their existence, it’s primarily the smarties who prefer to habitually stay up until the wee hours and to do the types of tasks that are easier to accomplish when you don’t have the day-dwellers hanging around and distracting you.
Of course being a night owl does have some negative side effects, or rather a lot that will screw up your health. For starters, studies have found that “eveningness” is associated with a high degree of emotional instability. That means you tend to be less agreeable and conscientious than the average Joe. Oh, and you don’t just make others’ lives miserable. Thanks to your late-night habits, likely brought on by high intelligence, you’re also three times more likely to suffer symptoms of depression. According to a number of studies, night owls are at higher risk for heart disease and suffer more arterial stiffness than those who go to bed early. People who tend to stay up late also tend to do other unhealthy things at night, such as overeating. Then, once they do eventually hit the hay, they experience more sleep interruptions when those pesky morning larks get up and start noisying about. All this adds up to some nasty artery stress and whacked-out circadian rhythms, a nice recipe for a massive coronary.
Another unfortunate stereotype of smart people is that they’re socially awkward nerds who are doomed to lives of celibacy until they get out of high school hell. Unfortunately, that one turns out to be totally true. But it’s not all bad news. There’s evidence that the highly educated get more enjoyment out of sex than the dumb jocks and that they make the woman in their lives happy. Yes, monogamy.
It all starts with the smart ladies. A 2008 national census reported that women who had dropped out of high school had the most children on average. And the more education women achieved, the fewer children they were likely to have, with the fewest children being born to women who had finished graduate school. Good news for overpopulation, bad news for picking up. Well, unless you want a dumb chick, who is likely to trap you with an unwanted child, as research found that women with lower IQs are less likely to know how to use birth control properly, leading to more unplanned pregnancies. Looks like Idiocracy was a startling insight into our future society.
Tyson note: I’m not sure I agree with this point because it assumes we are manipulative bastards. From my own experience managers are moronic manipulative bastards and they are usually following the Dilbert  Principle.
The problem with being the smartest guy in the room is that you usually know you’re the smartest guy in the room. For some people, that’s not a big deal. They can relate to others just fine and know how to navigate around everyone else’s deficiencies without being complete pricks. Others, however, know they have an intellectual edge and can’t help but abuse it.
In order to lie and get away with it, you also have to keep the truth in mind and manipulate it, and you might even have to cover up your lies upon further questioning. All of this involves integrating several brain processes in much the same way that you would solve a complex calculus problem. This means that the age at which you start lying, and the effectiveness with which you do it throughout your life, are controlled by how smart you are.
In one study, scientists put people in brain-imaging machines and found that the regions of the brain that light up when a person metaphorically sets his pants on fire are the same that control “executive functioning.” These are high-order thinking and reasoning abilities that include working memory, which, you guessed it, is the single biggest component of your IQ.
We’re sure that at some point, someone has told you that you can’t get anywhere without an education, and for the most part, they’re right. And you’re much more likely to pursue that education if you’re starting out with a high IQ. According to renowned intelligenceologists who painstakingly measured every goddamn thing that you can associate with IQ, test scores were “the best single predictor of an individual’s years of education.”
The problem is that education leads to one overall inaccurate belief: You think you’re smarter than you are. Three studies have found that people who fall for investment scams are better-educated than the average person but don’t seek advice because they think they’re immune to making mistakes. In one study, researchers found that 94 percent of college professors think their work is superior to their peers’. These fellows fail to realize that intelligence doesn’t always translate to real-world ability, and thus they tend to overestimate the quality of their work.
Via Smartiq.com
Whoa! Sure is getting crowded at the smart end of the bell curve. Right, guys?
It seems to go back to the old saying about how the wisest man is the one who realizes he knows nothing. Or, as Michael Shermer, the author of Why People Believe Weird Things, puts it: “Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.”
That’s why the more education you get, the more likely you are to believe in, say, ghosts and the supernatural. One study found that 23 percent of college freshman believed in the paranormal, compared with 31 percent of seniors and 34 percent of graduate students. Which leads us to wonder … what the fuck are schools teaching these days?
