Monthly Archives: May 2009

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Your new designer brain

neuroneA fascinating article in New Scientist on neural prosthesese and the possibility of a new source of inequality: between those who can afford to pay for technological mental enhancements and those who cannot:

People without enhancement could come to see themselves as failures, have lower self-esteem or even be discriminated against by those whose brains have been enhanced, Birnbacher says. He stops short of saying that enhancement could “split” the human race, pointing out that society already tolerates huge inequity in access to existing enhancement tools such as books and education.
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The perception that some people are giving themselves an unfair advantage over everyone else by “enhancing” their brains would be socially divisive, says John Dupré at the University of Exeter, UK. “Anyone can read to their kids or play them music, but put a piece of software in their heads, and that’s seen as unfair,” he says. As Dupré sees it, the possibility of two completely different human species eventually developing is “a legitimate worry”.

But the news is not all bad, with the observation that the human brain is becoming ever more plastic and capable of adaptation:

Today, our minds are even more fluid and open to enhancement due to what Merlin Donald of Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, calls “superplasticity”, the ability of each mind to plug into the minds and experiences of countless others through culture or technology. “I’m not saying it’s a ‘group mind’, as each mind is sealed,” he says. “But cognition can be distributed, embedded in a huge cultural system, and technology has produced a huge multiplier effect.”

It is interesting to speculate what the long-term consequences of dense technological interconnectedness will be on the human condition. Even assuming actual precise neuroengineering proves difficult, neural prosthesese offer a world of opportunity.

[via KurzweilAI][image from n1/the larch on flickr]

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Friday Free Fiction for 15th May

Once again, the weekend has sneaked up on me almost without being noticed… if it weren’t for G-Cal and Remember The Milk I’d probably forget to eat most days. But Friday tends to stick in the mind, because that’s the day I wrap up another big list of the past week’s free science fiction stories on the intertubes. Onward!

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Here’s few from FeedBooks:

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Missed this one last week (only human, sorry!); a message from Jeffrey A Carver via Tor.com:

Eternity’s End is my Nebula-nominated novel about a star rigger named Legroeder who sets out in search of the lost ship Impris, Flying Dutchman of the stars. And along the way, encounters interstellar pirates and some deep-cyber romance. This book is free range, free running, cage free, up on the web for you to download for free!

Go fetch!

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Issue #86 of HUB Magazine includes two stories:

  • “Wink” by Lucy Kemnitzer
  • “Tastes of the Dark” by Malin Larsson

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Even though Jason Stoddard has now sold the hardback rights to Eternal Franchise, he’s still giving the whole thing away; we’re up to chapter 7.1

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Another DVD extra from Shadow Unit Season 2: “Scene”

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Strange Horizons presents part one and part two of “The Rising Waters” by Benjamin Crowell

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From the prolific Lee Gimenez:

I just wanted to let you know that my short story “Unhistory” was just published in the May 2009 issue of Orion’s Child Magazine.

Bravo, Lee!

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From Nancy Jane Moore:

On Book View Cafe this week, you can read:

“Cat T’ai Chi“, a graphic whimsey by Ursula K Le Guin; “Running the Road“, a longish flash fiction from Nancy Jane Moore; Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff‘s “Heroes“, which is novelette-length; “Waterwoman Nude“, a brand new story from Kate Daniel; a memoir from BVC’s newest member Alma Alexander, “Houses in Africa“; and a bonus scene — not in the print book — from Pati Nagle‘s new book, The Betrayal.

And that’s just a tiny amount of the free material available on the Book View Cafe site, which has everything from serialized novels to plays.

You heard the lady – go take a look.

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And here’s a few extras via SF Signal and their diligent inter-ma-web filtration-elves:

  • Afterburn SF presents “Ten Little Phobias” by Bev Vincent
  • Issue 131 of AntipodeanSF has appeared, including stories by Kieran Salsone, Tom Williams, David Scholes, Mark Farrugia, Shaun A Saunders, Jamie Richter, Scott Wilson, Jan Napier, Simon Petrie, and Mika F Cella
  • Marie Brennan is offering (in multiple formats) the free novella “Deeds of Men“…a story that takes place between Midnight Never Come and her upcoming novel In Ashes Lie.
  • Baen’s Webscription presents “The Menace from Earth” by Robert Heinlein

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And it looks like that’s the lot. Unfortunately, Keyboard Cat is contractually unable to play me off unless I bribe his management with cargo containers full of fresh tuna, so I’ll simply end with the usual request to keep us posted about anything you think merits inclusion in next week’s round-up, and the suggestion that you have yourself a damn good weekend. *waves*

