J. Craig Wheeler

I summarized the 30-year family Krone Experiment adventure in Blog #30. After posting the film on YouTube on June 9, it got a few views the first day and then took off in exponential growth with a doubling time of 1.5 days. By Saturday, June 20, there had been 678 views, far more than the number following these blogs, so something else was going on. It was not clear how many people actually watched the whole film. There were few comments. My favorite was a fellow who said he had really liked The Krone Experiment and Krone Ascending books, but was pissed at me for not writing the third novel in the series. The views grew to a total of 3,600 then stopped on the Fourth of July. Clearly, there had been some kind of YouTube algorithmic manipulation. Asked ChatGPT about this history. It said, ask YouTube. YouTube has its own AI, which artfully dodged the question. Back to getting 3 or 4 views per day. Not sure of next step. As expected, Black List rejected me as a candidate for their fall screen writing workshop.

On June 15, I Zoomed an Authors Guild webinar with a panel of three agents. I asked whether there was a bias against old folks. All three rushed to deny such was the case. I have my doubts.

On June 22, I joined an especially interesting meeting of the Westbank Writers group. The guest of the day was Dean Bredeson, who writes under the pen name Anthony Dean. He was joined by his wife and movie-maker son who advocated Black List for support of screen writing (see above). Bredeson is a professor of instruction in the UT Business School. In an experiment to see if he could make a little money writing, he has been self-publishing a sci-fi series with Amazon's Kindle Direct. He wrote the first book, The Voided Man (about life as a prisoner in a cosmic void), in three weeks in 2024. It's a good story, although it overstates the brightness of a supernova in one plot point (very few supernova experts among his readership, I suspect). By the time of our meeting, he had written a total of 11 books in the series in 1.5 years (I was blown away. It takes me 11 years to write one book!). He reported on his experience. He advocated Kindle Direct for self-publishing and argued that a writer must have a series and publish regularly to attract readers and make a buck (another strike against me; my interests are too eclectic). He talked about the art and science of Amazon Ads: use phrases as keywords; avoid copyrighted names/titles (I used them); newbies famously overpay for ads; blogs are not worth it (I enjoy doing this one); register with US Copyright Office. He wrote several hours a day, morning and then evening. He writes 700 words per hour (I can do 1000 if the subject is in my head). He left us with an exercise, to answer two questions: To what do you aspire? What is your goal for tomorrow?

Thus motivated, I reactivated my Amazon Ads account for The Path to Singularity with phrases as keywords. I started with the price I would pay at $0.50 per click, then inched up to $0.75 on 7/7/26, then to $1.00 on 7/13/26. I got little reaction. I checked in with ChatGPT to see what it thought about phrases as keywords, how to navigate the Amazon Ads web page, and recommendations on how to sell books. It turned out that most of my previous impressions and clicks and the 8 previous sales were all on the simple keyword "ai." I turned that keyword back on and sold a single book on July 26. The sale price of that book was more than I paid for the clicks, but of course, I only get 15% of the sale, so I'm basically losing money. I fiddled with keywords and prices a bit more and will watch that for a while.

I heard somewhere, maybe a local bit on our NPR radio station KUT, about a UT psychology professor, Paige Harden, who had written a book on twins raised apart, a powerful technique for separating the effects of genetics and environment, nature versus nurture. I contacted her and proposed giving her a copy of The Path to Singularity in exchange for her signature on her book, Original Sin, which I promised to purchase and read. She agreed, but with summer travel we did not get together until July 9. The book was fascinating, not quite what I expected. It does involve twin research but delves into the ethically murky issue of when and how one deserves to be punished for a transgression. The deep question is how we should think about it if a person is just unlucky and trapped in circumstances in which they have no control. That is where original sin comes in. You are bad because of Adam and Eve, not anything you personally did. In Hardin's bailiwick, there is evidenced from twin studies that bad behavior is substantially, but not totally, genetic, inherited, but our modern justice system makes no allowance for that. Hardin concludes, if I may simplify, that these issues deeply entwine nature and nurture, that these two aspects cannot be cleanly separated. We had a very interesting discussion in her office, and I now have an autographed copy of her book on my study shelf.

I've been regularly chipping away at editing my dad's biography. I'm in the final chapter incorporating a lot of personal correspondence from my parents on their retirement when they built two houses by hand and made the transition from the Apollo program to the business of Native American jewelry and Kachina dolls. You'll have to read it to make sense of that.

