SARSAPARILLA
I was planning on doing these advice columns weekly… then, because I was being asked questions I felt I had to answer honestly, I switched it to bi-weekly… and now it’s been a couple of months since the last one. So yeah, the more ridiculous the question I’m asked, the better. For some reason I can’t leave the science/writing questions alone… leading me to procrastinate before answering them.
Howdy-
I have been considering setting up a blog for some time, because while science is my skill, writing is my passion. My hard drive is packed with old stories and articles sent to my friends and family, many of them garnering good attention. With a little prodding from Greta Christina’s blog, I finally decided to make one of my own. I was wondering if you had any tips about creating a readership, keeping it, and growing as a blogger.
Currently I only have a history type piece on there, but I am fairly sure the only person other than me that read it is…well…me.
Also, is there any etiquette for linking to other bloggers that I should know, so I don’t piss anybody off?
The first key to getting an audience is knowing how to write well, and there’s only one good way to do that. You have to put the work in. While a lot of people seem to think there’s a great secret to writing, like wearing only one shoe, eating a mango, and wearing a tin foil hat in the shape of a swan that will cause you to produce excellent content, this is sadly not true.
Read a lot, write a lot, and throw away the crap. Be prepared to write a lot of crap. You’re going to go through whole sewage plants before you start finding the gold. I wrote over a million words before I was eighteen. Where are they now? They’re in a dump somewhere, where they belong.
Writing is like working out. When you first start, and you’re benching a hundred pounds, does anyone come by and say “Wow! That’s amazing!” Of course not. Any time you’re beginning at anything, with rare exception, you suck. That’s how life works. You have to work out every day, pop some steroids (editing in this case), and pretty soon you’ll be the kind of hulking monstrosity that people can’t help but notice. You know, like Carrot Top. If you do this long enough, you’ll notice three things happen to you as a writer.
1. You develop a voice. If you write with flavor, people will figure out that they like the taste of your work, and get hooked. There’s no trick to doing this other than putting in the work.
2. Your tastes become refined enough that you can look at your own work with a critical eye. You don’t look at it anymore and say “good” or “bad” you see how all the parts fit together mechanically, and work on those accordingly.
3. People don’t cringe anymore when you ask them to read a story you wrote.
When you do all of that, people will find you. It’s exactly like the Field of Dreams. If you build it, they will come. Except it’s nothing at all like that. So you should probably learn to use analogy too. Then there’s the one big final step, because being good isn’t enough. After you do all that, you need to write on a consistent basis to keep your audience amused. That’s the only way to keep them. Now for the rest of your e-mail.
The only question you should ask yourself when you link to someone is: do you have an honest good-opinion not only of them, but of their work?
The sites you choose to link to are more about your relationship with your audience than they are about your relationship with another blogger. If you’re discerning about what you link to, people will take note, and be more apt to click on your links. If you link to anybody regardless of the quality of their work, even if you like them, pretty soon everyone figures out “hey, I like this blog, but the links are shit” and they stop clicking.
The only thing you do when you put someone in your blogroll that’s not entertaining is send a message that “Hey, this blogroll now has no value to you as a consumer of media.” Your blogroll should be about work that you think both you and your audience would enjoy, not a networking tool. If the work is not there it gives no benefit to the person you were trying to help, and if anything decreases the traffic you can send to the really good stuff.
Not to say that you’ll never see any benefit from your blogroll. I met Violent Acres because I linked to her. I think John Scalzi found the piece I wrote about him in his stats, and that in turn got me a couple of hundred viewers. But I don’t send traffic to artists that I don’t like or that my audience won’t like. If you do that, all you do is get your audience to stop trusting you.
If Boing Boing linked to uninteresting shit every day do you think people would still go there? Of course not. Your power in linking is as an editor. Don’t be afraid to say no to someone who wants a link (like my friend Sara from tallbladeofgrass, will the meta jokes ever get old? I don’t think so), and don’t be timid about linking to someone who is much more popular than you simply because you like what they do.
