I think we can all agree that NASA needs to find a reliable source of funding, but I’m inclined to agree with the team at Engadget – Congressman Ken Calvert’s suggestion that NASA sell advertising space on their rolling stock is more than a little distasteful. But then, the marriage of corporate sponsorship and space exploration is almost inevitable, in a way, so maybe we should just get used to the idea. I can think of a fair handful of science fiction stories that have already suggested it.

Hot on the heels of the announcement that language affects the way different people perceive the world around them comes the news that your cultural background also has a part to play. Apparently older East Asian people respond less strongly to changes in the foreground of an image than Westerners, which the researchers assume has something to do with the greater emphasis on the context of an image in Asian cultures.

I’m not sure how these things pan out over the pond, but us Brits have a national holiday on next Monday, which means we have a three day weekend – and extra down-time means extra reading time, in this household at least. So I think I’ll devote some time to taking a look at the second issue of the free-to-read webzine Coyote Wild, which calls itself a quarterly magazine of speculative fiction and poetry. [SFBC]

Last night saw the announcement of the jury-selected winner of this year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award, presented for ‘the best science fiction novel of the year’. Often a contentious and controversial award, the Clarke has a history of going to the book least expected to win. However, most of the controversy this year has surrounded which books did or didn’t make it onto the shortlist … but I get the feeling that, with the exception of the inevitable few dissenting voices, hardly anyone is going to argue that M. John Harrison’s Nova Swing isn’t a worthy winner. If you’d like to know more about the shortlist, there’s a bumper round-up of reviews at Torque Control, and you can see Harrison’s reaction to winning on his own blog.

Long gone are the days when being a hacker involved spending years learning complex routines of program code. Nowadays, a would-be 1337 h4Xx0r can just download ready-made programs from the internet – or better yet, just buy a gadget that will do all the hard work for them. Devices like the MacLockPick digital forensics USB key, for example, that can strip all the secret and personal data from a Mac running OSX simply by being plugged into it. Of course, it’s only available for sale to genuine law enforcement officials – or at least this official version is. I’d be surprised if illicit equivalents aren’t already floating around in the digital underworld.