I've been experimenting a little with Substack, posting the notices I have been sending to LinkedIn and X. I'm thinking of using that as a vehicle for these blogs but have not found the time to focus on the nuts and bolts of that.  

On July 22, The Austin Forum on Science and Society did an interesting Zoom book discussion on Infinity Machine, a biography of Demis Hassibis, the brilliant founder of the company DeepMind, now owned by Google. His father is a Greek Cypriot and his mother is Chinese from Singapore. He was a chess prodigy at four. Later, he developed the machine learning code AlphaZero that beat the world's human champion at the game of Go and then won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing the AI code AlphaFold that essentially solved the previously intractable problem of protein folding. Put your vita up against that!

The local chapter of the Authors Guild held its recently-constituted quarterly meet-and-greet sessions on July 30. In an interesting wrinkle, they scheduled author readings. The venue was Alienated Majesty Books near the corner of 29th and Guadeloupe in the little shopping center that hosted Oat Willie's for a long time (but no more). I drive by all the time and had no idea they had opened a couple of years ago. About 20 people snacked and chatted before the readings. I made one new acquaintance, Gary Keith, a retired UT professor of political science. He does a Substack under the pen name Demosthenes in which he comments on the political world. In retirement, he decided to try his hand at writing fiction. He published his first novel, Austin Blues, a year ago with Atmosphere Press, a local hybrid publisher with which the author shares the cost and receives full editorial support. I asked him if he included Clifford Antone in the story, and he said, "Of course!" The main plot line concerns an episode where The University of Texas refuses tenure to an acclaimed faculty member and offers no explanation nor venue for appeal. Gary made it up a few years ago while he was writing his story. Sound familiar? I promptly ordered a copy from Amazon which arrived today, 8/2. I'm looking forward to reading it.

Gary also gave what I thought was the best reading of the evening. Rather than an excerpt from his novel, he read a poem; his meditation about getting old, his version of raging against the dying of the light. His delivery was dramatic and emotional. Rather than choosing from a work in progress, I decided to read an excerpt from The Path to Singularity on AI-catalyzed mind reading, telekinesis, and mental telepathy. Amid all the furor over AI, I don't think this topic gets enough attention. My presentation seemed to go okay. Three or four people asked for my book business cards with the declared intention of buying the book. I wrote to Alienated Majesty Books a couple of days later, inquiring whether they would stock The Path to Singularity and host a reading and book signing. We'll see.

In Blog #26 (Plate Spinning), I mentioned that I was exploring the publication of my collection of global travel stories, Tales from a Small Planet, and that I had been turned down by The University of Texas Press and by Texas Tech Press. I did not mention that my current agent also turned it down. I asked ChatGPT, and it recommended that I explore other academic presses. I upped my effort and have now been turned down by Cambridge University, Yale, Princeton, Chicago, The University of Arizona Press and, for good measure, Springer-Verlag, publishers of my book on Supernova Explosions. ChatGPT recommended some agents and I emailed one with a quick reply of receipt but no further word. I have not had the mental space to pursue other bot suggestions.  

On 4/20/26, I read a sample from Tales entitled Bannister to the Westbank Library Writer's Group. This was the shortest of the collection, 500 words, about a time I was nearly caught sliding down the elegant marble banister in the Cambridge Club in London. It got some acclaim from the writers, which was good for my ego, but does not get me any closer to a contract. I did get some suggestions for travel writers I should check out.  

Jane, one of the writers, volunteered to proofread and edit the whole story collection in Tales. She emailed, "I made an over-generalization about academics who lacked a sense of humor. You, thank goodness, have a comic awareness." Thus flattered, I could not say "no." I sent her 54,000 words and after a few days she returned detailed edits and eight pages of comments. Absorbing that is now on my agenda.  

The Writer's Group selected the theme of "birds" for the Spring edition of the West End Writer's Quarterly, with contributions from the group. I first thought, "I have nothing to say about birds," but after a few days, I realized I could gin up a short contribution. I wrote a piece called Lucky Bird about the road runners that inhabit our neighborhood. They only rarely show, and I always consider them lucky omens.  

