Links for 01-06-2007
Multiverse funded, Gibson pines for Toronto past, trolls as tricksters, debunking the Drake equation, science fiction writers to help DHS…
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1 – Extended Play: The Elastic Book of Music, edited by Gary Couzens, reviewed by Paul Raven
Book review; short story anthology themed around music and musicians.
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2 – Multiverse Wins $4 Million in Funding
“Multiverse, the open virtual-world building platform complete with universal browser being developed by some early Netscape employees, has just won $4.175 million in funding…” Blimey.
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3 – Brown Dwarf or Planet: The Case of XO-3b
“It’s got the mass of thirteen Jupiters but orbits its star in less than four days, making it the largest, most massive planet ever found in such a tight orbit.”
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4 – William Gibson – Pining for Toronto’s ‘Gone World’
“Girard’s photographs of old Chinese houses standing forlornly amid fields scraped bare of rubble, awaiting the New Buildings, remind me of my Gone World Toronto.”
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5 – The Internet Troll As The Trickster Archetype
“I do not necessarily wish to excessively extol the virtues and powers of the Internet troll; these persons are typically not quite so epic as they are a nuisance.”
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6 – The Drake Equation is obsolete
“Put another way, as we continue to search for advanced ETI’s, and as we come to discover the absurdity of our isolation here on Earth, we may have no choice but to accept the hypothesis that human civilization will not survive this century.”
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7 – Sci-fi writers join war on terror
“Looking to prevent the next terrorist attack, the Homeland Security Department is tapping into the wild imaginations of a group of self-described “deviant” thinkers: science-fiction writers.” Oh, good grief.
