And the Winner Is...

Mixed news on the contest front.  My outline and draft novel did not make the finals of the Mackinac Center's Freedom in Fiction Prize.

However, my 3-minute climate video did win second place in the Kids and Globaloney contest

The results surprise me a bit.  I really felt good about my story concept for the fiction prize, so much so I will likely finish it and at least release it as an e-book.  On the other hand, I found the 3-minute limit almost impossible to make work in the video contest, and thought my video, which I include below, was rushed.

A better version is the 9-minute version here which covers the same subjects but with a bit more leisure and explanation.  This video, however, is a bit dated.  As I write in the YouTube comments, I want to take a better shot at explaining the issues around positive feedback.  I think I can fix it with just a rewrite of the narration.  That longer video is here and below.

My really long video, 60-minutes in 6 parts, is here.

3 Comments

  1. Frank Ch. Eigler:

    For what it's worth, your use of the phrase "dominated by positive
    feedback" may not be a very rigorous synonym for what you really
    seem to mean: "high gain" in signal processing lingo.

    Even in your "dominated by positive feedback" curves, *negative*
    feedback must limit the temperature (since if it didn't, the
    temperature would rise indefinitely without any further forcing
    function input - infinite gain). IOW, even in those cases,
    negative feedback "dominates" over "positive", but not before
    some amplification had taken place.

  2. M. Hodak:

    I thought the three minute version was excellent.

  3. M. Hodak:

    I thought the three minute version was excellent.