On one hand, it seems like the smarter you are, the greater your ability to know the dangers of, say, shooting heroin. So self-destructive habits are traits of the low-class and stupid, right? Eh, not really…
The thing is, the great minds have something in common with proverbial death-prone kitties: curiosity. Researchers have finally begun to understand the link between curiosity and intelligence on the molecular level, thanks to scientists from the University of Toronto and Mount Sinai Hospital who discovered a protein in an under-explored part of the brain that controls both traits.
Via Wiredtowinthemovie.com
It’s always in the last place you look.
Makes sense. Weird shit like monkey-powered time machines can be invented only by people with enough brain smarts to make them work and enough curiosity to want to see such awesomeness in the first place.
So extra-curious people are also extra-likely to be substance abusers. British scientists published the results of a long-term study showing that smart people were more likely to be drunks. People who fell into the “very bright” category (IQs of 125 or greater, that’s me) were not only more likely to experiment with alcohol but also were more likely to drink excessively and binge drink than their dimwitted counterparts. And they found the same link between high intelligence and psychoactive drug use. It also turns out that intelligent people are much more likely to indulge in illicit substances such as marijuana, Ecstasy, cocaine and heroin. The smarter you are, the more likely you are to be tripping balls at any given moment.
As for why, remember when we said earlier that smart people’s brains seek out novelty and thus are the first to experiment with any new habit? Well, one theory explaining the link between substance abuse and intelligence is that both alcohol and drugs are novel substances, in evolutionary terms. Humans have been consuming alcohol for only about 10,000 years, and the earliest recorded drug was only 5,000 years ago. So when something is novel, the curiouser and most intelligent among us are more likely to want to try it out.
You know. For science.
Hover Car Racer by Matthew Reilly
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I’m very tempted to give this book five stars, but I’m not sure I can give a young adult audio-book like this such a high rating.
Eleven CDs kept me entertained while I was on the road for work this week. Matthew managed to keep me wide awake despite the long hours on the road. On many occasions I found myself holding my breath and gripping the steering wheel, hoping that Jason and The Bug were okay.
Hover Car Racer is essentially Matthew Reilly for tweens and teens. This is Matthew Reilly we’re talking about, the King of fast paced adventure that never lets up until the final page. He makes sure that every teen angst and tragedy befalls Jason Chaser, to the point that you hate all the bad guys for being so mean. Yes, I’m probably too old to be calling characters meany-pies.
This isn’t really a book for adults, despite how much I enjoyed it. My wife found it a little too childish in language use for her liking, were I was able to ignore that issue, as the pace rocketed along. As such, give this to any young boys you have in your family, especially if they aren’t big readers. Hover Car Racer is likely to be one of those books that hooks kids on reading.
A lot of things have changed in our modern society. I’m writing on the internet, you could be from just about anywhere in the world, and we can all agree that the US government should tactically nuke the Kardashian residence. Bigots are no longer able to say the things they used to be able to. In this modern age they need to know who it is okay to insult.
Racism, sexism and the like are no longer cool. We’ve realised that everyone has the same colour blood, that women and men are two sides of the same coin and that religions are all saying roughly the same thing – hell, Jews, Christians and Muslims worship the same God.
It has to be said that gay people, especially men, still suffer as a target of bigotry. I’ll leave it to Steve Hughes to point out the flaws in the bigot’s statements.
Yes, kooks. Even I can’t help myself. The reality is that there are extremists out there hiding under the banner of religion. It is a pity they are giving religion a bad name, especially with the promotion of anti-science. As a result it is only okay to be bigoted against idiots who are giving religious people a bad name.
Between the double chin and the ability to eat a weeks worth of groceries in one sitting, fat people are one giant target for bigots. There is no end of insults available and doing so only makes them an even bigger target, as they seek comfort snacks. Plus, it is easy to justify the insults out of love and concern for their health. And the laughs.
It’s about time racists got a taste of their own medicine.