With fading sales of The Path to Singularity and advice from several quarters, I girded my loins to do battle with the Amazon Ads machine. There is no charge for keywords, so I converted my index into a huge list of them. That was too cumbersome to manage, so I trimmed the list down to a dozen or so while I experimented. I first made very conservative bids and the result, as might be expected, was few free "impressions" a handful of "clicks" for which I had to pay a little, and no book sales. I then tried raising my bid to be within Amazon's recommended window for keywords like Kurzweil, Bostrom, and Singularity. The result reminded me of the dramatic segment, The Sorcerer's Apprentice, from Disney's Fantasia that haunted me for years of my youth. The impressions shot up to over 10,000, the clicks to dozens, and I actually sold a few books. The problem was that while I had set a daily expense limit of $5, I was hitting that every day, spending far more than I was making in sales. I felt like Mickey Mouse in that film, chopping the brooms, only to have them multiply. I tried to pause the campaign, but it kept going. Then I found another pause button, then another. One problem, I figured out in the wake of my panic, was that I had somehow triggered a United Kingdom campaign in addition to the U.S. version. That required a separate pause. I've been working up my courage to tip toe back in. The trick, I guess, is a carefully balanced choice of keywords and bids. I also have to say, I find the Amazon web pages awkward, cumbersome, and inscrutable. We'll see. 

This is more about reading than writing, but I had an interesting exchange in April with Ben Thomas, my last postdoc before I retired. Ben is now working at a high-tech company in Great Britain. Ben had engaged in a new personal project related to machine learning. The idea was to take a selection of technical papers on "superluminous supernovae" (SLSN) and make a Retrieval-Augmented Generation or RAG system. A RAG is a technique to enhance AI large language models (LLMs) by allowing them to retrieve and incorporate new information from external data sources (the Web) before generating responses. Ben's notion was to create an LLM expert in SLSN by collecting all the papers and embedding them into a "vector database." Then, when you query the LLM with a SLSN question or thought, it would embed that question-or-thought into the same semantic space and pull out the nearest neighbors that would be semantically similar to the query, thus yielding LLM-assisted science. This project, in turn, required the construction of a "knowledge graph" of papers and their citations. 

I'm working with Hungarian colleagues on a paper on the supernova spectral data we have acquired with the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at McDonald Observatory over 15 years. We are specifically exploring mysterious "high-velocity features," HVF, which are frequently observed but unexplained in exploding white dwarfs. In a fuzzy way, I had also been thinking of using AI to help guide our interpretation of HVFs. My notion was to collect every paper on HVF, and query them in some way. What do HVFs have to say about the progenitor evolution and explosion physics? I was thinking of something like a RAG system without even knowing that was a thing. Clearly, I need to learn more about RAG techniques.  
 
Then there is the subject of knowledge graphs. In yet another coincidence, my older son, Diek, gave me a book on knowledge graphs for my April birthday. I have little idea what they are, though I see they are something related to the clustering in machine learning analyses. The book is a collection of technical contributions, and I've been working up my energy to tackle it. Ben's query boosted me in that direction. 
 
I had previously met Chris Barton at an Authors Guild function in Austin. He had suggested that with my book oeuvre, I would be a good candidate for the Texas Institute of Letters. That sounded like a nice idea to me. The hooker is that you cannot apply; you must be nominated. In April, I read that Chris is now president of the Texas Institute of Letters. I emailed him congratulations, noting that I had not spontaneously been nominated for TIL membership, and asking his advice about how I might catalyze such a thing. His response was that one way to get on the radar of other TIL members is to serve as a judge in the TIL annual literary awards in a dozen literary categories, one of which is the award for Most Significant Scholarly Book. I agreed to become a judge and now look forward to receiving 8 or 9 scholarly books to review next October. No self-interested deed goes unpunished. 
 
In the meantime, writing remains an accessible, easy dopamine fix, so I write on. 
 
 
 
 
 

Where does the time go? It's been a little over two months since I last posted. Then a week shot by after I drafted this. Not that I haven't been busy. In addition to non-astronomical things, I've been heavily involved in helping to write and edit a paper on the polarization of supernovae that promises new insights into asymmetrical propagation of the thermonuclear burning fronts in Type Ia exploding white dwarf events. I also found myself involved in a rather tense personal intra-group conflict over contributions, credit, presentation, and choice of journal. I think the contretemps is now substantially smoothed over.

