How the Mighty Hath Fallen

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So, I put a chapter of “The Sniper” up on Royal Road about a week ago.  And shortly afterward I received a rejection from them because the story was also on Amazon and this website (OCF) and I had to prove to them that both those copies belonged to me.  They wanted me to add in my Amazon Jake Barter author page that I was putting the story up on Royal Road.  So, I had to figure out how to do that and whether this would cause a bad reaction by Amazon.  After all, Amazon sells my book for money and Royal Road lets people read it for free.  Well, the day before yesterday I tried putting up the statement about Royal Road but the author page rejected the edit.  It turns out that I couldn’t use Royal Road’s actual internet address on Amazon but I could just use the name of the site.  And then I had to prove that OCF was my website by a similar message and then, voila!  They put the first chapter of my book up on their site and so far, nine people have read it.  Well, that not much.  But I figure it’ll be fun to see if I can get much interest on that site.

Apparently, Gen Z frequents the site to read fan fic called “Lit RPG.”  Now, my book is neither fan fic nor Lit RPG.  So, it’s not certain that I will find an audience there.  But I’m interested in testing the waters.  I also put it up at BookFunnel and the good folks over at Whatfinger were kind enough to put up a link to that site and I got 14 e-mail addresses of people who downloaded the book there.  So, a little at a time I’m getting more visibility for the book.  I’m at 187 sales on Amazon and I’ve accumulated 34 ratings and 29 reviews with a cumulative rating of 4.7 and some very nice reviews that were definitely encouraging.

Once the experiments on Royal Road and BookFunnel have run their course I intend to put the book on KDP Select which requires the book to be exclusively on Amazon for at least 90 days.  Supposedly the low-cost barrier to reading on this program will attract the maximum number of “eyeballs” to the story and I’m very curious to see how that effects sales.  And I’m not particularly hoping to make a lot more money that way but rather I’m hoping for much more exposure.

So, the great book publishing experiment grinds on.  My hopes for international fortune and fame have been dashed on the sharp rocks of harsh reality.  My dream of movie studio executives battling each other in front of the Compound to see whose blockbuster offer would land the movie rights to this timeless masterpiece has gone up in smoke.  At this point I’m negotiating with the Dunwich Middle School to have the sixth grade put on a one act play version of Chapter 1.  Is this how Heinlein got started?  How, the mighty hath fallen.

07JUN2019 – Quote of the Day

photog Quote of the Day ,

The good citizen will demand liberty for himself, and as a matter of pride he will see to it that others receive the liberty which he thus claims as his own. Probably the best test of true love of liberty in any country is the way in which minorities are treated in that country. Not only should there be complete liberty in matters of religion and opinion, but complete liberty for each man to lead his life as he desires, provided only that in so doing he does not wrong his neighbor.

Theodore Roosevelt

The Day After the Day After Tomorrow

photog Current Events, Science, Science Fiction / Fantasy , , ,

In the comments for yesterday’s post on anti-matter there was some discussion about the methodology for interstellar travel; matter/anti-matter annihilation as a form of impulse power versus the use of a worm hole to poke in and out of space as needed.  As was intimated (being turned inside out) the current understanding of general relativity does not present any clear mechanism for human beings to utilize such a phenomenon and remain alive.  And that got me thinking.

Five hundred years ago if you wanted to go from Portugal to India you would get on a sailing ship and circumnavigate the continent of Africa and then cross the Indian Ocean.  And when you returned from this trip thirty months would have passed.  Today, a direct flight from Lisbon to Calcutta would take about twelve hours.  Call it a day for a round trip.  That’s about 900 times faster than the old way.  A trip to Mars at its shortest takes about six months.  Adding in the return trip makes the whole voyage something like 26–34 months.  If somehow, we could increase our speed by the same 900 times we could go round trip to Mars in a day.

Of course that’s impossible.  But only in the sense that we would be trying to improve the same means of travel in the future case.  So, if you told Vasco da Gama he could make a round trip to India in one day he would assume you were either joking or insane.  Because the very idea of a jet plane was an impossibility in his world.  Before you can have jet planes you need Galileo, Newton and Maxwell.  In other words, you need the mathematics, physics, chemistry and engineering of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to know that a jet plane could exist.

