I came across this story in the news yesterday: Country star Gretchen Wilson, at 34, finishes high school. The crux of the story is that Wilson, a wealthy award-winning singer-songwriter who had dropped out of school in ninth grade, has passed the GED exam and will be getting her high school diploma next week.

The money quote that she gave to the Tennessean in their story on Wilson, which the AP article cites, explains that Wilson got her GED to be a model for her 7-year-old daughter. Wilson says, "...I certainly don't want her to think you can be this successful without an education."

While I laud Wilson for both her attitude and her actions, and I agree that everyone should get an education, I find her comment a bit ironic. Because the simple fact is that Wilson became as successful as she did without an education. Later on in the Tennessean's article, she even says that she doesn't think she would be where she is today if she had stayed in school:

"I don't think I'd be where I'm at today if I had stayed in school," she says. "What I mean to say is I think I would have never followed the path that I followed. I may have been in the music business, but I don't think I would have been an artist. I don't think I'd have been pushy enough. I kind of had to get out there and start fighting and clawing my way through the world, and that started really early and I think that's a lot of what it took for me to finally get that record deal."

So I'm thinking that maybe the example she should present to her daughter is a different one – not that a person needs an education to be successful, but that a person ought to have an education to be complete.

Tags: teaching

This will probably mostly interest those of you who live in Brookline, Massachusetts, and those of you interested in local politics in general.

Tomorrow is the annual Brookline Town Election, and it's a vital one. We have an actual race for the two contested positions on the Board of Selectmen, and two Proposition 2½ override questions that, if they fail, would require some significant cuts from the budgets of the police and fire departments and the libraries and schools.

If you need to learn more about tomorrow's election, the ballot is currently available from the Town Clerk as a PDF file here. If you don't know who is running in your precinct for Town Meeting, it's a good place to look.

A list of polling places (again, provided by the Town Clerk) can be found here.

And for more nonpartisan information, the League of Women Voters Guide to the election can be found here. (That's a link to a page that includes the guide as a PDF.) Every year, the LWV sends a few questions to all the candidates and prints their responses in the Guide; it can be instructive to see who responds and who doesn't, and how they answer the questions.

As for my own recommendations, I've made the following endorsements.

First of all, in the Selectmen race, I've endorsed incumbents Gil Hoy and Nancy Daly. In my opinion, both have been very good as Selectmen. Gil, in particular, has been a fierce advocate for the town's libraries. As a member of the Board of Library Trustees, I have seen first-hand how Gil's advocacy has aided our library system. (My letter supporting Gil can be found, along with many other letters supporting Gil, here.)

Secondly, when it comes to the override vote, I have endorsed Question 1A, the $5.4 million override, which would fund everything except the World Language program in the elementary schools. Please note that although I have not endorsed Question 1B, I am not advocating against it either. I still think the World Language program is an excellent idea; I'm still not sure if the town can afford it. I'll probably make my final decision tomorrow morning in the voting booth. Yes for Brookline is advocating voting in favor of both override questions, and I should note that both the Boston Globe and the Brookline TAB have endorsed both questions as well.

If you're looking for any other guidance, I urge you to check out the Brookline PAX May 2008 Town Election Endorsements. In my own case, whenever I'm in doubt or uninformed about a candidate or an issue, I can usually rely on the PAX endorsements to guide my vote. (If you want to know what PAX stands for, read Brookline PAX Supports.)

Wherever you stand on the issues, if you live in Brookline, please vote tomorrow. Democracy is a fragile thing, and must be encouraged to thrive.

Tags: boston, brookline, politics

(This seems to be my week for recommending books for science fiction writers.)

Last night, Nomi and I went to the Museum of Science to hear a talk by Dr. Michio Kaku.

Dr. Michio Kaku, Michael A. Burstein Photo copyright ©2008 by Nomi S. Burstein. All rights reserved.

Kaku is a theoretical physicist who has written a few very popular books on physics and what he thinks the future will bring. His current book is Physics of the Impossible, in which he discusses a variety of technologies that most of us think of us as science fiction, but which Kaku speculates will happen for real, some of them very soon.

In the book, he lays out three different classes of impossibility, as follows:

Class I Impossibilities, such as teleportation, telepathy, and invisibility, are consistent with the laws of physics as we know them and might become real within the current century.

Class II Impossibilities, such as time travel and travel faster than the speed of light, lie at the edge of known physics.

