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Exhalation (short Story)
"Exhalation" is a science fiction short story by American writer Ted Chiang, about the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It was first published in 2008 in the anthology ''Eclipse 2: New Science Fiction and Fantasy'', edited by Jonathan Strahan. In 2019, the story was included in the collection of short stories '' Exhalation: Stories''. Plot The story is epistolary in nature, taking the form of a scientist's journal entry. The scientist is a member of a race of air-driven mechanical beings. The race obtains air from swappable lungs filled with pressurized air (argon) from underground. When it is realized that a number of clocks simultaneously appear to be running fast but do not appear to be malfunctioning, the narrator decides to explore the explanation that people's brains are computing slower. The scientist dissects his own brain and discovers that it operates based on the movement of air through tubes with small flaps of gold leaf acting as switches. The scientist hypothesizes tha ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ted Chiang
Ted Chiang (born 1967) is an American science fiction writer. His work has won four Nebula awards, four Hugo awards, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and six Locus awards. His short story "Story of Your Life" was the basis of the film ''Arrival'' (2016). He was an artist in residence at the University of Notre Dame in 2020–2021. Early life, family and education Ted Chiang was born in 1967 in Port Jefferson, New York. His Chinese name is Chiang Feng-nan (). Both of his parents were born in Mainland China and immigrated to Taiwan with their families during the Chinese Communist Revolution before immigrating to the United States. His father, Fu-pen Chiang, is a distinguished professor of mechanical engineering at Stony Brook University. Chiang graduated from Brown University with a computer science degree. Career Chiang began submitting stories to magazines in high school. After attending the Clarion Workshop in 1989 he sold his first story, "The Tower of Babylo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hugo Award For Best Short Story
The Hugo Award for Best Short Story is one of the Hugo Awards given each year for science fiction or fantasy stories published or translated into English during the previous calendar year. The short story award is available for works of fiction of fewer than 7,500 words; awards are also given out for pieces of longer lengths in the novelette, novella, and novel categories. The Hugo Awards have been described as "a fine showcase for speculative fiction" and "the best known literary award for science fiction writing". The Hugo Award for Best Short Story has been awarded annually since 1955, except in 1957. The award was titled "Best Short Fiction" rather than "Best Short Story" in 1960–1966. During this time no Novelette category was awarded and the Novella category had not yet been established; the award was defined only as a work "of less than novel length" that was not published as a stand-alone book. In addition to the regular Hugo awards, beginning in 1996 Retrospective H ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
2008 Short Stories
8 (eight) is the natural number following 7 and preceding 9. In mathematics 8 is: * a composite number, its proper divisors being , , and . It is twice 4 or four times 2. * a power of two, being 2 (two cubed), and is the first number of the form , being an integer greater than 1. * the first number which is neither prime nor semiprime. * the base of the octal number system, which is mostly used with computers. In octal, one digit represents three bits. In modern computers, a byte is a grouping of eight bits, also called an octet. * a Fibonacci number, being plus . The next Fibonacci number is . 8 is the only positive Fibonacci number, aside from 1, that is a perfect cube. * the only nonzero perfect power that is one less than another perfect power, by Mihăilescu's Theorem. * the order of the smallest non-abelian group all of whose subgroups are normal. * the dimension of the octonions and is the highest possible dimension of a normed division algebra. * the first number ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Science Fiction Short Stories
Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for scientific reasoning is tens of thousands of years old. The earliest written records in the history of science come from Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia in around 3000 to 1200 BCE. Their contributions to mathematics, astronomy, and medicine entered and shaped Greek natural philosophy of classical antiquity, whereby formal attempts were made to provide explanations of events in the physical world based on natural causes. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, knowledge of Greek conceptions of the world deteriorated in Western Europe during the early centuries (400 to 1000 CE) of the Middle Ages, but was preserved in the Muslim world during the Islamic Golden Age and later by the efforts of Byzantine Greek scholars who brought Greek man ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Escape Pod (podcast)
''Escape Pod'' is a science fiction podcast magazine produced by Escape Artists, Inc. It proclaims itself "the world's leading science fiction podcast". The present co-editors are Mur Lafferty and S. B. Divya. While episodes are free, the company runs on listener donations and sponsorship. Podcast history Escape Pod launched on 12 May 2005 with founder Serah Eley filling all roles. Writer Jeremiah Tolbert later joined as editor. Serah Eley announced her retirement on 26 April 2010. Her last appearance was Episode 240 on 12 May 2010. Mur Lafferty assumed both producer and hosting roles at Escape Pod with Episode 241. Effective 1 January 2013, Mur Lafferty stepped down as editor, keeping her association with Escape Artists, Inc. On 18 December 2012, at Escape Pod's site, Mur published "Announcing the new editor of Escape Pod!", naming co-host Norm Sherman the new editor and Alasdair Stuart interim editor until Sherman assumed his new role. Escape Pod confirmed Mur's departu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Heat Death Of The Universe
