Ben Crowell's Personal Page

my fiction
- "Centaurs" sold to Asimov's in April 2009
- "A Large Bucket, and Accidental Godlike Mastery of Spacetime" will appear in the December 2009 issue of Asimov's
- "The Rising Waters" appeared in Strange Horizons, May 4, 2009 (free online)
- "Tear-Down" will appear in the September 2009 issue of Asimov's
- "Whatness" appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, Volume 33, Number 3, March 2009 (free online, also available via Anthology Builder)
- "Quality of Life" appeared in Jim Baen's Universe, Volume 3, Number 2, August 2008 (free online, also available via Anthology Builder)
- "Running" appeared in Strange Horizons, June 9, 2008 (free online, also available via Anthology Builder)
- "Niche" appeared in Aphelion, Volume 12, Issue 120, April 2008 (free online)
- "A Greater Power" appeared in Electric Spec, Volume 3, Issue 1, February 28, 2008 (free online)
The Assayer is a site I run that catalogs free books and accepts user-submitted reviews of them.
open-source software I've written
- OpenGrade, open-source software for teachers to record grades
- Planet Finder - an applet that maps the stars and planets in the night sky from any location on any night
- Spotter, a symbolic answer checker for math and science students
- When, an extremely simple personal calendar program
- Clamor, Unix software for musical ear training
- Accelerando, an accelerating musical metronome
- Soundconverter, a program for converting sound files from one format to another
- Inf, a browser-based calculator that can handle infinite and infinitesimal numbers
- Ear Workout, Mac software for musical ear training
- Mac Fourier, displays the Fourier spectrum of a sound recorded through a microphone
- pmtolatex software for converting PageMaker files to LaTeX
- footex, software for converting LaTeX math markup into mathml, html, or png
- a browser-based calculator, for homebrewers, which helps you to find your beer's specific gravity based on a measurement with a refractometer
essays, informational pages, and other writing
- The main Light and Matter site is where my textbooks are.
- a series of three articles, written in 2000, 2002, and 2005, about free books
- God, Evolution, and the Big Bang, an article about creationism
- a little paper about the way a pool ball rebounds from a cushion on a pool table.
- a memorial page for my grandfather, Russ Crowell
- an article about the hard scientific constraints on interstellar space operas
- an review of the Everex TC2502 Green gPC
music
- Eyes and Ears, a book of music for sight-singing
- arrangements for strings
- a fingering chart for the saxophone
French