Ben Crowell's Personal Page

blog
My fiction. The stories marked with an asterisk are the ones that I think are my best work.
- *"A Hole in the Ether" appeared in the September 2013 issue of Asimov's. (free online)
- *"Kill-Switch" appeared in the July 2012 issue of Asimov's. (free online)
- "The Pass" appeared in the March 2012 issue of Asimov's. (free online)
- "Wheat Rust" appeared in the September 2010 issue of Asimov's. (free online)
- *"Petopia" appeared in the June 2010 issue of Asimov's. (free online) It was anthologized in Year's Best SF 16. A Russian translation appeared in the February 2011 issue of the magazine Если, and there is also a Ukranian translation.
- "Centaurs" appeared in the March 2010 issue of Asimov's (free online)
- *"A Large Bucket, and Accidental Godlike Mastery of Spacetime" appeared in the December 2009 issue of Asimov's. (free online) A Russian translation appeared in the October 2010 issue of the magazine Если.
- "Tear-Down" appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, September 2009 (free online)
- "The Rising Waters" appeared in Strange Horizons, May 4, 2009 (free online). It was anthologized in Robots: The Recent AI, eds. Rich Horton and Sean Wallace, Prime Books, 2012.
- *"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).
- "Founder Effect" appeared in Fusion Fragment #13, May 2010.
- "Fork" appeared in OG's Speculative Fiction #22.
- *"A Greater Power" appeared in Electric Spec, Volume 3, Issue 1, February 28, 2008 (free online). AE made a podcast version on AE Reads Skiffily.
- "Niche" appeared in Aphelion, Volume 12, Issue 120, April 2008 (free online).
The fiction listed above is all available under a fairly liberal licensing scheme. Source files are online, for my own convenience.
The Assayer is a site I run that catalogs free books and accepts user-submitted reviews of them.
open-source software I've written
- When, an extremely simple personal calendar program
- 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
- Kcals, a browser-based calculator that estimates how many calories you burn when running or walking a route defined by a GPS track
- Clamor, Unix software for musical ear training
- Accelerando, an accelerating musical metronome
- FreeLab, open-source software for use with Vernier LoggerPro sensors
- Scope, a time- and frequency-domain software oscilloscope for unixlike operating systems
- 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 guide to rock climbing routes at Tahquitz
- 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 memorial page for my grandfather, Russ Crowell
- an article about the hard scientific constraints on interstellar space operas
- Maps of Skyline Trail and Cactus to Clouds
- Practical hints for hiking in East Africa
- Historical photos of the Hafele-Keating experiment
- The Physics of Knots
music
- Eyes and Ears, a book of music for sight-singing
- Mr. Mangohead, saxophone quartet music
- a fingering chart for the saxophone
- arrangements for strings
French