Links for 26-10-2006
Bumper edition! Cyberpunk raincoat, Halo movie dropped, subliminal erotica works, writing as transgression…
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“Puddlejumper is a luminescent, nylon raincoat that turns the prospect of walking in the rain into an opportunity for play and performance, says Co, a former professor of new media.” Straight. Out of. Neuromancer.
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“Not only is it made of metal and rubber, in and of itself completely mind-boggling and on more than one occasion made me question my own hollow existence, but it can also walk up walls.” Video.
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“Just weeks after movie maestro Peter Jackson committed to building Halo games for the Xbox 360, movie studios Fox and Universal have jumped ship and decided not to produce the movie…”
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“As NASA lays plans for travel to the moon and Mars, the agency is exploring propulsion systems, crew modules, and habitat structures [and more].”
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“‘If necessary, Russia’s rocket-manufacturing complex can create the means in space to repulse asteroids threatening Earth,’ Remishevsky said, without giving further details.”
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“[SETI] could potentially be risky for Earth and its inhabitants. So researchers are developing a Richter-like scale to assess the chance that extraterrestrials could detect – and potentially react to – such signals.” Includes Brin quote.
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“Hwang Woo-Suk, hailed as a national hero before a university inquiry ruled his work was bogus, blamed junior researchers for faking some research but said his now discredited claims were real.” Maverick genius, or shyster?
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“…invisible erotic information can either attract or repel observers’ spatial attention depending on their gender and sexual orientation – In other words, sex sells – even subconsciously.” Ig-nobel prize candidate, perhaps?
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“The world is you, the act of being in the world reappropriates the world as being defined by you. Writing, blogging, is not mere intellectual masturbation. It is the theft of identity back from the selfish hands of ideology.” Thank f*ck for that!
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“Jeff Barr has the futuristic title of Web Services Evangelist at online retailing giant Amazon.com; as Jeffrey Batra in Second Life he is working hard on projects that bridge the virtual world and the real one.”
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“And then, after weeks of fierce struggle, suddenly Charlie Stross appeared in the sky like a vengeful god and laid the genre’s battlefield to waste.” William Gillis appears to be a Stross fan…
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“Summary: In each of the last six centuries, the West was shaken by new technologies that transformed three things – vision, memory and attention – [triggering] crises of confidence.” More high thought from David Brin.
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“When artist Darick Robertson first began work on Transmetropolitan with writer Warren Ellis, he found inspiration for the popular series’ eccentric characters in the people around him.” Gallery of source photos and models.
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“The trouble is, the BBC’s excuses aren’t completely threadbare: in cases of ‘Islamic’ terrorism, they would be very quick to hear about it from the police and the government, and no amount of playing down would be involved.”
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My oh my … sure is a lot of Ol’ Bill on YouTube. There goes my weekend!
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“The cluster of thousands of stars dispersed billions of years ago due to a lack of gravitational pull, Looney said, leaving the sisters “lost in space” and our Sun looking like an only child ever since.”
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“The fate of what some scientists dub “the people’s telescope” is again up in the air, as NASA decides soon whether to squeeze in a last astronaut repair mission to extend the life of the Hubble Space Telescope.”
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“The 13 icons on our sixth annual Top-Earning Dead Celebrities list collectively earned $247 million in the last 12 months.” This could well be the only solo number one Kurt Cobain ever achieved, and over Elvis too. Rock on.
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“To me the most interesting result of the study is that self-imposed deadlines don’t appear to help procrastinators [as much as external deadlines]: they need rigid, externally-imposed deadlines in order to get the job done.”
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“…the best observational evidence yet that globular clusters sort out stars according to their mass, governed by a gravitational billiard ball game between stars.”
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“A full moon may have triggered the Indian Ocean earthquake that caused the tsunami on 26 December 2004, a new study concludes.”
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“New calculations on the decline in the planet’s capacity to provide food, fibre and timber, and absorb carbon dioxide, suggest we are using 25% more resources than are renewed naturally in a year.” Ouch.
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“High concentrations of phosphorus in a Martian ocean,” Greenwood and Blake conclude, “would not be expected if Mars had an active biosphere during the ocean’s existence.” Martian life back off the menu – until next week, at least.
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“In theory, mind uploading is a pathway to immortality [...] I’m betting that not only will it happen, but that it’s possible that the writers are going to get there first.” Is David Edelman running Hubris27.8?
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“So-called Pulses are times of sudden, catastrophic events like asteroid impacts, whereas Presses are periods of multigenerational stress on ecosystems, such as massive volcanic eruptions.”
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“Cities are clusters of spatial events. We want to repopulate the map with the rhythms of urban life.” Captain Sterling has been on patrol with his notebook again.
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27 – The Next Big Thing“…the Web for many will become the cliched 3D virtual reality that has been so overused as a literary and cinematic device that most of us have forgotten how compelling that vision was when it first appeared.” More metaverse reportage.
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“All of human achieviement — all our hopes, dreams, and fears — in one graph.” A graphical representation of the non-linear rate of change of progress that the futurists talk about. Cheers, Mac.
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“…the ‘Head over Heels’ concept provides a strong further proof that digital manufacturing technologies like laser sintering are not just for prototyping any more, but are rapidly becoming a standard manufacturing technology.”
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30 – ISS EarthKAM“ISS EarthKAM is a NASA sponsored program that provides stunning, high quality photographs of our planet taken from the Space Shuttle and International Space Station.” ZOMFG! Awesome; great resource for space geeks.
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31 – Braving a new world“Penguin [...] is the first major publisher to dip its toe into the virtual world and, appropriately, it has chosen Neal Stephenson’s ‘Snow Crash’ as the book with which to test the waters.”
Tags: links
October 27th, 2006 at 2:35 am
[...] Humanity and The Pace of Change Sure starting to shape up like a singularity. Thanks, Armchair Anarchist. (tags: history human science technology change future) [...]