I noted in Blog #27 that I had finished a draft of my father's biography about the first hydrogen bomb and other 20th century technology and noted a box of letters from my parents in their retirement years in Colorado Springs. I ended up doing a crude typed transcription of those letters. That gives me a searchable digital base to draw on to sort out the chronology while they built two houses, helped with my sister's business selling Kachina dolls (a long story in itself), and cushioned her through a divorce. That transcription alone took a large part of last two months. I hope it was worth it. I'm now working my way through the draft biography, attempting to streamline it and render it more readable.

On 2/12/26, I was contacted by a representative of OLLI, the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at The University of Texas at Austin. They had heard good things about my presentation on the technological future of humanity I'd presented to the Retired Faculty/Staff Association and wondered if I could give a similar presentation based on my book The Path to Singularity. The hooker was that they were looking for a talk in spring, 2027. I warned that with things changing exponentially rapidly, the topic might be rather different than now (witness Moltbook's self-conversing AI agents, Anthropic's Claude Mythos that revealed thousands of cybersecurity vulnerabilities, and generic threats to cybersecurity from quantum computing), but I agreed to give a presentation in January 2027. Unless it is canceled by our robot overlords.
 

I sampled various webinars from the Authors Guild, one way back on 2/2/26 on side gigs for authors. Not sure I learned a lot from that one. Another on 3/12/26 was entitled Amplify Your Story: How Writers Can Build Literary Visibility, and one on 3/16/26 covered Promoting Books Without Social Media. I have mentioned in previous blogs my screenplay for The Krone Experiment and my dream of having it made into a streaming film or series. To that end, I had posted it on Blacklist.com back in 2025. Nothing immediately came of that, but then the Authors Guild did a webinar on 4/14/26 with two of the leaders of Blacklist. They are Black, hence the name, which I presume is an ironic poke at J. Edgar Hoover and Senator Joseph McCarthy. I picked up some hints I might try to pursue. On 4/16/26, I attended the second annual Authors Guild Austin Meet and Greet. I had a couple of interesting conversations about Amazon ads and the use of Substack.
 

I attended the local Good Systems and UT Robotics symposium in the Alumni Center on March 3 and 4. Some good talks and a few folks to whom I could flog The Path to Singularity. One was Yi Mao, a pleasant woman who is the CEO and Managing Director of ATSEC, a local information security firm. She was interested in taking a group of her people to McDonald Observatory, and I did a little to catalyze that. They will visit on May 2. In return, I fished for the possibility of giving them a talk on the future of technology, maybe with an honorarium since they are a business. Instead of that, Yi offered a free lunch, and the possibility of a keynote talk at a later time. I agreed and will meet with them on May 13. I'll try to update my spiel. Do we control our technology, especially AI, or succumb to it? Do we flourish in an age of AI-induced abundance or suffer social disruption in an era of hyper-rapid dislocation?

I attended the semi-annual meeting of the department and observatory Board of Visitors on March 6 and 7. It is always good to schmooze and to hear excellent talks from young people. I passed out a few business cards for The Path to Singularity.

Kelsey Piper is a brilliant writer on technology and its social effects. She wrote for the online Future Perfect hosted by Vox. I have been reading her for years and quoted her in The Path to Singularity. I had tried to contact her with no luck when the book came out. In early March, I attended a quickly scheduled lively panel discussion on the dust up between Anthropic and the Pentagon as to whether Anthropic would allow its AI Claude to be used for autonomous weapons and spying on civilians. To my surprise one of the panelists, computer scientist Scott Aaronson, mentioned Piper's name during his presentation. Turns out he knows her personally. I asked for an introduction and contacted her, offering her a signed copy of the book. She is now working for The Argument (a substack publication that tries to make the case for liberalism as distinct from progressivism, populism, and MAGAism). She replied graciously, and I sent her the book on March 11 but have not heard back.

I have been regularly attending the Westbank Writers Group on Monday's at 5 PM, either in person or by Zoom. One of our most interest sessions was on 3/16/26. We examined samples of writing by humans and by AI and then voted on which we preferred and which did we think was AI. The result was basically chaos, with people all over the map. One bit was generic astronomy-for-poets boosterism for the glories of astronomy that any astronomer could have written. I voted for human, but it was AI. Another piece that I liked very much touched on the spiritual aspects of science. I voted for AI, but it was Carl Sagan.  

I also regularly attend sessions of the Austin Forum for Science and Society, especially their Zoom book discussions. On 3/25/26, we tackled Enshittification by Cory Doctorow. Yup!