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Bright-greening Dubai

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Whatever you may think of Dubai (and however much of it is actually true), you can’t deny that those people know how to dream big. The Dubai Chamber of Commerce has apparently green-lit a plan for a self-sufficient off-grid ecotopian zone, dubbed (with what one presumes is as much hope as anything else) “Food City”. And here’s the proposal from architectural outfit GCLA:

Dubai "Food City" concept

GCLA has described their proposal for Food City as the “the marriage of landscapes and urbanism”. Their project integrates a variety of proposals to decrease overall energy use — concentrated solar collectors, towers covered in thin-film photovoltaic cells, piezoelectric pads in pedestrian areas, and methane harvesting through sewage percolation tanks.

GCLA also proposes water conservation measures critical to off-the-grid survival in water-starved Dubai, like atmospheric water harvesting, solar desalination through concentrated solar collectors, grey water recycling, and application of hydroponic sand to minimize water loss. Essentially, GCLA’s vision is an amalgamation of nearly every urban sustainability initiative in the past few years. It’s certainly utopian, but it may ultimately prove necessary.

Necessary, perhaps; but plausible, practical or realistic? Even assuming the best about Dubai, I’ll be surprised if the application of money and architectural talent alone can build a self-sufficient garden city in one of the dryest places on the planet… but it sure does look pretty. [image copyright GCLA; reproduced under Fair Use terms, contact if takedown required]

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Garage ribofunk – the rise of homebrew genetic engineering

digital rendering of DNAHere’s another story that keeps bouncing back… and receiving progressively more paranoid coverage the closer it gets to mainstream news sources, too. That said, a certain amount of concern about biohacking or DIY genetic engineering is probably sensible – as much as most of the hobbyists brewing up weird bugs in their broom-closets are the sort of cheery can-do geeks who want to help, the ever-lowering barriers to entry of these technologies mean that it wouldn’t take much for someone with more nefarious purposes in mind to get themselves started:

… some researchers and law-enforcement officials have raised red flags. In a paper published in Nature Biotechnology in 2007, a group of scientists and FBI officials called for better oversight of so-called synthetic DNA, an ingredient widely used by professional biologists and hobbyists, saying it could theoretically lead to the creation of harmful viruses like Ebola or smallpox, since their genomes are available online. “Current government oversight of the DNA-synthesis industry falls short of addressing this unfortunate reality,” the paper said.

Ms. Aull, who lives with a cat and three roommates who are “a little bit weirded out” by her experiments, says the worries are overblown. DIY biologists are trying to “build a slingshot,” she says, “and there are people out there talking about, oh, no, what happens if they move on to nuclear weapons?”

Other biohackers argue that Mother Nature is more likely than any home hobbyist to create dangerous new pathogens. They cite the current A/H1N1 “swine flu” virus, which is a made-in-the-wild brew of human, bird and pig influenzas. Mackenzie Cowell, a founder of DIY Bio, says members aim to do good and are committed to working safely.

Frankly, I’m quite surprised that this movement hasn’t been stamped on more thoroughly and quickly; the post-9/11 world hasn’t exactly been kind to anything that can raise a pulse (and sell newspapers) simply by having the word ‘terrorism’ bolted on to it. Perhaps the DHS see themselves in a future alliance with the Shapers against those pesky Mechanist kids from cyberspace… [via PosthumanBlues; image by ynse]

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Behold – the magic cloak of illusion! Er… it was here a minute ago…

vanishing actA big part of the fun of this blogging gig (for me at least) is watching stories resurface and reiterate themselves over time. Point in case: metamaterials and ‘invisibility cloaks’, which cropped up a few times last year, and which raise their head again with news from Hong Kong University that researchers have discovered a theoretical method for not only making things appear invisible, but also for making one thing appear to be another thing entirely. Confused? Well, this might help:

The trick is to create a material in which the permittivity and permeability are complementary to the values in a nearby region of space containing the mouse we want to hide. “Complementary” means that the material cancels out the effect that the mouse has on a plane lightwave passing through. So a plane wave would be bent by the mouse but then bent back into a plane as it passes through the complementary material, making the mouse disappear.

The second step is to then distort this plane wave in the way that an elephant would. This means creating transformational material that distorts a plane lightwave in the same way as an elephant. So anybody looking at this mouse would instead see an elephant.

An invisibility cloak is just a special case of this, when the mouse is simply replaced by the illusion of free space, say Chan and co.

Simply? Well, they sound pretty sure of themselves, but I’ll maintain my skepticism until I see it actually working… or don’t see it, rather. [via SlashDot; image by crystalchu]