Monthly Archives: January 2009

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Military kids to be issued virtual stand-ins while parents on deployment

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soldier and babyOK, file under “hearts in the right place, brains possibly not”: the US military has noted that having parents away from their kids a long time on active duty (and hence not exactly able to call home regularly) probably isn’t so great for the kids’ well-being. [image by SoldiersMediaCenter]

Their potential solution? Virtual parental avatars powered by chatbots. Here’s a snippet from the DoD’s solicitation for proposals:

“The child should be able to have a simulated conversation with a parent about generic, everyday topics,” the solicitation says. “For instance, a child may get a response from saying, ‘I love you,’ or ‘I miss you,’ or ‘Good night mommy/daddy.’ This is a technologically challenging application because it relies on the ability to have convincing voice-recognition, artificial intelligence, and the ability to easily and inexpensively develop a customized application tailored to a specific parent.”

So many potential responses, so little time… I guess I’m mostly surprised that it was thought up as a request from the DoD rather than at a DARPA coffee-break bull session.

Also – how many old sf stories does this sound like? I’m sure I remember a PKD short featuring something very similar. [via Gizmodo; tip-off from the Whitechapel Massive]

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Friday Free Fiction for January 9th

So how’s the first full working week of the year been treating you? Yeah, me too… still, the weekend’s nearly here, and the weekend means free science fiction links at Futurismic! So here we go, fiction-fans:

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Here’s a bunch from Feedbooks, including the latest Futurismic reprint:

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Just the one over at Project Gutenberg:

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And one at Manybooks:

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Here’s the latest issue of Apex Online:

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Strange Horizons presents “Sisters of the Blessed Diving Order of Saint Peter and Saint Andrew” by A C Wise

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Subterranean Online‘s Winter quarter kicks off with “Clinic” by Kris Nelscott

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Shira Lipkin strikes again! – this time with a story called “The Angel of Fremont Street” at ChiZine

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Chris Roberson‘s free stories are like buses; you wait for ages, then two come along at once::

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We received a message from Kit O’Connell:

The Continuous Coast project – a Creative Commons-licensed shared world – just released three works of fiction as a preview of the world. The fiction is by Steven Brust, Reesa Brown, and myself.

We’ll keep you posted on the project as it develops (we’re in our beta/prologue phase now), but in the
meantime you can check out a few of our other online presences:

Bravo – Futurismic loves Creative Commons projects! Go take a look and show your support.

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From EOS Books:

We’re a couple of weeks away from the release of Jonathan Barnes‘ next book, The Domino Men. And we’re so excited about it, that we are offering his entire first book, The Somnambulist, [to read] online for free.

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Here’s part 30 of Memory by Jayme Lynn Blaschke

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And here’s all the other stuff captured by the diligent hearts of SF Signal:

  • Afterburn SF presents “The Carrion Monster” By Tim McDaniel
  • Best SF presents “Bean There” by Jack Skillingstead
  • Weird Tales presents “The Last Great Clown Hunt” by Chris Furst
  • Planet Magazine presents “The Tears of Lakshmi” by Ian James
  • St. Martin’s Griffin presents “Countdown” by Jonathan Maberry [PDF download, sign-up required]
  • MindFlights presents “Quanruzaman’s Gateway” by Peter Simon
  • Big Pulp presents “Two Ravens” by Michael Turner
  • Behind the Wainscot issue #9 presents fiction and poetry by Neil Ayres and E Sedia, Mariev Finnegan, Berrien C Henderson, Nicole Kornher-Stace, James Owens, Genevieve Valentine, Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, Ann Walters, F J Bergmann, and Marion Boyer
  • The latest update at ChiZine presents fiction and poetry by Kurt Dinan, Shira Lipkin, Daniel A Rabuzzi, Jonathan Wood, M Frost, Maurice Oliver, and Jacqueline West
  • Here’s the first excerpt from The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters Volume One by Gordon Dahlquist; Bantam are serialising the whole thing, apparently.

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And here’s a little bit of Friday Flash Fiction for you to finish with:

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And there you have it! As always, we have our ear to the ground for the rumble and thump of your tip-offs, gratuitous self-plugs and projects, so send ’em in – deadline is 1800 GMT every Friday. In the meantime, have a great weekend!

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Russia blasting biomass at Martian moons

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Earth-Mars montageWhile the Western world waits to see what President-Elect Obama does with the US space program, the Russians are getting busy with a Mars mission of their own.  Due for launch in October, the charmingly-named Phobos-Grunt mission will be robot-manned, of course, but there will be earth lifeforms aboard, albeit very tiny ones:

LIFE [Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment] is intended to help better understand the nature of life, its robustness, and its ability – or not – to move between planets. The journey will be a test of one facet of the “transpermia” hypothesis. That is, the possibility that life can voyage from planet to planet inside rocks blasted off one planetary surface by impact, to land on another planetary surface.

Don’t worry, though; they’re not going to break the 1967 Outer Space Treaty by infecting Mars with Earth biology. Or at least they’re not going to do it deliberately – but that’s not stopping a few NASA types getting a bit hot under the collar about the whole business:

… I am uncomfortable with sending native tundra samples so close to Mars, because this is a location on Earth that could possibly contain organisms capable of adapting to Martian conditions,” and to do so “seems ill-advised,” Conley told SPACE.com.

Well, we surely don’t want to corrupt Mars with Earth microbes if we can avoid it. But how much of that discomfort is rooted in the Planetary Society using a Russian mission arther than a NASA one, I wonder? [superb montage image by Bluedharma]

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While the economy falls, local currencies rise

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Is the local currency an idea whose time has come – or rather, has come back? In the Berkshires of Massachusetts, a local currency called Berkshares is being buoyed up by the current economic crisis, and receiving a lot of enquiries from other communities interested in replicating its success:

Since the currency’s launch two years ago, five local banks have printed more than 2 million paper notes. About 185,000 are currently in circulation, according to Susan Witt, a Berkshare co-founder.

It’s in no way ready to replace regular money just yet, but it seems to work well as a supplementary system during hard times. The problem is the admin – there’s a lot of work involved for what is usually a small volunteer organisation, which is why the Toronto Dollar is moving to an electronic version to simplify the management procedures.

As the strength of the nation-state concept atrophies, will we see an increase in local communities making their economies more sustainable and autonomous? Given the rising cost of transportation for both people and goods, it doesn’t seem too implausible.

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Eric Drexler on global warming

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rainbowFor this year’s Edge Question “What will change everything?” Eric Drexler’s answer is simultaneously depressing and heartening:

In the bland words of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “only in the case of essentially complete elimination of emissions can the atmospheric concentration of CO2 ultimately be stabilised at a constant [far higher!] level.” This heroic feat would require new technologies and the replacement of today’s installed infrastructure for power generation, transportation, and manufacturing. This seems impossible. In the real world, Asia is industrializing, most new power plants burn coal, and emissions are accelerating, increasing the rate of increase of the problem.

Drexler dismisses the “magic nanotechnology” trope and suggests what technological developments could do for us:

According to fiction and pop culture, it seems that all tiny machines are robots made of diamond, and they’re dangerous magic — smart and able to do almost anything for us, but apt to swarm and multiply and maybe eat everything, probably including your socks.

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A solar array area, that if aggregated, would fit in a corner of Texas, could generate 3 terawatts. In the course of 10 years, 3 terawatts would provide enough energy remove all the excess carbon the human race has added to the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution began. So far as carbon emissions are concerned, this would fix the problem.

Drexler has further discussion of his essay on his blog, Metamodern.

[at Edge.org with further comment at Drexler’s blog][image from ktylerconk on flickr]