The heat death of the universe (also known as the Big Chill or Big Freeze) is a hypothesis on the ultimate fate of the universe, which suggests the universe will evolve to a state of no thermodynamic free energy, and will therefore be unable to sustain processes that increase entropy. Heat death does not imply any particular absolute temperature; it only requires that temperature differences or other processes may no longer be exploited to perform work. In the language of physics, this is when the universe reaches thermodynamic equilibrium. The Heat Death theory has become the leading theory in the modern age with the fewest unpredictable factors. If the topology of the universe is open or flat, or if dark energy is a positive cosmological constant (both of which are consistent with current data), the universe will continue expanding forever, and a heat death is expected to occur, with the universe cooling to approach equilibrium at a very low temperature after a very long ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Entropy
Entropy is a scientific concept, as well as a measurable physical property, that is most commonly associated with a state of disorder, randomness, or uncertainty. The term and the concept are used in diverse fields, from classical thermodynamics, where it was first recognized, to the microscopic description of nature in statistical physics, and to the principles of information theory. It has found far-ranging applications in chemistry and physics, in biological systems and their relation to life, in cosmology, economics, sociology, weather science, climate change, and information systems including the transmission of information in telecommunication. The thermodynamic concept was referred to by Scottish scientist and engineer William Rankine in 1850 with the names ''thermodynamic function'' and ''heat-potential''. In 1865, German physicist Rudolf Clausius, one of the leading founders of the field of thermodynamics, defined it as the quotient of an infinitesimal amount of hea ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The California Sunday Magazine
''The California Sunday Magazine'' was a longform Sunday magazine featuring stories about the Western United States, Latin America, and Asia. In June 2021 it won a Pulitzer Prize, eight months after the magazine ceased publication. The prize was awarded in feature writing for a story on refugees and potential immigrants crossing the Darién Gap by freelance writer Nadja Drost. History ''The California Sunday Magazine'' was founded in October 2014 by Douglas McGray and Chas Edwards. The first issue was delivered to 400,000 households as an insert with the Sunday editions of the ''Los Angeles Times'', the ''New York Times'', the ''Sacramento Bee'', the ''San Francisco Chronicle'', and the '' San Diego Union-Tribune''. In 2016, the magazine won the National Magazine Award for overall excellence in print magazine photography. Other finalists included '' National Geographic'', '' New York'', '' Vanity Fair'', and ''The Wall Street Journal''. In 2018, ''California Sunday'' was acqu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The California Sunday Magazine
''The California Sunday Magazine'' was a longform Sunday magazine featuring stories about the Western United States, Latin America, and Asia. In June 2021 it won a Pulitzer Prize, eight months after the magazine ceased publication. The prize was awarded in feature writing for a story on refugees and potential immigrants crossing the Darién Gap by freelance writer Nadja Drost. History ''The California Sunday Magazine'' was founded in October 2014 by Douglas McGray and Chas Edwards. The first issue was delivered to 400,000 households as an insert with the Sunday editions of the ''Los Angeles Times'', the ''New York Times'', the ''Sacramento Bee'', the ''San Francisco Chronicle'', and the '' San Diego Union-Tribune''. In 2016, the magazine won the National Magazine Award for overall excellence in print magazine photography. Other finalists included '' National Geographic'', '' New York'', '' Vanity Fair'', and ''The Wall Street Journal''. In 2018, ''California Sunday'' was acqu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Encyclopedia Of Science Fiction
''The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction'' (SFE) is an English language reference work on science fiction Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel unive ..., first published in 1979. It has won the Hugo Award, Hugo, Locus Award, Locus and BSFA Award, British SF Awards. Two print editions appeared in 1979 and 1993. A third, continuously revised, edition was published online from 2011; a change of web host was announced as the launch of a fourth edition in 2021. History The first edition, edited by Peter Nicholls (writer), Peter Nicholls with John Clute, was published by Granada plc, Granada in 1979. It was retitled ''The Science Fiction Encyclopedia'' when published by Doubleday (publisher), Doubleday in the United States. Accompanying its text were numerous black and white photo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Argon
Argon is a chemical element with the symbol Ar and atomic number 18. It is in group 18 of the periodic table and is a noble gas. Argon is the third-most abundant gas in Earth's atmosphere, at 0.934% (9340 ppmv). It is more than twice as abundant as water vapor (which averages about 4000 ppmv, but varies greatly), 23 times as abundant as carbon dioxide (400 ppmv), and more than 500 times as abundant as neon (18 ppmv). Argon is the most abundant noble gas in Earth's crust, comprising 0.00015% of the crust. Nearly all of the argon in Earth's atmosphere is radiogenic argon-40, derived from the decay of potassium-40 in Earth's crust. In the universe, argon-36 is by far the most common argon isotope, as it is the most easily produced by stellar nucleosynthesis in supernovas. The name "argon" is derived from the Greek word , neuter singular form of meaning 'lazy' or 'inactive', as a reference to the fact that the element undergoes almost no chemical reactions. The complete octe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
