Monthly Archives: October 2008

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Undecided voters: Yeah, right

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Undecided voters have probably made up their minds. They just don’t know it yet. U. Virginia psychologist Brian Nosek and colleagues got 25,000 people to take an online test (you can try it yourself). The test mixes up pictures of Obama and McCain with “good” words like “friend” and “bad” words like “enemy,” and asks you to press a key through several cycles of screens.

On average more undecided voters reported explicitly feeling slightly warmer toward Obama than McCain, but Nosek’s implicit measurements showed the undecided subjects had a slight preference for McCain over Obama.

Color me skeptical: I scored a slight preference for the candidate I already didn’t mail in my ballot for.

[Image: gapersblock]

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Kummersdorf: cradle of the space age

An interesting article on Kummersdorf in Germany, site of some of Wernher von Braun‘s rocket experiments before WWII:

It is here that the German military initiated the world’s first large-scale rocket development programme in the first half of the 20th Century.

This programme led to the development of the infamous V-2 rocket, used by Germany against the allies during World War II.

More information about the Kummersdorf proving grounds can be found here.

[article and image from the BBC]

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Geoff Ryman on the origins of Mundane SF

Geoff Ryman and MonQeeThe charming, modest and erudite Geoff Ryman – author of Air, The Child Garden and more, plus the progenitor of the still-divisive Mundane SF manifesto – gets his turn in the interview hotseat over at the Nebula Awards website. Here he is explaining what inspired that controversial manifesto:

In 2002 Clarion I saw that a whole kind of SF writer, those whose work was based on science, were increasingly outside the SF and fantasy culture.  I wanted to help get them published and I very suddenly found myself writing The Mundane Manifesto, based on some of the things the guys (and they were guys) had said.  Both about old tropes driving out the new, and also an avoidance of the coming crunch in terms of oil, global warming, overpopulation, and development economics.

Some interesting stuff there, including an admission that Ryman himself may not have been the ideal figurehead for the subgenre. Go read. [photo by Danacea]

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Ken MacLeod on the New Enlightenment

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Quite old, but still relevant, here is an exerpt from a brief comment by author Ken MacLeod on the “new enlightenment” and the divisive debate surrounding global warming and environmentalism:

In science fiction, the key challenge is thinking about questions of the future. Some of the tools we have for thinking are broken or blunted. The climate change issue is a good example.

It’s difficult for the informed lay person even to decide if there’s a problem or not. The difficulty lies not in the complexity of the science, but in the subversion of the institutions of science, communication and democracy.

The role of the interest groups involved, whether it’s the energy corporations or the environmental campaigners, has been to accuse the other side of doing what the other side accuses them of doing – namely, subversion.

MacLeod may not be a climatologist but he makes a good point about the basic nature of the argument.

[image from geraintwn on flickr]

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Google’s BookSearch goes legit in $45m deal

spiral stacks of books and magazinesThe headline pretty much says it all, really, but in case you’d not heard it elsewhere it appears that the wranglings between Google and the publishing companies over the company’s Book Search project have finally been settled. Once the plan has been stamped off by a federal judge, the Big G will build an independent ‘Book Rights Registry’ to monitor copyright matters, and we’ll have some new ways of getting access to old or obscure books without leaving the comfort of our swivel chairs. [image by Thomas Hawk]

What’s interesting is that there was apparently a good chance of Google actually winning the case had it gone to court… and it’s not quite the bed of roses for the publishers as it might initially seem, as Google’s now nicely placed to play a very influential role in the future of publishing.