Greg Egan

This page lists all the eBooks:

www.gregegan.net/BIBLIOGRAPHY...

I know some people are keen on buying their eBooks from Bookshop dot org, so I’m happy to announce that almost* all my self-published DRM-free eBooks are now available there.

* Except for DICHRONAUTS; the US rights are held by Night Shade so my own edition can only be sold outside North America.

“It Was Just An Accident” was powerful, tightly focused on its central quandary but still humanly messy.

Maybe “Death and the Maiden” was first to ask “What if you meet your torturer?” — but sadly the world has more than enough barbarity to justify another version of this story.

Next pandemic is gonna be lit 🔥
We’ll all be chugging protein drinks and swallowing deworming tablets and talking about “that which cannot be named” while our social media feeds tell us that anyone who died did not do enough push-ups…

Fed up with your world? Visit ours. Picture of the Clarkesworld robot looking over at the cover of our February issue. That cover features a robot looking out at the sea while standing on the beach with their hands clasped behind their back. The water comes gently towards their feet. Peaceful ocean and sky. A contemplative moment of peace. Cover art by Matt Dixon.

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Imagine! I mean, imagine how hard it is for a quadratic equation to understand itself! Imagine how hard it is for that statement to have any meaning whatsoever!

I very much enjoyed “The Secret Agent”. It reminded me of “Once Upon A Time in Anatolia’’, in the sense it created of being immersed in a very specific time, place and culture, while the flash-forwards expanded the scope and gave everything an eerie poignancy.

YouTube video by ParticleMen Preview TMBG's new album The World Is to Dig: Wu-Tang

Hear the brand new track from our upcoming album The World is To Dig. The song is Wu-Tang. Arrives in April.... and get your own free download of it right now at TMBGshop. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Io63...

Two Twisty Shapes Resolve a Centuries-Old Topology Puzzle | Quanta Magazine The Bonnet problem asks when just a bit of information is enough to uniquely identify a whole surface.

www.quantamagazine.org/two-twisty-s...

Long-Sought Proof Tames Some of Math’s Unruliest Equations | Quanta Magazine Mathematicians finally understand the behavior of an important class of differential equations that describe everything from water pressure to oxygen levels in human tissues.

www.quantamagazine.org/long-sought-...

Both of these Quanta articles describe fascinating mathematical developments — but they also come with encouraging human stories of the ultimate success of persistence over decades by individual mathematicians, fresh collaborations that reignite dormant ideas, and connections to work from long ago.

Enough complete directory names, not enough characters.

Dear MacOS developers

How about you stop uglifying the icons and start disambiguating multiple folders with the same name in the Finder’s Go > Recent Folders menu. Maybe include enough of the end of each path so that every item becomes distinct?

The silent bit puzzles me. Mine needs a fan running, and it continues for quite a while after the heating stops. Does your unit have a super-quiet fan, or some way to avoid the need?

What the Literature is Filling Up With

Welcome, piles of slop filling up the journals with clouds of useless wordy garbage. Case in point:

So whatever events on those two worldlines Bob considers to be simultaneous, he still ends up measuring exactly the same distance between them as Alice does.

At s = u = 0 we have what Alice measures:

P(0) = 0
Q(0) = x A

|Q(0)-P(0)|^2
= |x A|^2
= x^2 |A|^2
= x^2

But for *any* values of s and u:

|Q(u)-P(s)|^2
= |x A + (u-s) C|^2
= x^2 |A|^2 + 2(u-s) A·C + (u-s)^2 |C|^2
= x^2

Then the worldlines for two light pulses that Alice considers to be separated by a distance x, one starting at the origin and one starting at x A, will be:

P(s) = s C
Q(u) = x A + u C

where s, u are parameters for how far we go along the respective worldlines.

What happens if Bob, flying past in a spaceship, uses *his* definition of simultaneity to pick different events on the worldlines of the same light pulses?

Suppose A is a unit-length spacelike vector orthogonal to Alice's worldline, and C is a lightlike vector orthogonal to A.

What? Simultaneity is an observer-dependent notion! But if Alice uses *her* definition of simultaneity, she will encode her chosen planar figure in the collection of light pulses in a frame-invariant way.

A photograph of Einstein drawn as brightness contours.

In special relativity, observers in relative motion will disagree about various measurements. But if Alice draws any planar figure, and fires a simultaneous pulse of light from each point on it, perpendicular to the plane, any observer will agree on the figure’s shape and size.

I’m sure the writers of “Death By Lightning” know exactly what they’re doing with the anachronistic dialog: endless F-words, “quality time”, “crash and burn” etc. It’s fun, in a West Wing With Beards way. But it still makes me nervous about trusting them on any of the history.

I lost about six dollars! If I’d been paying more attention I would have caught the error before I left the supermarket, but I only picked it up after I’d got home and was staring at the receipt wondering why the total was higher than my rough guess for what it should have been.

It turns out there are 6 different digits between the barcodes, so it might well have been some kind of software error.

Today in the supermarket I scanned 2 packs of flour … and one of them was listed on the receipt as frozen raspberries. So that must have been a genuine barcode misread, rather than just incorrect data in a product database. The barcodes looked fine, so maybe the reader glitched.

Against Imaginary Friends: Why Digital Companions Are No Solution to Social Isolation Robert Sparrow and James Brown discuss "Against Imaginary Friends: Why Digital Companions Are No Solution to Social Isolation," a Research Article in the…

FYI @profgalloway.com: a paper in the journal of a major US professional society for computer scientists: “Against Imaginary Friends: Why Digital Companions Are No Solution to Social Isolation” by Robert Sparrow & James Brown. Published with a 5 minute video overview.

cacm.acm.org/research/aga...

A prolate spheroid (the surface created by rotating an ellipse around its long axis) with two neighbouring meridians running from the equator to the pole drawn in blue, and two red geodesics running on either side of the equator around 270 degrees before colliding.

These are the paths of the individual ants, from the starting point until they bump into each other.

Bari Weiss’s new CBS hires include ‘germ theory denialist’ doctor Dr Mark Hyman, who claimed he reduced his biological age by 20 years, brought on as a contributor

"Among the hires at CBS News announced by Weiss is a doctor who claims he reduced his biological age by 20 years with cold plunges; that cod liver oil treats autism; and that Alzheimer’s and dementia can be reversed with supplements he sells on his online store."

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Just rewatched “The Wages of Fear”, which suited the ambience on a 37C day.

I last saw it 40 years ago, and I’d forgotten everything but the overall premise, so it was every bit as jaw-dropping as if I was watching for the first time.

4.9/5 stars, with -0.1 for the very end.

What I am computing in the post you replied to is the Gaussian curvature *at the equator*, as the product of the curvatures of the equator, and a meridian *at the equator*.