Chasing Dreams
literal and metaphorical
Before we get started today, I should point out that the good folks at Utopia Science Fiction have just published their first anthology, celebrating 5 years of hard work!
I’m not in it, but they did just accept a sixth article from me for their April issue on climate. It is about resistance to antibiotics and pesticides, and what we might do about that problem if we changed our murderous default mindsets.
End of an Era
This past week I finally shut down the Facebook group for our public science discussion group, part of a larger movement I first discovered while living in Houston. We hadn’t met in person since the beginning of the pandemic, but I continued to post links to articles and events organized by other people or groups there. I finally left the online group over a year ago, and in the absence of any moderation it was taken over by “job ads,” which were presumably phishing lures of some sort.
FB doesn’t make it easy; you have to individually remove every member before you can delete the group. (Actually, they make it impossible. The group is not deleted. Of course not. FB would never give up that data. It’s only archived. This is not reflected in their own previous help documents.)
In the 5+ years that Diedrich Schmidt and I ran that series, we hosted over 50 speakers, to audiences that ranged from just the two of us (once just me) to about 30, and drank hundreds of beers, contributing some non-negative number of $$ to the local economy. We did turns at a half-dozen establishments, several of which are likewise now dissolved as physical entities, or at least changed hands:
Gibb’s Hundred Brewing
The Green Bean coffeeshop
Leveneleven Brewing
I continue to make some efforts to do local science reporting in this newsletter, most recently this two-parter:
And I’d be happy to do more, if there’s interest;
Yearly Writing Stats
As always, thanks to the team at The Submission Grinder for providing this valuable service. If it weren’t for them, I would make a lot more mistakes, submitting the same piece to multiple editors at the same time, or sending the same one back to an editor who has already rejected it. As a small boost to them, I include a link to The Sample, which forwards this newsletter to potential subscribers selected by AI.
Half as many submissions this year, but only one fewer accepted. The Grinder doesn’t separate out fiction from nonfiction. That’s the basis of the lower acceptance rates over the past couple of years, though. I’ve been doing more fiction, and editors like my fiction less, at least in comparison to the competition. This is from one of my latest rejection notices.
We received 499 stories for our first submission call and could only accept a very small number of them for publication. Thank you for both your patience and for the opportunity to read your work.
Speculative fiction magazines publish less nonfiction, but the number of people writing it is so much smaller that acceptance rates are actually a little higher.
I also won my first literary prize this year, which was pretty cool.
Dream Research
As I begin to prep the next iteration of my college neuroscience seminar (the University taketh away, and the University giveth back, for no obvious reason), I’m reminded of a recent book, a really good little excerpt of which is linked below.
Misfortunes—mishaps the character cannot avoid—are seen in about a third of all dreams. That rate is, sadly, seven times higher than the rate of good fortunes. Nevertheless, we succeed in handling difficulties in dreams as often as we fail.
To what purpose?
The sleeping brain performs multiple forms of memory evolution. It stabilizes and strengthens some memories while extracting rules and gist from others, and it integrates new memories into older, pre-existing knowledge networks . . .
This is not a trivial task. Our brains store immense amounts of information in an unbelievably complex collection of interlocking neural networks. Related memories are physically connected so that activation of any memory in the network will tend to activate others in that network. How the brain decides to file new information—into exactly which networks it will link a new memory—determines whether and when this new information will come to mind during subsequent wakefulness.
Perhaps my one lasting scientific contribution will be the dream journal I’ve been keeping off and on for the past ten years or so. I imagine turning it over to some dedicated research team after I die. The value to science (if there is any) will be in the number of dreams recorded (hundreds at this point), which might allow for finding potential patterns of individual difference, over and above the statistical patterns noted across groups. See the top 15 in the linked article above.
There’s also a lot of metadata about class, culture, and personal history that will have to be added in to make the records searchable.
Here are the three most recent examples from my own files:
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