This group are so popular that you don’t even have to be a sexist to have been accused of being a sexist. All you have to do is be part of the demographic that used to be sexists a generation ago.
Where do scientists get off anyway? They just don’t understand the world like normal people. With all of their study into how the world works, they have lost touch with all the people who don’t know about the world. Snooty bastards!
This group have always been a bigotry target and they will remain one of our favourite targets until society dispenses with them for good. Fuck ’em.
If they are going to be attention whores, then at least let the attention be negative. The person who flour-bombed Kim Kardashian recently got their bigotry target right.
You know who you are. We all hope you burn in hell next to the rapists, child molesters and people who talk on the phone in the cinema.
These people rightly deserve every ounce of hate they receive. Hopefully it comes in the form of Terry Tate.
As a fiction author I am rather disturbed by the anti-science trend that appears to be occurring in society. If the real world treads into fictional territory all the time then fiction authors will have to start writing non-fiction. I think we can all agree that science is a good thing and that fiction should remain in the books that we read and movies/TV that we watch.
Adam Savage gave a good speech at the Reason Rally on the weekend, check it out.
In some of my spare time I like to make things out of wood. I’ve already built and filled up one bookcase and am working on finishing a second. I suddenly feel the need to scrap the project and copy Hannah’s fantastic design.
Have to love a TARDIS inspired bookcase!
We all need to take book reviews with a pinch of salt. In this case people seemed surprised to find vampires don’t sparkle.
The internet is filled with guides on how to go vegetarian, and increasingly how to go vegan. Of course the reality of these diet changes is that at some stage vegans and vegetarians are going to have to come back to eating meat, as they discover they lack energy, are anemic and their B12 and calcium levels require them to eat real food.
In an effort to help my malnourished friends before their bones shatter, I thought I would put together this quick guide to becoming an omnivore.
It isn’t as easy as just starting to eat real food again. If it were that easy, vegans would be jumping back on a normal diet all the time. The problem is that the human digestive tract changes so that your body doesn’t starve without meat in the diet. As a result it stops making the digestive enzymes that help you digest meat. Changing back to a meat diet would then mean there is a shortfall in pancreatic secretions required to digest the meat in the short-term. The changed flora in the gut would also be affected. The “sick” feeling is just your body getting used to eating properly again.
Step 1:
Go to your local butcher and purchase meat.
Step 2:
Start off small. The longer you have been unhealthy the smaller the amount of meat you want to start eating to become healthy again. Remember, you are restarting your body, so you need to be consistent and gradual so that you can adapt.
Step 3:
Increase the portion of meat in the diet gradually until you are eating normally again. This will take time, as pointed out. The end goal is to avoid all the problems of not eating meat, so stick at it.
Step 4:
Make sure you are still eating your vegetables, they make a great side dish to meat.
Step 5:
Congratulations on becoming normal again. As an omnivore you are now able to keep up with the kids, won’t have the nutrient deficiencies, will be eating complete protein sources with a good balance of amino acids and will have lowered that osteoporosis risk.
How soon should I make the change to eating meat again?
ASAP.
Will I be healthier as an omnivore?
As long as you eat right (meat+vegetables+fruit+cereals = right) without going all Hurley on the food you will be much healthier.
But I heard meat gives you cancer?
And I heard Elvis is still alive. Most foods contain carcinogens, that’s why you are meant to eat a balanced diet and not get fat. All of the studies that claim you will die of cancer from eating meat are lying, as they forgot to mention you also have to be inactive, fat, not eating vegetables, smoking and drinking like a fish as well.
Will I be sexier eating meat?
There is nothing sexy about salad.
But won’t I be hurting animals?
No. Animals like sheep and cattle have been bred for thousands of years to enjoy being your food. They even try to eat as much garnish as possible to make themselves tastier.
But aren’t animals farting too much for the environment?
Animals fart and burp, that’s natural. Digging up coal, oil and gas to burn for energy is damaging the environment. Plus animals are cuter and friendlier than oil executives.
Tyson Adams 