Class III Impossibilities, such as perpetual motion machines and precognition, defy the laws of physics as we currently understand them.

His talk skimmed some of the topics in his book, including invisibility and teleportation. He also discussed robots and artificial intelligence, and my favorite topic, time travel. He showed a few clips from a BBC series he's hosting, Visions of the Future, which is supposed to be broadcast in the United States sometime in 2009, but I'd love to track down a copy earlier if I can.

Kaku is clearly a fan of science fiction; his lecture slides were sprinkled with pictures from Star Trek, 2001, Terminator, and other media SF, and the cover of his latest book clearly shows a TARDIS as the time machine plunging through the wormhole. At one point, in an attempt to explain the paradoxes inherent in time travel, Kaku described a scenario that I quickly realized was the plot of Robert A. Heinlein's short story "All You Zombies–" (F&SF, March 1959). I wish he had identified it as such, though, as that might have inspired people in the audience to track it down.

When discussing the rise of the Internet and the shrinking of the computer chip, Kaku showed an artist's representation of a pair of contact lenses with chips that would give you immediate access to the Internet directly in your field of vision. The lenses would also help you identify people's faces, and I started to think about a former student of mine who has prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize faces. With contact lenses such as these, no one would ever have to know.

One thing Kaku mentioned does have me a little worried. Over the past few decades, astronomers have observed many gamma ray bursts (GRBs), short-lived bursts of high-energy photons, the most energetic events occurring today. GRBs are often caused by two energetic stars orbiting each other, occasionally emitting a burst of these photons across the sky. (For more information on gamma ray bursts, check out NASA's website on Gamma-Ray Bursts.)

Why did Kaku bring these up? Well, apparently, one of the potential gamma-ray bursters out there, WR 104, is only 8000 light-years away and, um, pointed right toward us. Should it send a burst of gamma rays in our direction, it could conceivably fry the planet we live on. Since I'm the type of guy who already worries about collisions from near-Earth asteroids and the eventual heat death of the universe, now I have something else to worry about. Thanks a lot, Dr. Kaku. :-)

Like "The Coming Convergence" by Stanley Schmidt, which I recommended earlier this week, "Physics of the Impossible" is a great read for both science fiction writers and people interested in what the future will bring.

Tags: books, science, science-fiction

This past week, I got hold of a copy of Stan Schmidt's new book, "The Coming Convergence," and I'm delighted to recommend it to others.

Just to remind those of you who might not remember, Stan is the editor of Analog magazine and therefore the editor who has published most of my stories. He's also writing an introduction to my book, "I Remember the Future." As editor of Analog, Stan has had a chance to see a lot of other writers imagine the future, but he's also a writer who has done his own share of imagining where current trends might lead. And he's done this before, in both his fiction and nonfiction.

In this case, the convergence he refers to in the title of the book is the convergence of technologies. Stan points out that a lot of technologies that originally seemed unrelated ended up working together to create something new. A few examples include the Internet and 3-D medical imaging. Stan looks at the way technologies converged in the past to speculate on how they will converge in the future; throughout the book, he explores subjects like biotechnology and nanotechnology, and he posits a variety of "metaconvergences" that will lead to dramatic changes.

If you're a science fiction writer like me, I suspect you'll come up with a lot of neat ideas for stories from reading the book. And even if you're not a writer, I think you'll find the book thought-provoking. We're going to be living in the future Stan describes, and reading his book is a good way to prepare yourself for it.

Tags: books, science, science-fiction

On another discussion forum, I brought up the question of what one might do with lottery winnings. We quickly determined that a $1 million lottery isn't really all that much; if you take it as twenty annual payments, after taxes it works out to roughly $35,000 per year. Not exactly "quittin' money," as a colleague of mine would put it.

I proposed $200 million as the amount I would want to win to live as comfortably as I would want while still being able to make the large charitable donations I would enjoy making. And as an exercise for a story once, I worked out a "lottery plan," that is, what steps I would have to take if suddenly winning one of the huge $200 million lotteries.

It made sense to think of myself as the winner, since it's more fun that way. :-)

And, actually, that's one of things lotteries sell, the chance to dream.

So, anyway. The first part of the plan includes switching the answering machine from the listed number to the unlisted number, calling the local police department to hire a 24-hour detail and an escort to lottery headquarters, and then enlisting an accountant, lawyer, and financial advisor for immediate assistance.