“I’d like to see your thoughts on faster-than-light travel. The plausibility of a wormhole supported by exotic matter, moving through a wormhole connecting a black and white hole, alcuiberre drive, etc.”
~Mandrake the Magician
First, let’s review a little bit of Einstein.
General Relativity leads us to an inescapable conclusion: if you have mass, you cannot travel faster than light. Period. If you have mass even a Planck unit above zero, you cannot be given enough energy to travel as fast or faster than light. Unless there’s some cheat way of giving an object infinite energy that we don’t know about yet.
If you have zero mass (like a photon), you travel at the speed of light. If you have an imaginary mass (your mass is a multiple of i as in the case of a tachyon) it is theoretically possible to go faster than light, although this also leads inevitably to time travel.
I’m not a particle physicist, so the only real “proof” I’ve ever seen in support of a tachyon even existing is someone saying “Wouldn’t it be awesome if I did this to the mass of a particle so it could go faster than light?” It may also be predicted by symmetry in the Standard Model, but I don’t know enough about that to comment. I’m sure there’s some greater driving impetus than the one I know, so I’ll leave it at that.
Now for the fun ideas. The Alcubierre Drive is more or less what they use in Star Trek. You make space shorter, move a little bit, and then let space get longer again. Ta da! You travelled an incredible distance without violating relativity. My confusion over this is of course: how does one bend space?
The only way I know of to bend space is to create a massive gravitational distortion (i.e. have a really big fucking chunk of stuff in as dense a body as possible.) Are we getting a super massive black hole and riding behind it like a charioteer? Does that even work? How are we moving this gravitational distortion along with us? Shouldn’t it kill us? How do you stop the tidal forces of the spacial distortion from killing everyone inside your vessel?
Apparently there are theoretically possible ways of doing this with exotic matter, but I won’t even pretend I know enough about that to comment. Hopefully someone finds a loophole in the laws of physics, because I really want a faster than light space-ship. I’ll pray that they make some amazing discoveries from the Large Hadron Collider, because that’s the only contribution I can make.
As for your black hole question… in theory every time a black hole is created a white hole is created somewhere else. The only problem is that no one has ever observed a white hole in our universe. Some physicists have hypothesized that this is how the universe reproduces. Every white hole becomes the seed of a new universe (the problem with this of course being is that there’s not enough mass being sucked into the black hole to become a new universe… but fuck, it’s a black hole, who really knows what it’s doing?)
As for the worm-hole questions… I get confused about it all to be honest. So we use them to rip a hole/create a bridge though space. Okay. Now… is there still an event horizon at each end? Because if that’s the case I’m not going to be able to get out of the one on the other end no matter how fast I go through the one at my end. Do the blackholes just disappear and leave me with this weird space corridor? What stops the corridor from disappearing? The whole idea confuses me on about ten thousand different levels. When people start saying “Hey! What if we bombarded the black hole with exotic particles?” I just start to cry, and stop following their argument.
I would really prefer to just climb on board a ship and have someone say “BAM! We’re here.”
“I’d like to see a comparison of the mass of Death Star I (http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Ultimate_Weapon) to that of the uncompleted Death Star II (http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Death_Star_II)”
~Andrew”
Do the exact same thing I did in the last entry I posted on this, except with a new value for the radius. Then when you’re done, make a guess to how far along the new Death Star is to completion in terms of the amount of material that needs to be brought on board. I’d say 3/4 would be a good estimate. Multiply the mass you find of a complete giant Death Star by 3/4. That’s the mass of the unfinished Death Star.
If you’re feeling ambitious, figure out how many moles of steel (which would be our guess metal) are used in the construction of the Death Star, then multiply that by the heat of vaporization of steel to find the total energy released when the Death Star blows up. Figure out the distance from Endor, and then decide how powerful the shock wave from the exploding Death Star is once it hits the planet, and compare that to an event like Hiroshima.
