Monthly Archives: December 2007

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Ender’s Game, here we come

The military and video games have had a long history together, going back to flight simulators before WWII.  Of course, there’s been America’s Army, but that was a recruitment tool, a way to gloss over the downsides of the Army, namely the permanency of death and having to follow orders.

So where are our “Nintendo soldiers”?  Turns out they’re currently working on a suitable training simulation for the US Army.  Heck, there’s even a trade magazine devoted to these simulators.

The question isn’t “what are these simulators?”, but “what are they not?”  Well, they’re not going to teach you how to shoot and they won’t get you buff.  What they will do is provide tactics lessons in a classroom environment that can then be put to use on the training grounds.  For more info on the what and why, check out this essay by a training games company, and this paper from the National Defense University.  They’re not just random commercial games slapped together, but designed from the ground up to meet training demands.

I’ve played FPS games online since the good ol’ days of Doom II.  And with some of the squad-based ones simple tactics can make or break your game.  Me?  I charge in and promptly die.  And then proceed to do it again.

(via DailyTech)  (image from renato guerra)

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Friday Free Fiction for 21 December

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Looks like things are winding down for the holidays – I know I certainly am! But there’s still free fiction to be had …

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Much of the following comes courtesy of the SF Signal gang.

Recently-free fiction at ManyBooks.net:

Jeff Patterson continues his tradition of Christmas stories with “The Harbinger of All Things Glorious“.

Bonus! Free audio fiction: SFF Audio has a reading of “Trunk And Disorderly” by Charles Stross.

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Chris Roberson rolls out a festive re-run: “Timmy Gromp Saves Christmas“.

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Oh, so you’d like some non-fiction, would you? Well, thank MetaFilter for this little pointer:

Gutenberg-e now offers open access to Columbia University Press history ebooks.

“These award winning monographs, coordinated with the American Historical Association, afford emerging scholars new possibilities for online publications, weaving traditional narrative with digitized primary sources, including maps, photographs, and oral histories.”

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Make way for the Friday Flash Fiction crew … a few troops short, but still soldiering on despite the weather!

Somewhat appropriately for the season, Dan Pawley has “A Kind Of Homecoming“.

Neil Beynon has either been at the funny mushrooms, or he’s visited a different “Centre Point” to the one in London.

Gareth L Powell will twist your head with “The Red King’s Nursery“.

Very appropriately for the season, Gareth D Jones is “Frozen“.

And yours truly chronicles the adventures of “Alex in Hinterland“.

Flash fiction bonus! As noted by Gareth D Jones, Guy Hogan doesn’t just post flash fiction at his blog, but provides tips and advice on writing the stuff too.

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Looks like that’s your lot for this week – but then I expect you’ll have plenty of other stuff to keep you busy, too.

From me (and on behalf of the whole Futurismic gang) have the best holiday you possibly can, whatever you may call it in your household! Take care, folks.

[tags]freedom, fiction, stories, online[/tags]
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Striking writers look to open new internet ventures

Whilst I’ve talked in the past about the future of online content, it appears for some writers an internet based career is rapidy becoming present, not future. The LA Times reports that a number of the writers and creators involved in the Hollywood writer strike are in talks with venture capitalists and advertisers about creating their own content sites. It may be that if this strike continues long enough, some writers may not come back at all to the studios. It’s also interesting to note that the words quoted most by the writers invovled is ‘United Artists’, the organisation that structured good deals for creators way back in Hollywood history.

On the web, there’s also a good round table discussion featuring Tobias Buckell, Pyr editor Lou Anders and David Louis Edelman at SF Signal about the use of the internet to promote writers via community, rather than advertising. Charles Stross also had a good rant about the idiocy of the Kindle earlier in the month.

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Reality mining: what your phone knows about you

mobile phone close-up The next big frontier for the software and web corporations is in your pocket – your mobile phone. But have you ever wondered why exactly the search giants like Yahoo and Google are so keen to get access to your handset? Sandy Pentland, an MIT researcher, explains in an interview at Technology Review:

“It knows where you are, and this is obviously sort of useful. But the generalization is that maybe it can know lots of things about you. Take your Facebook friends as an example. The phone could know which ones you socialize with in person, which ones are your work friends, and which friends you’ve never seen in your life. That’s an interesting distinction, and reality mining can make it automatic. It’s about making the “dumb” information-technology infrastructure know something about your social life. All this sort-of Web 2.0 stuff is nice, but you have to type stuff in.”

Quite. But as Nicholas Carr points out, that’s not quite as utopian as it might initially seem:

“… it’s easy to see the vast commercial value of automatically harvesting a continuous stream of data on a person’s location, activities, relationships, and social roles and using it to personalize services and advertisements or, in the extreme, manipulate behavior for profit-making ends.”

Well, it’s not like we’re unused to having our behaviour analysed and manipulated for commercial purposes … or to the idea that external agencies can spy on us by subverting our gadgets. But the point is that technologies in their default states are making it much easier – rather than rejecting Big Brother, have we instead slipped him into our back pocket? [Image by Milica Sekulic]

[tags]reality mining, phones, surveillance, technology[/tags]
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Stanford creates nanowire batteries with 10 times current charge

Nanowires are an exciting way to dramatically increase efficiency in exisiting silicon tech

Lithium-ion batteries, such as those used in your laptop, mobile phone or hybrid car, are extremely important in today’s world but are limited by the amount of lithium ions that the typically carbon anode can hold. Stanford announced this week they’ve developed a new method that can increase the amount of charge held by as much as 10 times.

 The new battery uses what is perhaps the technology of the next ten years – nanowires.  At large scale, the swelling of the lithium ions when they absorb positive charge breaks the structure of the silicon holding them. The researches instead used a mesh of microscopic silicon nanowires that bend and swell under the pressure but do not break. The researcher, Yi Cui, said:

Manufacturing the nanowire batteries would require “one or two different steps, but the process can certainly be scaled up,” he added. “It’s a well understood process.”

 I’ll look forward to my laptop with 25 hour battery life in a few years, then.

[via Daily Kos, image from the Stanford article, apologies for my absence this week – I’ve been wrestling with my wireless connection on Ubuntu Gutsy]