Links for 24-09-2007
Death management website, piracy paradox, Rushkoff on 9/11 conspiracists (get over it, basically), scientific literacy, literature literacy, Mundane SF on the offensive, music reviews …
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1 – Album review: Tusken Coalition – Self-Titled
“It’s not easy listening, as you’ve probably gathered, and nor is it particularly danceable. But it is strangely affirmative, the sort of music that speaks to the real experience of urban youth in Britain …”
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2 – Album review: Mukul – Stray
“Think of ‘Naked Lunch’ set in Bombay, remixed by William Gibson and starring a subcontinental Serge Gainsbourg with a penchant for better living through chemistry … that’s about as close as you’re going to get. It’s fascinating.”
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3 – Album review: Elena – Glimpse
“London-based Elena shows early promise of flowering, with the distinctive colour of her voice hinting at glorious blooms to come – but the soil she’s planted in could do with some invigorating fertilisation.”
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4 – Broadband beyond the grave offers web service for the dead
“… now a website dedicated to that vast and previously overlooked group, the dead, is starting to prove being online is vital even when you are permanently offline.” Weird, but not entirely surprising.
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“Designers’ frustration at seeing their ideas mimicked is understandable. But this is a classic case where the cure may be worse than the disease. There’s little evidence that knockoffs are damaging the business.”
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6 – RUSHKOFF on 9/11 conspiracy theorists
“9-11 theorists are unwittingly performing as the unpaid minions of the administration’s propaganda wing.” Rushkoff lays it down.
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7 – Scientific literacy as a means to inoculate against religion
“Given the intricacies of the modern age and the ever-growing complexification of ideas and technology, it can be said that a scientific education is also increasingly necessary; if literacy can be considered a basic right, then so to must scientific lite
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8 – Learning to hate literature
“Despite the fact that I studied English Literature at university and went on to undertake a variety of bookish professional pursuits, my central recollection of English Lit at school is of how much I disliked most of the books that I read for my classes.
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“… the idea that, as science becomes normalised and incorporated into the tropes of literary fiction, so SF has retreated into a kind of mystic ecstasy, is an interesting one. Unfortunately, it’s completely false.” McAuley responds to Kincaid.
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10 – Second Life Sketches: Brief Lines
“It appears that my slight paranoia about the place was justified: upon his entry to the island, he was set about and caged by the crazed valkyries who inhabit the place …”
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11 – “Take the Third Star on the Left and on til Morning!” by Geoff Ryman
“Mass market SF, the SF that most ordinary people think of when you use the phrase, commercial and media SF want to pick and choose from science, using only those things that will grant us our wishes and dreams.”
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12 – Astropreneurs are kidding no one
“Look, kids. None of you are going to the Moon. There are certain more pressing matters which will present issues of human survival in your own lifetime that you’ll know about if you’ve been paying attention to the scientists.”
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13 – ‘Pulp-based computing’ makes normal paper smart
“Boxes that sense the weight of their contents and books that talk back when pages are turned could be developed using technology being tested by researchers at MIT in the US.”
