Coffium

I finished Urth of the New Sun this evening; a bit of a slog. The first four books remain brilliant even on the third reading, but the fifth just isn’t as good.

Now I’m reading a galley of Cory Doctorow’s upcoming novel, Eastern Standard Tribe. It’s fun so far, but one thing has me puzzled. Cory’s invented coffium, coffee made with heavy water that doesn’t cool off. Assuming that’s an exaggeration (even stars cool down eventually), does this idea work scientifically? Does heated heavy water take a dramatically longer time to cool than light water does?

I’ve tried using Google to find out what the specific heat of heavy water (D₂O) is, without luck. This suggests to me that it’s the same as the specific heat of H₂O (1.00 cal/g °C). Anyone out there know any different?

Heavy water is about 10% denser than regular water, which would slow its cooling a bit since you’ve got more mass trying to shed heat through the same surface area; I assume you’d get a 10% increase in cooling time, but I haven’t bothered to look up the actual formula and run the numbers. That’s not enough of a change to justify the claim Cory’s narrator is making.

It also has slightly higher boiling (101.42° C) and freezing (3.81° C) points than regular water does, and it’s about 10% denser; I don’t know what that would do for cooling, if anything.

Eastern Standard Tribe

Finished Cory Doctorow’s Eastern Standard Tribe last night. (It’s a short book, and reads pretty quick.) Premise: It’s 2012, and subcultures have grown up around time zones. Art Berry is living in London, but his true loyalty lies with the east coast of North America, to the detriment of his sleep schedule. Also to the detriment of his official employer, a European conglomerate that he’s sabotaging with plausible-but-bad user interface design advice. Then his lover and best friend betray him over his brilliant idea for a wireless networking music-swapping scheme for use in traffic jams, and have him committed. Or maybe that’s just a paranoid fantasy brought about by sleep deprivation....

Sketching and discount comics

Christmas Day sale at Cosmic Comics! 30% off on TPBs! Whee!

Unfortunately, I didn’t find most of the stuff I’d been making mental notes of for the past couple weeks, and some guy right next to me snagged the last copy of Lost at Sea (filed in the with manga collections for some reason). I scored the following:

AutobioGraphix from Dark Horse, a collection of autobio shorts by various creators. I find collections usually have a large proportion of crappy stories, but this one’s really good so far (I’m halfway through).

Uzumaki (volume 1) by Junji Ito. A horror manga. I’ve read the first couple of stories already, and was intending to pick up the trades.

Courtney Crumrin and the Night Things (volume 1) by Ted Maifeh. I don’t know much about this, but I saw a good review of it last week, and it looks interesting.

After that, I felt my energy level dropping, so I strolled to the Starbucks on 17th and B’way, managed to get one of the three somewhat comfy chairs, and sipped a peppermint mocha (I considered a peppermint hot chocolate, but wanted the stronger caffeine hit) while sketching the people who were sitting around and standing on line for the bathroom. One woman noticed, and asked me to draw her next (the curly-haired woman, top row, second from the left). I think another might have been deliberately leaning behind her companion to avoid being drawn (top row, right, she didn’t come out so well), or I could just be paranoid. My favorite here is the dark-eyebrowed guy at the lower left corner.

On my way out, a guy who’d been behind me, watching me over my shoulder, complimented me. Ah, praise!

( Sketches )