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Goodbye to All That
After a long period of dormancy, I've decided to resuscitate my website, eugenefischer.com. As part of that process, I am going to discontinue mirroring the content from that blog to livejournal. So this will, in all likelihood, be the last thing I ever post to this platform. It's been fun. See you elsewhere on the internet. -
Tradition
“It is traditional,” Kevin Brockmeier said, “to end every science fiction workshop at Iowa with gifts of robots.” It was the end of Spring semester 2012, and he had just finished teaching the first such graduate workshop that Iowa had ever offered. He passed a box of wind-up robots around the class. Mine was Bender from Futurama, holding a beer can ( Read more... ) -
Understanding Plagiarism
Here’s something that I’ve meant to post for a while. When I first came to Iowa I knew that I would be teaching for the Rhetoric department, and was worried (rightfully, it turned out) that my students might have escaped high school with a weak grasp of what constitutes plagiarism. I wanted to make a simple guide I could give as a handout, and ( Read more... ) -
Tradition
“It is traditional,” said Kevin Brockmeier, on the occasion of the final meeting of the first workshop on science fiction and fantasy ever offered at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, “that whenever a science fiction workshop is offered at Iowa, on the last day all of the students get a wind-up robot.” He passed around a box full of a dozen toy robots. ( Read more... ) -
More on the Readercon Harassment Issue
Genevieve Valentine has posted a roundup of further responses to the Readercon Board’s decision not to follow their own harassment policy in punishing Rene Walling. Most notable is that a woman Mr. Walling previously harassed, Kate Kligman, has not only come forward, but revealed that she had privately alerted the Readercon Board to Walling’s ( Read more... ) -
On Readercon’s Failure to Enforce Their Harassment Policy
The sequence of events: Genevieve Valentine got harassed at Readercon and bravely came forward about it. The man who harassed her did so repeatedly despite very clear communication that his attentions were unwelcome. Genevieve did not initially name her harasser, choosing instead to address the issue with the Readercon board of directors. ( Read more... ) -
Tabclosing
Slimming down my browser again.
- Warren Ellis’s information diet. The contents of his RSS reader.
- An article about the myths might one believe about science from movie representations. Notable for the passage:
Myth #4: Scientists follow the scientific method as it was taught in high school: Observation, Question, Research, Hypothesis, Experiment, ( Read more... ) -
Go Spurs Articles Go
The San Antonio Spurs, perennially underrepresented in sports media, have been so phenomenally good this year that people are actually starting to write articles about them. There have been several nice ones recently.
- “Gregg Popovich’s Portable Program” by J. A. Adande. An analysis of how the Spurs’ culture has led to success, and why it is now the ( Read more... )
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Tabclosing
- Is a baby conceived after the father’s death a survivor? NPR article on the relationship between fertility technology and tax law. Potentially relevant for a story I’m writing.
- An infographic of common logical and rhetorical fallacies.
- Matt Might’s thoughts on productivity for academics.
- David Alexander Smith’s checklist for critiquing science fiction ( Read more... )
