The New York Times has an article about the precious lesser-known documents and literary artifacts that may be lost forever if their curators decline to have them digitised – or just can’t afford to. While there’s plenty of argument on either side for scanning works still in copyright, it seems a shame that pieces of our world’s history and culture may become even more obscure than they currently are. [Print Is Dead]

There’s plenty of good science fiction appearing online for free these days – and not just here at Futurismic, either. This time it’s the turn of Technology Review (a damn fine tech-news website in its own right) to play host to ‘Osama Phone Home’, a new short story by David Marusek, author of Counting Heads, which was definitely one of the best novels of last year. [SFBC]

There’s nothing worse than mail-ordering some fresh new threads only to have them arrive and not fit you properly. Sony-Ericsson think this is another case for your increasingly-ubiquitous portable computing platform mobile phone; load in your measurements, scan the barcode on the clothes, and check the cut on a screen image of a virtual you wearing the virtual duds. Could this be the elusive killer app for Second Life?

Science fiction stalwart Ben Bova has a column at Bonita News where he rails against what he sees as a rising tide of moronitude that threatens to drown the human race itself. I have some sympathy with what he’s saying, but I very much doubt that getting more people to read science fiction would make a difference. [SF Signal]

Never let it be said that genre fiction is a staid and unchanging backwater of literature. Andrew Wheeler of the SF Book Club rounds up three newly-birthed (and somewhat tongue-in-cheek) literary manifestos that have shambled in from the wilds of the blogosphere. Of course, clockpunk doesn’t have a manifesto as such, but you can bet that now BoingBoing have pointed it out, we’ll be hearing a lot more about it.