What if the mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and engineering of the twenty second, twenty third and twenty fourth centuries conspire to make the round trip to Mars only one day by finding a completely novel approach to travel.  What if wormholes really could be harnessed for human transport?  Then a day long trip would just be a convenience for meals whereas actual travel time would be zero.  But you argue, “wormholes are a theoretical aspect of relativity that have never been observed and if they exist would be as inimical to human life as a black hole would be.  And I would counter that feeding flammable liquids like octane into a machine that produces electric sparks and depends on metal parts rotating thousands of times per minute is much too dangerous a method for transporting humans from place to place.

So, I won’t say I know that we’ll ever reach the stars.  But I think anyone who says categorically that we cannot is making assumptions that cannot be taken as fact.  They are conjecture based on the current understanding of physics and engineering.  So, I guess we’re free to fantasize about galactic empires and worm holes and warp drives and anything that makes us happy.  And some days I want to read about the day after tomorrow and other days I’ll dream about galactic empires.  Why not?

06JUN2019 – Quote of the Day

photog Quote of the Day ,

A soft, easy life is not worth living, if it impairs the fibre of brain and heart and muscle. We must dare to be great; and we must realize that greatness is the fruit of toil and sacrifice and high courage… For us is the life of action, of strenuous performance of duty; let us live in the harness, striving mightily; let us rather run the risk of wearing out than rusting out.

Theodore Roosevelt

FedEx Boldly Goes Where No Man Has Gone Before

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When Scotty needs a shipment of anti-matter does he expect to see an Amazon truck or maybe FedEx?  Well, maybe not yet but who knows about tomorrow?

Antimatter has been transported for the first time ever — in the back of CERN’s truck

“On 24 March, a team at CERN, the European particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, transported 92 antiprotons in a specially designed bottle that traps the particles using magnetic fields. The bottle travelled on the back of a truck, taking a 30-minute journey around the lab’s site.”

Alright, to be realistic, the Starship Enterprise couldn’t reach Warp Factor 8 on 92 antiprotons.  In fact, you probably couldn’t lift your pinky off the table with the energy produced by that amount of matter/anti-matter annihilation.

https://youtu.be/0xD9qEdHFIE?si=zCKTeF3RTXgm51yZ&t=52

But if we can send anti-matter by delivery truck today who knows what next week will bring?  Someday I may be able to order up a bushel basket of Higgs bosons or a peck of top quarks.  The sky’s the limit.

I read somewhere that the folks dreaming about interstellar travel were hypothesizing that anti-matter could be more easily stored if it was cooled down to just above absolute zero.  I remember thinking, “Does this sound like we’re making it easier or harder by requiring it to reach such a difficult state.  But maybe I’m wrong.  My whole experience with cryogenics had to do with trying to build a cooling jacket for a chemical reactor that used liquid nitrogen to run some organic synthesis steps at ridiculously low temperatures.  And to be totally honest, I wasn’t convinced that the chemists really had any specific reactions that needed these conditions.  They just wanted to make sure that the system they built couldn’t possibly be unable to produce the temperatures, pressures and chemical corrosion resistance parameters that they had promised to their boss.  But anyway, if you can imagine anti-matter travelling in a truck then you can further reckon with anti-matter at 0.01 K sitting in the hold of a star ship waiting to be combined with normal matter to produce impulse to accelerate the ship toward Proxima Centauri.  I just know I won’t be volunteering for that first trip, thank you very much.

So, since we’re discussing anti-matter, I’m still waiting to hear where all the anti-matter in the universe is hiding.  After all, I seem to remember that according to all the theories out there, the universe should have exactly equal quantities of matter and anti-matter.  Well, where is it?

Somewhere out there shouldn’t there be an anti-photog, out there running an anti-OFC website and publishing his novel “The Anti-Sniper”?  Maybe all the missing antimatter is also, all the missing dark matter they’re always looking for.  But whatever the reality, if we’re starting to ship anti-protons around it’s only a matter of time before the commodities exchanges start listing anti-matter on the big board and before you know it, I’ll be able to trade puts and calls for anti-matter.  What would a butterfly spread on anti-neutrons cost on expiration Friday.  Hmmm.