The Sword and Laser discussion

New episode is up, live from BayCon 2012!

http://www.swordandlaser.com/home/201...

Now the wait for the next episode is gonna be hell.

edit:
Just finished listening. Great episode. Loved how the conversation went all over the place.

I want more podcasts like this. Fantastic episode!

I believe both 2312 and Blue Remembered Earth are supposed to inspire scientists.

That was an interesting conversation. You could probably do something similar with Robert J. Sawyer.

Another great episode!

This episode was a lot of fun! And the discussion of learning languages later in life increasing brain plasticity reminded me of one of the major reasons I'm struggling to learn Korean, and got me motivated to spend some time today studying (something I've been avoiding for a couple of months out of frustration).

By the way, the idea that English is unusually willing to take in words from other languages is a myth. Not because English doesn't--but because almost all languages do. Taking in a large number of "loan words" from other languages is a very common feature of languages in general. I had bought into this myth myself (before hearing it debunked by linguists), and thus was surprised by the astoundingly large number of loan words Korean has taken on. But it turns out that's pretty much normal.

I type in both qwerty and dvorak. Is my brain more plastic?

Great, why was the accompaniment of thunder and lightning edited out from my voice? To be fair, the intrusion of flying monkeys also had to be cut from the final podcast, though Tom had one of their purple feathers stuck in his hair.

And, yes, I do collect reasons why the fantasy genre is great. I compile these words into word art.

Yep, I agree with the others, this was a great episode. Very interesting and covering a broad range of topics. Excellent work!

Great interview. Reminded me of that one podcast Tom is on, Fourcast?
What he described (long term planning) reminded me strongly of Second Foundation.

Sword & Fourcast.

Thanks you guys! This was a lot of fun to listen to. I'm in my late 30's and I am just learning German. It's very humbling to try and tackle a new language later in life.
Again, thanks for the great podcast!

Todd is an interesting fellow...

Enjoyed the extended interview podcast. Some interesting subjects came up.

Todd brought up the Honor Harrington series again. How about we resurrect the On Basilisk Station campaign for the July laser read?

Just want to say that this was one of my most favorited interviews in quite a while. Todd covered a broad range of really interesting topics. It is always fun to listen to a smart person talk.

Great interview! Loved the range of topics you covered. Your discussion of the change in attitude towards dragons brought me back to a humanities class I once took. We read The Serpent and the Goddess: Women, Religion, and Power in Celtic Ireland and Chalice and the Blade, The: Our History, Our Future and considered the idea that before the patriarchy of Judaism there was the matriarchy of a religion that worshiped nature, with the serpent as the main symbol. So, in order to exert their authority men had to slay the serpent (or dragon). I'm not a scholar in that area so I'm not sure I could argue the point but it always made a lot of sense to me. In any case I thank Anne McCaffrey for starting the turn back to an appreciation of the dragon as a force for good.

Kathi wrote: "I'm not a scholar in that area so I'm not sure I could argue the point but it always made a lot of sense to me...."

The prehistoric matriarchy myth has been an attractive one since it was first forwarded in the 19th century, but, alas, it's just a myth. Still a useful metaphor for the discussion of the ways in which patriarchal culture has marked womens' experiences historically, but there's no archaeological evidence for it, and plenty against.
There *have* been matriarchal sub-societies, including serpent-oriented cults such as the various 'Mysteries' groups at Eleusis and those dedicated to Dionysus. Both heavily involved women, and some had exclusively female participation.

This was my favourite episode ever...

As a hard-SF reader I always avoided anything from his mum because I felt it was too fantasyish... But hearing him talk convinced me to give it a go... But only if I can get them as audio books...

One nitpick - the New Forest in the South of England to which Todd (or was it Tom?) refers to isn't actually 400 years, but almost a 1000 years old: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Forest - I loved taking my mountain bike through it when I lived nearby...

Just wanted to say great episode guys. Really enjoyed the interview. It felt very candid and I liked the rat holes that you guys went down. Very enjoyable.

I'm just listening to the podcast now (late to the party, I know :-( ) and the discussion about loanwords and concepts that don't exist in every language, reminded me of a talk a friend and I had last week, about how English doesn't seem to realy lend itself to translation to German because German is so much wordier.
Most of the snark and punch that comes from the tight style a lot of US/UK books are written in, gets lost in translation, wich is fine as long you only ever read translations, but once you start to notice it, it gets realy frutstrating. So both of us started to read a lot of books in the OV a couple of years ago and now we are loosing our grip on our motherlanguage :(.
Bilingualism. Makes you incompetent in two languages!

Leavey wrote: "I'm just listening to the podcast now (late to the party, I know :-( ) and the discussion about loanwords and concepts that don't exist in every language, reminded me of a talk a friend and I had l..."

No, English is a Germanic language and very close to German linguistically. I found, when learning German, that I got to grips with it very quickly simply because the vocabulary is so much alike. I also study Old English (Anglo-Saxon) which really helps to see just how closely related the Germanic languages are.

Noel wrote: "No, English is a Germanic language and very close to German linguistically. I found, when learning German, that I got to grips with it very quickly simply because the vocabulary is so much alike. I also study Old English (Anglo-Saxon) which really helps to see just how closely related the Germanic languages are."


I can appreciate that learning a language will be different for everyone but the vocabulary in German is like the least important thing. It's the sentence structure with respect to cases, gender, declension patterns and verb placement that is the real trick with German. If you were able to pick the language up with little effort, I congratulate you on your ability. But I personally haven't found German and English to be very similar.

I admit the use of cases etc is tricky for a native English speaker to pick up. German once had a simpler structure.

Ted - the language of bacteria, both native and interspecies: http://www.ted.com/talks/bonnie_bassl...