Does Not Equal is a webcomic by Sarah Ennals – check out the archives, or see Time, Part 1 from last week.
Monthly Archives: August 2008
The Gulf Of Mexico becomes Hurricane Alley
In the sixties, Roger Zelazny wrote ‘Damnation Alley’, in which Hell Tanner drives from Los Angeles to Boston in a land ravaged by near constant hurricanes and tornadoes in an attempt to deliver a life-saving plague vaccine. While we’re nowhere near that doomsday scenario, this year’s hurricane season is certainly hotting up.
Hurricane Gustav is crossing Cuba into the centre of the Gulf of Mexico today, with many of the simulations projecting it to land as a strength three hurricane somewhere in Louisiana on Tuesday night. Meanwhile, a few days further out in the Atlantic tropical storm Hanna (the eighth named storm of the year) is growing steadily and is also projected to land as a hurricane next weekend anywhere from Florida to Mexico. It may or may not enter the Gulf.
Further out than that a number of other weather systems are beginning to form in the infamous ‘hurricane alley’, creating a conveyor belt of large storms. High ocean temperatures of 28-32 degrees in the Gulf of Mexico in particular are increasing the size of intensity of these systems. When the sea temperatures are above 26 degrees, a tropical storm or hurricane above it will intensify. Below that level the cyclone begins to unravel. With Ocean temperatures high and a number of storms forming, the Southeast coast of the US and the caribbean are in for a pounding over the next few weeks. Oil experts are already beginning to predict problems for oil production, with large percentages of US oil production and refining taking place in the Gulf of Mexico. While it would be inaccurate to link a single hurricane to climate change, if tropical ocean temperatures remain high, the residents at the end of hurricane rally will have to expect more storms.
[via The Oil Drum, Gustav weather picture via Weather Underground]
Friday Free Fiction for 29th August
Happy Friday, free fiction fans! This week’s selection may be missing a few items, because I’ve had to precompile it on Thursday (I’m off on holiday, don’t you know). For the same reason, there won’t be a Friday Free Fiction next week, but I’ll be saving up the links as per usual for a bumper edition on 12th September.
If you’re worried about going hungry for new material, though, bear in mind that there’ll be a fresh new Futurismic story out on Monday 1st… keep watching the skies! Now, on with the list…
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From ManyBooks.net, a classic pulp “Hitler won” novel: The Sound Of His Horn by Sarban
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Feedbooks.com are still catching up on the Futurismic back catalogue:
- “The Jiminy Device” by Lisa Mantchev
- “Cycle Thieves” by Mark Ward
- “The Other Side Of Silence” by Ruth Nestvold
- “Diamond Dust” by David Walton
- “Changing the Tune” by Jason Stoddard
- “Real City” by Carrie Vaughn
- “Eyelid Movies” by Will McIntosh
- “The Baby Window” by Vincent VanAllen
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Project Gutenberg drags out Anthem by the enduringly controversial Ayn Rand.
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At Tor.com, a new story from Steven Gould: “Shade”
Xareed had been waiting for the water truck for two days, seated in the dirt at the edge of the camp, his family’s plastic ten-liter water-jug tied to his ankle.
He didn’t like being on the edge of the camp. Except for the piece of cardboard he carried impaled on a stick there was no shade. The poet Sayyid had said, “God’s Blessing are more numerous than those growing trees,” and Xareed hoped so, for there were no trees in the camp or outside. So the blessings had better be more numerous, not less.
Also via Tor, we hear that Mur Lafferty has released an electronic version of her new novel Playing For Keeps in parallel with the dead-tree launch.
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More heads-up notices from the SF Signal posse:
- Stuart Clark is giving away PDF versions of his stories “Digitall” and “The Curator“.
- Someone has laboriously scanned the first year’s worth of Astounding Stories magazine (from 1930!) and put it up on archive.org for all to read. Should be good for a chuckle, if nothing else.
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From Apex Online: “Scenting the Dark” by Mary Robinette Kowal
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Via the Scalzi, an excised chapter from an early version of The Last Colony goes up at Subterranean Online: “The Secret History of the Last Colony“.
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The Shadow Unit never sleeps: the latest DVD extra is called “Mirror Writing“.
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From Gary Reynolds:
Issue #2 of the Concept Sci-fi ezine is now available to download in both PDF format and Mobipocket format. This issue includes short fiction from; Walter Jon Williams, Susan Murray, Ben O’ Neill, Andrew Males and Michael Kechula. We also have a piece of poetry (our first one!) and an interview with Marianne De Pierres.
I really hope that you enjoy reading it – feel free to subscribe and get future issues delivered directly to your Inbox.
You heard the man – go check it out.
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Jayme Lynn Blaschke is up to instalment #22 of Memory:
“Lassie, I’m nae a performing dog what’ll sit up and do tricks on command for ya,” Flavius growled. “Nae matter what ya ken of me, with all this talk about ‘lesser sentients’ and the like, I’m more than a plaything for the women of the Eternal Dominion. I’m descended of Bellona’s bridgroom and Sajal be damned, I’ll nae jump to when ya snap yer fingers. I’ll thank ya to remember that!”
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And finally, Greg O’Byrne missed the Friday Flash Fiction boat last week, so here’s his micro-flash of “Hard Luck on Mars“. I’m sure the other Fictioneers will supply their own links in the comments in my absence!
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And that’s your lot, folks. Keep the tips and plugs coming in as usual, and I’ll cobble them into a post in a fortnight’s time. Until then, bon voyage!
Print-a-house
Devotees of rapid prototyping technologies like the RepRap Project will be pleased to hear that construction equipment manufacturer Caterpillar is funding research into scaling the technology up so that it can be used to produce concrete structures:
Behrokh Khoshnevis, a professor in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, says the system is a scale-up of the rapid prototyping machines now widely used in industry to “print out” three-dimensional objects designed with CAD/CAM software, usually by building up successive layers of plastic.
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Instead of plastic, Contour Crafting will use concrete,” said Khoshnevis.
I suppose that rapid prototyping technologies are going to be a change of web/Internet/genetic engineering proportions over the next couple of decades, affecting everything and leading to unpredictable social changes.
Viropiracy – because safeguarding ‘intellectual property’ is more important than saving lives
This is just a *face-palm* of epic proportions – welcome to the concept of “viral sovereignty“.
This extremely dangerous idea comes to us courtesy of Indonesia’s minister of health, Siti Fadilah Supari, who asserts that deadly viruses are the sovereign property of individual nations — even though they cross borders and could pose a pandemic threat to all the peoples of the world.
Before anyone jumps down my throat, yes, there is a precedent for developing nations protecting the intellectual property implicit in their native biome – the West has shafted them in the past, after all. But as Jamais Cascio points out:
… it’s extraordinarily important for information about potential pandemic diseases to be made as open as possible, if we want to avoid a global health disaster. Withholding viral data, and refusing to provide samples of the viruses, out of a misplaced fear of viropiracy (or more paranoid fantasies), is simply criminal.
I think you’d have to be very paranoid to not see the logic there, really. But anyway – if you catch a virus, it replicates in your body, right? So if viropiracy became a part of international legislation, would you technically be infringing the IP of a nation if you caught a unique disease there but crossed the border before the symptoms started to show, and end up liable to be prosecuted for piracy as well as smuggling? Probably not… but it highlights just how bloody stupid an idea it is, doesn’t it? [image by Noii]