But the best part of the plan includes the list of charities that I wish I could donate more money to, and how much I would give to each one. (After buying a large house, mortgage-free, with enough room for a library and comic book collection, of course. And yarn for Nomi.)

I can immediately think of a few theater companies and museums I'd love to fund, as well as a few synagogues and schools I'd like to help out. After that, though, my imagination fails me.

So I pose the question to anyone who wants to play. To where would you donate money if you won the $200 million lottery?

Tags: personal

This past weekend was one of the most relaxing ones I have had in a long time. gnomi and I went to her parents' house for shabbat, followed by the first two days of Passover. We ate, we slept, we read, we enjoyed the two seders, we slept some more, we spent time with friends and family, we slept some more...

You get the idea.

And now, of course, back to the real world. If anything happened over the weekend, assume I missed it...

Tags: jewish, personal

Last night, after I got home from class, Nomi and I performed the traditional search for chametz one does just before the Passover holiday. And, as you can see in Nomi's post At Chez Burstein, Everyone Helps Search for Chametz, we always get a little extra help from our friends....

Tags: jewish, silly

1. Letter in The Brookline TAB supporting the re-election of Gil Hoy to the Board of Selectmen

2. A comic strip by Seanan (LJ: cadhla)

Guess which one is more amusing. Go ahead, guess.

Tags: brookline, conventions, personal, politics

People who have much more connection to last year's tragedy than I do will undoubtedly be talking about it all day. I urge you to go read their posts, articles, and stories. (You can start with the Washington Post story Deceptively Stong about Derek O'Dell, who was shot and survived to tell his story. Or the New York Times story A Living Memorial After Virginia Tech, about the parents of victim Austin Cloyd, who are building houses in her memory.)

But I do have one thing I'd like to share. Last year, after the shootings, gnomi was reminded of a scene from the TV show The West Wing in which the president speaks after a similar tragedy occurs in their world. I share those words (by Aaron Sorkin) again today:

... securing peace in a time of global conflict, sustaining hope in this winter of anxiety and fear. More than any time in recent history America's destiny is not of our own choosing. We did not seek nor did we provoke an assault on our freedoms and our way of life. We did not expect nor did we invite a confrontation with evil. Yet the true measure of a people's strength is how they rise to master that moment when it does arrive.

Forty four people were killed a couple of hours ago at Kenneson State University. Three swimmers from the men's team were killed and two others are in critical condition when after having heard the explosion from their practice facility they ran into the fire to help get people out. Ran into the fire. The streets of heaven are too crowded with angels tonight. They're our students and our teachers and our parents and our friends. The streets of heaven are too crowded with angels tonight.

But every time we've measured our capacity to meet a challenge we look up and we're reminded that that capacity may well be limitless. This is a time for American heroes. We will do what is hard. We will achieve what is great. This is a time for American heroes and we reach for the stars.

(The West Wing: "20 Hours in America")

Tags: history, world-news

I discovered the sad news today that physicist John Archibald Wheeler had died on Sunday morning at the age of 96.

For those of you who have never heard of him, Wheeler will probably be most remembered by the general public as the one who invented the term "black hole" for a dead star so dense that not even light could escape its gravitational pull. Oppenheimer and Snyder had suggested this possibility out of Einstein's general relativity, and it was at a conference in 1967 that Wheeler came up with the term.

The concept of a star so massive that not even light could escape had been discussed long before the equations of general relativity suggested the possibility, but no one had come up with a good term for the idea. Probably the most well-know phrase before "black hole" was "frozen star," which doesn't quite create the same image in the mind as "black hole" does.

Black holes have become a longtime staple of science fiction; I even used one for my first cover story, "Escape Horizon" (Analog, March 2000).

As someone who studied general relativity as a graduate student, I used Wheeler's classic co-authored textbook on the subject: Gravitation by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler. It's one of the clearest explanations of general relativity for the physicist that I have ever seen. I also learned some of special relativity out of the classic Spacetime Physics book that Wheeler co-authored with Edwin Taylor; and although I did get to meet Taylor once (when I almost served as his Teaching Assistant), I never did get to meet Wheeler. I wish I had; I understand he was a great teacher. Wheeler was probably the most influential physicist of the 20th century who never won a Nobel Prize, and he deserved one a thousand times over.

If you want to learn more about him, here's a link to his New York Times obituary: John A. Wheeler, Physicist Who Coined the Term 'Black Hole' Is Dead at 96.

Tags: history, language, personal, science, science-fiction