Tag Archives: speed

Writing a Novel in One Week

Tail-light trailsHow fast can you write well? Don’t mistake slowness for quality: what speedy writing lacks in deliberation, under the right circumstances and with enough writing practice behind it, it can more than make up for in involvement, awareness, and momentum. [image by Neal Fowler]

James Maxey, author of numerous successful short stories and of the Dragon Age trilogy of novels, has been used to a goal of 10,000 words written per week. This is pretty ambitious by almost anyone’s standards, and he doesn’t always hit the mark. Recently, though, he found he suddenly and unexpectedly had a full week without obligations, and he asked himself if for that time he might be capable of writing 10,000 words a day. Working like that for a week, he reasoned, it should be possible to write an entire novel. Continue reading Writing a Novel in One Week

Making the internet more like E-Coli

Does the net work in a similar way to the bacteria that makes us ill?There’s fascinating article on Discover today about a control theorist called John Doyle working on ways to improve internet speeds. He compares the structure of the internet to the E-Coli bacteria – both structures resemble a bow tie in the way they homogenize information or DNA into a small knot in the centre then spread them out to their respective destinations. With the oncoming prospect of RFID on most products and wireless nodes popping up all over the place, having an internet structure that doesn’t collapse under the weight of all the signals broadcast across it is essential. Doyle thinks that by letting computers use more information about internet traffic flow and speed, they can use the quickest route more easily, speeding up transmission of data by a huge amount.

[story via Discover magazine, image by sdbrown]