Monthly Archives: December 2010

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Holiday time

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OK, folks; for those of you who haven’t already done the same or similar, yours truly is trundling off to do the family thing for a few days, so Futurismic will be going into a short hibernation as a result. I’ll probably be popping in briefly between Xmas and New Year’s, but please don’t be surprised if content is minimal – I have some work projects to finish up, for a start, and I could do with a bit of brain-downtime. Hell, I think we all could, AMIRITEZ?

So have a great holiday, of whatever denominational flavour (or lack thereof) you prefer. But just before I go, here’s a note in my inbox from from new UK indie publisher called Fingerpress:

[We]  recently published Smallworld by Hugo-nominated author Dominic Green. The book’s available in paperback, and also can be downloaded under a Creative Commons license from here: http://genres.fingerpress.co.uk/smallworld.html

And the blurb from that page reads as follows:

Mount Ararat, a world the size of an asteroid yet with Earth-standard gravity, plays host to a strangely confident family whose children are protected by the Devil, a mechanical killing machine, from such passers-by as Mr von Trapp (an escapee from a penal colony), the Made (manufactured humans being hunted by the State), and the super-rich clients of a gravitational health spa established at Mount Ararat’s South Pole.

But as more and more visitors to the tiny rock are dispatched with cold efficiency by the faster-than-sight robot, the children (and their secretive parents) start to wonder who put the robot there, and who – or what – is really in need of protection.

Sounds like it has a Robert Sheckley kind of vibe to it… so if you fancy a free read, go download it, why don’t you?

Happy holidays, folks, and thanks for reading. 🙂

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The last pre-Xmas Wikileaks post…

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… well, the last one from me, anyway. As already praised (and disparaged) in the comments to yesterday’s post, Bruce Sterling’s essay on Assange, Wikileaks and all that is well worth a read. Regular readers won’t be surprised to hear I’m somewhat in awe of it (fanboy is as fanboy does), but as always, go read and make up your own mind. What marks it out as unique, I think, is the fact that it’s devoid of both righteous oppositional ire and revolutionary supportive fervour; instead, it’s full of foreboding, a “we could’ve seen it coming, but we still couldn’t have seen what lies beyond” type of thing. All bets are off, unless you’re betting on the very much odds-on prospect of things getting weirder and nastier and faster.

And a related piece for contrast: here’s Thomas P M Barnett – staunch advocate of globalisation and of the US as “sysadmin to the world” – making some points about US diplomacy and transparency that throws Wikileaks-related handwringing from the government into an interesting if unflattering light:

It’s interesting for our president to meet China’s and sign a joint declaration where both sides say they don’t consider the other to be an enemy and then to have a Pentagon-favorite military think tank publish maps of strike sites all over China that we’d want to hit in the opening days of our war with the Mainland over Taiwan.

When you’re that open with your plans, it’s hard to describe anything the Chinese do in return as particularly “provocative.” And yet, we do offer Beijing the benefit of our transparency on the subject.

Me?  If somebody publishes maps of the U.S. delineating all the places they’d want to bomb on the first day of the war . . . I’d take that kinda personally.  No, I’m not naive enough to believe the Chinese don’t have theirs. But it takes a certain chutzpah to publish yours so openly while decrying Chinese “provocations” and “throwing their weight around.”  China hasn’t waged war in a very long time.  The U.S. does so regularly.  Whose maps should we take more seriously?

I know, I know. We must think these bad thoughts in order to prevent their occurrence. I’m sure we have similar maps for every country in the world yes?  Just to be certain?

I’m sure that there’s Cablegate material that makes the US government look like a stroppy manipulative teenager trying to throw its weight around the playground of global realpolitik, but revelations like the above make you wonder whether that image bothers them as much as they claim. *shrug*

Today's Tomorrows

All I want for Christmas is some cool new physics

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I’m a bit of a physics geek.  Not that I can do the math.  But I’ve always wanted to know how the world works, and physics is the very coolest science for that.  The foundation.  So I decided to find three bits of news in physics to put forward as a little gift for my fellow science geeks – a bit of how the world might work for the holiday season. Continue reading All I want for Christmas is some cool new physics →

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Jaron Lanier on Wikileaks

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The Wikileaks story just keeps on rolling, but in defiance of the cliché it’s picking up a fair bit of moss as it goes. At the risk of repeating arguments made, well, pretty much everywhere (and to reiterate a point I made before), it’s quite possible to be supportive or generally approving of Wikileaks as a principle and as an organisation at the same time as thinking Julian Assange to be a serious douchebag who’s responding to the limelight like weeds to the springtime sun… though the caveat there is that most of what we’re hearing of Assange’s public statements is being filtered through other news organisations whose fondness for Wikileaks is less than complete. The truth remains obscure, in other words.

That said, it’s been interesting – and heartening – to watch the results of genuine grassroots action as regards the #MooreAndMe rape apologism campaigns; it’s a horrible way for it to have happened (and a horrible that it should even be necessary), but I can’t help but feel that there’s a good side to the way that discussion and criticism of mainstream cultural attitudes to rape have been brought out from the marginalised sidelines of feminism into highly visible layers of public discourse. Granted, it’s been rather like overturning a rotten log in a gloomy forest, but that’s the price of progress, I suppose; a societal problem can’t be fixed until society becomes conscious of it. Sunlight, disinfectant, you know the drill.

So to the tireless folk behind the #MooreAndMe hashtag, my utmost respect. As hard as it might be to believe for a regular reader of this site, there are times when I realise that the most helpful thing I can do is shut up and let people who really know what they’re talking about do their thing. Perhaps stepping back from the fight isn’t as useful as pitching in, but personal experience dictates that the greatest of harm can result from the best of intentions, and that one learns much more from listening than flapping one’s own uninformed lips.

But there’s one commentary link-out that needs to be made, and it’s to Jaron Lanier’s Wikileaks piece at The Atlantic. I’m by no means in complete agreement with it on a number of points, and there’s a slightly patronising “yeah, I was once naive enough to believe all that stuff, too, but I done growed up” undertone to it that grates somewhat… but of all the negative responses to Wikileaks I’ve read so far, it’s by far the most cognisant of the playing field it discusses, and the first that has really made me think hard about my own stance on the matter. It’s a long one, and not easy to yank quotes from while maintaining context, so just go read the whole thing… whether you’re for or against.

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Un-American behaviour? There’s an app for that

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So last week I flippantly suggested the possibility of a smartphone app for reporting politically or religiously unpalatable behaviour by persons in your immediate vicinity. I often make these worst-case-scenario suggestions as a rhetorical device, a kind of ultimate extrapolation of the sf-nal “if this carries on…” riff, rather than in the sincere belief that they will actually come to pass. Sometimes, however, reality likes to remind me that a cynic is rarely disappointed… [via TechDirt]

Citizen Concepts announces the launch of PatriotAppTM, the world’s first iPhone application that empowers citizens to assist government agencies in creating safer, cleaner, and more efficient communities via social networking and mobile technology.  This app was founded on the belief that citizens can provide the most sophisticated and broad network of eyes and ears necessary to prevent terrorism, crime, environmental negligence, or other malicious behavior.

The underlying concept is actually pretty sound (not to mention an inevitable component of a truly networked society) but the presentation is, to me at least, chilling in its jingoistic nationalism*, and a reminder that technology is morally neutral: it’s the hand that swipes the screen which wields the blade.

[ * This is not an anti-American dig, by the way; I’d find a Union Flag-draped equivalent even more unpleasant. It is my hope that systems like this will actually erode nationalism in the long run, but it’s far from a foregone conclusion, sadly. ]