I’m all stuffed up with a nice seasonal cold. Skilled craftspersons among VCTB’s audience who would like to make me feel better are welcome to build me one of these.

[Via Boing Boing]

I wish my father, a computer engineer and employee of IBM long before I was born, was still alive to see an IBM 1401 Mainframe computer being toured as part of a musical show that features interpretive dance.

He’d probably have been quite disgusted, but in a good way.

Via FutureWire comes material that may provide relief for those concerned that the strictures of the Mundane SF submission requirements leave them too little room for maneuver …

IBM has published a report called “The Next Five in Five”, which is a cheerily optimistic bit of futurist thinking that lays out the five major technological innovations that the Big Blue crew believe will occur within the next five years. You’ll need to click through for details, but here are the all-important bullet points:

1. We will be able to access healthcare remotely, from just about anywhere in the world
2. Real-time speech translation-once a vision only in science fiction-will become the norm
3. There will be a 3-D Internet
4. Technologies the size of a few atoms will address areas of environmental importance
5. Our mobile phones will come close to reading our minds

What I find interesting about this report is how plausible it is. It may be that IBM deliberately kept it that way, but even so it contrasts astonishingly to the Tomorrow’s World type of boosterism that I remember from my childhood. I’d watch those programs and think “wow, just imagine that!” I read that list, and I shrug and think “yep, seems likely.”

I have some sympathy with the Mundane manifesto*, and this report shows why - there’s acres of scope for speculative fiction based purely on plausible real-world developments. Though of course you’ll need to get published quickly before reality trumps your fictional masterpiece!

That said, I think there’s still a place for the wide-screen new space opera, which fulfils a different urge. You can write fiction featuring scientifically implausible tropes and still make it deeply relevant to the human condition - as the Culture novels of Iain M. Banks demonstrate most admirably, IMHO.

[* Said Manifesto has vanished into the places where unrenewed domain names are eternally blessed, at least as far as I can tell from a perfunctory Googling, but Abigail Nussbaum's report on it will tell you most of what you need to know.]

Tags, tags, tags. They’re everywhere, from big name news sites to tin-pot backwaters like this one. But are they any real use to the average internet denizen, and more specifically to science fiction heads?

Continue reading “Tagging for today and tomorrow”

Precious, precious computer innards - I love them so:

Okay, so that’s a bit of a cop-out for a Friday photo, but as previously explained I’ve not had much of a chance to get out of the house on photographic missions. Even if I hadn’t had the computer crisis, the weather has been far from conducive to leaving the centrally-heated comfort of The Hall of Mirrors. So, PC innards is what you get. I rather like the way they look, as it happens, and I’m considering keeping the sides off of the case on a permanent basis - not just for aesthetics, you understand; it also improves the airflow. Ahem. Continue reading “Friday Photo Blogging: Electronic intestines”

You probably have no idea how much of a relief it is for me to be able to see this:

Continue reading “It’s alive … alive!“

You know how they always say the screwing with your .dll files is a profoundly stupid idea?

They aren’t lying. Continue reading “Fr1d4y phuXx0r3d boXx0r”

The ability to spool a variety of ‘content’ onto the web from any moment and/or location we find ourselves in is growing by the month. But what use is it in real terms, and how much of that content is actually worthwhile? Continue reading “Shadowcasting”

I love libraries, and not just because I work at one. Libraries kept my brain well fed when I was a kid (as well as providing somewhere to go where a lot of other kids wouldn’t be), and supplied me with dreams, ideas and new experiences. Most libraries today, however, look rather old-fashioned when seen through the eyes of young people raised in a digital age, and are underused by that demographic as a result.

They might not seem so dated were they to have devices like this available, though:

Continue reading “Biblioroll - technology and the future of books and libraries”

After a week of flim-flam over a real non-story (Pluto will not change shape or size, no matter what it gets labelled as), it’s a real relief to find something in the RSS feeds that really gets your motor running. MIT’s eLens project is just such a thing. Continue reading “The Real World Web - envisioning a future of ubiquitous information”