Links for 07-02-2007
A political history of SF, wiki star map (hours of fun), griefing, space junk…
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“The history of modern SF is one of five attempted revolutions — one success and four enriching failures.” Whoo – some contentious stuff in here. Let battle commence! Link via various sources.
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2 – Review: The Arthur C. Clarke Award: A Critical Anthology
An in depth look at the much delayed (but still much coveted, by me at least) ACC Award Critical Anthology. I need to read more of this year’s shortlist before Eastercon so I can pitch in to the arguments…
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3 – WIKISKY.ORG – Interactive Sky Map
Does what it says on the tin. Go lookee!
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4 – Princeton library joins Google Books project
“Google’s controversial endeavor to digitize the world’s books and put them online continued to grow with the addition of Princeton University’s centuries-old library.” Rolling, rolling, rolling.
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5 – Women have played major role in history — from the start, authors assert
“Of greatest import in this book is the idea that women have always been major players – not simply baby-machines who tended to the children, rustled up roots, collected nuts and berries and relied on macho male hunters to bring home the bacon.” Well, d
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6 – Ganking the Meaning out of Games
“Is griefing simply emergent play that some folks don’t like?” More thoughts on the philosophy and sociology of computer games and MMOGs.
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7 – Read your Feeds and e-mail with “Cellular-Book”
“With the rollable display you can read newspapers, electronic books, RSS feeds, even your email. There are 16-levels of gray which makes reading the content easy on the eyes.” Could be the one we’ve been waiting for.
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8 – Bypass Pay WiFi With Ping Tunnel
This could come in handy; anyone want to set up a proxy on their server?
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9 – Karl Schroeder: ‘Queen of Candesce’ cover
“It doesn’t get any better than this. Stephan Martiniere has beautifully rendered one of the opening scenes of QoC for the novel’s cover.” Damn, that guy’s good. Shame he doesn’t do more work over here in the UK.
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10 – UK Gets Super-Scope
“Dubbed the Diamond Light Source synchrotron – or uber microscope – it’s a machine that allows intense beams of x-rays and ultra-violet light to penetrate inside matter to an atomic or molecular level.” That’s a big piece of kit.
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“I must emphasize that the science fiction value of the work proceeds, in my opinion, from different standards.” John C. Wright flicks his nose at the ‘literary values’ crowd. This one’s gonna run for a while, methinks.
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12 – Comet Between Fireworks and Lightning
“Sometimes the sky itself is the best show in town.” It sure is – one of the most amazing bits of photography I’ve ever seen, via Scalzi’s AOL gig.
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13 – Space Junk: Orbiting Debris, Once a Nuisance, Is Now a Threat
“For decades, space experts have worried that a speeding bit of orbital debris might one day smash a large spacecraft into hundreds of pieces and start a chain reaction, a slow cascade of collisions that would expand for centuries…”
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February 7th, 2007 at 9:49 pm
I read with interest your link about Google books and Princeton. I remain unimpressed. Did you know that (assuming they digitise books at their current rate) it will take Google 200 years to digitise the current sum of knowledge? I cite as my source http://www.degreetutor.com/library/adult-continued-education/librarians-needed
By the way, hope you got the job!!!
February 8th, 2007 at 1:08 am
Very true, but this is a snowball situation, and that current rate won’t stay at the level it is now; they’re going slowly at the moment because the legal shenanigans are still being worked out. Once they know they’re safe, they’ll throw a great deal of money and resources at it. Google are canny players, they know exactly what they’re doing – and there’s a new conglomerate trying to sideswipe with the same idea. For better or for worse, it’s not a case of ‘if’ but ‘when’, IMHO.