G.T. Labs

g.t. labs

A new site, and its background image

 

Hi! After a long hiatus from blogging and site updating, we’re back with both…and now at least the site will be responsive. (I’ll try too!) I hope you like it, and can find stuff, and that it works well for all your G.T. Labs and science comics needs. I think it will for mine. Many thanks to my friend Jane for getting me here.

Of course a website refresh isn’t newsworthy at this point in history. It’s not like we’re living in the world of The Americans, where “ARPANET” is invoked like it’s a magical and mysterious thing. Which it is, if you think about it for even a second. (And for the worst cross-over ever, imagine Harry Potter sneaking onto that show and yelling Arpa Net, causing all the mainframe tape drives to spin out of control.) But it’s also mundane and commonplace too.

So what remains that’s magical and mysterious while also being the very definition of mundane and commonplace? Quantum theory! And that’s where the new background image comes in. This is the rendering of Einstein’s clock-in-a-box as it appears in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp (1949). No credit for the artist, but I infer from the text that it was commissioned by Bohr himself, and as a collector, that would be a drawing I’d love to have the original for.

It illustrates a thought experiment he posed to stump Niels Bohr and his fellow quantum theorists in Einstein’s ongoing effort to demonstrate, once and for all, that this quantum stuff was nonsense. The bunk. Just Plain Wrong.

It almost worked.

Bohr had dispatched most of Einstein’s previous objections with relative ease, but this one made him sweat. Here’s how the scene plays out in Suspended in Language, which you can buy right here on this site, or from great booksellers everywhere.

(Sorry/not sorry about the EPR cliffhanger!)

G.T. Labs books: now DRM-free at comiXology

The title says it all, but in case you want more, you can read the press release: “New DRM-free Publishers at ComiXology“.

I was happy when comiXology asked me to join the second wave of DRM-free books, since it allowed me to make the books available to a wider audience. Will some of that audience share the books in ways I’d rather they didn’t? Maybe, but I suspect most won’t, and the benefits of making the books easier to read will be worth it.
This isn’t my first foray into DRM-free, though the first was a smaller scale. I worked with the Ann Arbor District Library a couple of years ago to release a few titles to AADL card-holders available. We went back and forth quite a bit on how that would work, and in the end instead of of requiring one of those hated click-through agreements, I wrote this and attached it to all the files:
A note from the author:

Hi! Jim Ottaviani here, writing to say thanks for downloading [BOOK TITLE]. You probably expected to see a bunch of legalese at this point, but I almost never make it all the way through those licenses myself, so you won’t get that here. You also won’t get passwords, due dates, or DRM. We want you to read this book however it suits you, be it on a desktop computer, a laptop, a tablet, a phone… From here on out, this copy is yours.

So, I hope you enjoy [BOOK TITLE], and if you do I have two requests.

If you want to share it with friends who live in Ann Arbor, please encourage them to get the book from AADL themselves. This is an experiment for both the library and me; we’d like to find out how many people want to read books this way. So if your friends live here, they can get it the same way you did, and that would help us learn more. And hey, if they don’t already have a library card, now is the perfect time for them to get one! AADL is a wonderful resource, and you’ll both be happy you introduced them to it.

And if you planned to send it to a friend from out of town? Well, while it’s uncomfortable to say it so plainly, here goes: You and I chip in via taxes to support all the great books, music, and movies — not to mention services — AADL provides. Some of my share comes from sales of the books I write. If you give this to someone who hasn’t chipped in, either directly or indirectly, we’ll end up with fewer great things to watch and listen to and read. So instead of sending them your copy, please suggest that they buy one, or ask their local library to order one for its collection.

Thanks for reading, and again, I hope you enjoy the book.
So far, so good I think. And now, in partnership with comiXology, the experiment goes global.

New story: “The Imitation Game” is here

Turing at the time of his election to Fellowsh...

Turing at the time of his election to Fellowship of the Royal Society. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

At last! The book was first announced in Publishers Weekly a…while ago. After a whole lot of work, Leland Purvis and my book about Alan Turing has begun to appear at Tor.com. Here’s our pitch from way back when:

“The atomic bomb shortened WWII by months, and the whole world knew it, instantly. The code-breakers at Bletchley Park shortened the war by years, but everyone who worked there remained anonymous and everything they did remained secret…for decades. As Winston Churchill put it, Bletchley people were the geese that ‘laid the golden egg, but never cackled.’

Flying at the head of Churchill’s flock was Alan Turing, the mathematician who cracked the German Enigma code. That alone would be enough to secure his place in history, but before the war he launched modern computer science via his creation of the Universal Turing Machine and after the war he created what is now known as the Turing Test, a benchmark for artificial intelligence. He called his test ‘The Imitation Game’.
He was also openly gay in a time and place where gays were treated criminally. And not just metaphorically — he killed himself with a cyanide-tainted apple after being convicted of homosexuality and forced to undergo estrogen treatment.
Our world is one of computers and secure communications, and Turing’s work is at the heart of both. He was an eccentric genius, an Olympic-class runner, a witty and clear communicator about complicated ideas, and open and honest to a fault. The secret he kept to safeguard his country could have saved him; the secret he refused to keep to save himself meant his destruction at the hands of that same country.”
We hope you enjoy it! Here’s that link again: The Imitation Game.
(I scheduled this post to appear at 10:01:01 local time. Binary and prime: I hope Alan Turing would approve.)

Graphic novels about science: Buy one, get one (Feynman) free!

Feynman paperback coverIt’s a Friday when a lot of people shop, and do so hoping to get a great deal, so I’d like to offer you what I think is a great deal:

The first 10 purchases of any book from www.gt-labs.com will get a free copy of Feynman. (I’ll love it if you buy more than one book, but to be fair to all this will be a one-per-order thingee…) After that first ten, I’ll still send you something for free along with your purchase, but it may not be that book. It will be comics- or science-related, though!
Let’s try this through Dec. 10, 2013, shall we?
And…I’ll sign any of the books to anyone on your holiday gift list, including you, if you’re in the mood to treat yourself to something nice.
 

Note that I have to limit this offer to folks in the U.S., since I don’t have time right now to figure out postage and fill out customs forms and wait in the lengthening lines at the post office. I can only procrastinate so much on writing the next book, after all!
So, I hope you head over to www.gt-labs.com and pick out a new favorite!

G.T. Labs post office box…no more!

In the last year or so arrivals to my P.O. box have dwindled, so that now only virtual particles bubbling up from the vacuum and checks from my distributor have appeared there. So, it’s time to reduce the keys I carry around each day by one… 

I find myself sad to close it. It served me well for over a decade and I loved finding the yellow “a package is waiting for you” slip or a note from someone who just discovered one of my books and had to tell me about it by sending a letter. Paying a visit after a few weeks out of town was like unlocking a long-abandoned storage locker, one that might be full of treasure, and I have happy memories of using a trip to get my mail as a way to trick myself into getting a few miles of running in during the dead of winter.
Anyway, if you see reference to a post office box in older copies of my books and are hankering to mail beef jerky or chain letters or stuff I might actually want to hold in my hands, please don’t send it there. Instead, contact me via email and we’ll figure out what to do next.

I’m not sure what will happen to good old eighty-one forty-five next, but I’m about to find out. Or not…it probably transforms itself into a miniature black hole, from which nothing escapes. And yes, I’ve already made sure those checks don’t cross that event horizon!