Does Not Equal is a webcomic by Sarah Ennals – check out the pre-Futurismic archives, and the strips that have been published here previously.
Monthly Archives: November 2008
DVD gift ideas for science-minded kids
My son, age eight, has always been interested in animals, extinct or otherwise. But he’s played to death the three-DVD documentary series The Future Is Wild, which depicts the evolution of life on Earth millions of years into the future. The CGI animation is pretty good; the extrapolated life forms in the post-human world are mind-bending.
My son doesn’t seem frightened or depressed by the depiction of a universe without human intelligence or galactic empires, which is more than I can say for his dad. You don’t have to be a kid to get into this. And if you’re even considering writing an sf story about nonhuman aliens, please see it.
There’s an animated TV adventure series on Discovery Kids, but my son and I agree that it’s not as good as the original.
Just as good, and getting almost as much screen time in my house, is Alien Planet, exploring via space probe the planet Darwin IV, where evolution produced creatures like nothing on Earth.
I hope they go over as well in your home as they have in mine.
[Bladderhorn from Alien Planet]
New UK smart CCTV cameras detect ‘precrimes’
Living in a small city like mine, it’s not often one gets to feel that one is at the cutting edge of an emerging future society.
So how lucky for myself and the other residents of the over-stretched city of Portsmouth that we are the first town in the UK to be under the observation of Phildickian ‘smart’ CCTV cameras that are programmed to flag up an alert when they observe ‘suspicious behaviour’ that might indicate a crime is about to be committed.
You know, those sure-fire indicators of criminality… such as standing still for a while, or stopping to talk to someone. I would like to take this opportunity to praise the glorious leadership of Airstrip One for going to such efforts to ensure that any and all double-plus-ungood actions can be eradicated before they even have a chance to occur!
If anyone needs me, I’ll be typing a letter to the German Embassy requesting political asylum. [image by JapanBlack]
Friday Free Fiction for 28th November
All is quiet on the blogosphere… at least until tomorrow, when the States have recovered from Thanksgiving, I expect! Still, in the meantime here’s some free fiction to keep you busy until the bloggers get their engines cranked back up to speed.
There’s nothing from the big two this week, so let’s get straight to the webzines:
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Afterburn SF presents “Gliese 581” by Lee Gimenez.
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News from Paolo Bacigalupi:
Thanks to Lou Anders at PYR Books, my short story “The Gambler” which appeared in the original anthology Fast Forward 2 is now available online for free reading at PYR’s website.
A great story by a great writer in a great anthology. If you follow just one link from this week’s Friday Free Fiction, let it be this one.
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Strange Horizons presents “Up In the Air” by Richard Larson
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Tor.com presents The Buried Pyramid by Jane Lindskold. (Download for registered users only, but that don’t cost you nuthin’, mister.)
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COSMOS Magazine presents “Loop” by Peter J Bentley – “Being ‘born again’ and having the opportunity to live your life all over again sounds like a great idea – until it actually happens.”
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Electric Velocipede presents “Season of the Long Now” by Robert J Howe
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A handful via SF Signal, without whom we’d miss a great deal:
- Dragon Moon Press has several of its novels available for free PDF download
- The Scientific Indian presents “21 Minutes” by Rahul Jaisheel
- The final online issue of The Martian Wave features fiction by Anne Stringer and Rick Novy
- Ray Gun Revival #48 features fiction by Scott Davis, Mike Duran, D Thomas Mooers, R J Walker Miller, M Keaton, Keanan Brand, Sean T M Stiennon, and John M Whalen.
- Big Pulp presents “Cloning The King” by Bill Ward and “The Thing That Ate Mrs. Wilson’s Dog” by Sophie Bachard
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And it just wouldn’t be a Friday without a little bit of Friday Flash Fiction, would it? Let’s see: Neil Beynon is “Remembering Lisa“, while Gaie Sebold is “Empty“.
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And that’s your lot, folks – your tip-offs and plugs are always welcome, though. I hope none of our American readers have mortally injured themselves by overindulging in seasonal NOM NOM NOM action, and that everyone has an equally great weekend.
Swedish data bunker can withstand nukes in style
Charles Stross points to this fun datacentre in Sweden:
This underground data center has greenhouses, waterfalls, German submarine engines, simulated daylight and can withstand a hit from a hydrogen bomb. It looks like the secret HQ of a James Bond villain.
And it is real. It is a newly opened high-security data center run by one of Sweden’s largest ISPs, located in an old nuclear bunker deep below the bedrock of Stockholm city, sealed off from the world by entrance doors 40 cm thick (almost 16 inches).
Also Strosscommenters point to another Dr. Strangelove-referencing movie-design essay on the design of supervillain’s lairs: Who Stole My Volcano? Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dematerialisation of Supervillain Architecture.
[via Charles Stross, via Magical Nihilism][image from the article on Royal Pingdom]