Does Not Equal is a webcomic by Sarah Ennals – check out the pre-Futurismic archives, and the strips that have been published here previously.
[ Be sure to check out the Does Not Equal Cafepress store for webcomic merchandise featuring Canadians with geometrically-shaped heads! ]
It’s Friday once again, which can only mean one thing – a big bunch of free science fiction stories to read on the intertubes!
Thanks to the wonders of Fusion-Modulated Temporal Blogging Technology (better known as “pre-scheduled posting”), I’ll actually be half-way up the country from my home by the time you read this, having compiled it beforehand… so if there’s anything I’ve missed, please accept my apologies, and my assurances that it’ll be rounded up for next week’s collection. That said, there’s plenty here to keep your eyeballs busy as it is…
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Here’s a whole shed-load from FeedBooks:
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Strange Horizons presents what is surely a candidate for Longest Titled Short Story Ever: “A Journal of Certain Events of Scientific Interest from the First Survey Voyage of the Southern Waters by HMS Ocelot, As Observed by Professor Thaddeus Boswell, DPhil, MSc; or, A Lullaby” by Helen Keeble, part the first and part the second
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Subterranean Online presents a new excursion into Jack Vance’s Dying Earth: “Sylgarmo’s Proclamation” by Lucius Shepard
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Here’s the latest instalment of Jason Stoddard‘s Eternal Franchise; we’re up to chapter 8.4
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Shadow Unit Season 2 continues with Episode 2.04: “Getaway“
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News from the courageous Jay Lake:
My short story “People of Leaf and Branch” is live at Fantasy magazine.
There’s also a sample from Jay’s new novel Green at Tor.com.
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Speaking of Tor.com, their latest full-sized piece of original fiction is “The City Quiet as Death” by Steven Utley and Michael Bishop
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Here’s fragment 38 of Jayme Lynn Blaschke‘s Memory
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The ever-prolific Lee Gimenez writes to inform us that his story “September 12th” is up at Aphelion.
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Last but certainly not least, over at SF Signal they’re continuing their nefarious and underhand quest to make me look like the lazy mountebank I surely am by collating daily (daily!) free fiction round–ups. So go and wreak revenge on my behalf by clicking through and hopefully overloading their servers or something. That’ll show ’em. š
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Oh, you want more? OK, so here’s a non-fiction bonus for you: in case you’ve not seen it already, the new edition of H+ Magazine is available to buy, read online in a fancy Flash interface or download as a free PDF. Can’t say they don’t give you options, them transhumanist types…
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And that’s your lot. Don’t forget to send smoke signals if you want to head us off at the pass with something you think we might otherwise miss in next week’s selection! But otherwise, have yourselves as good a weekend as you can.
Via Geoff “BLDGBLOG” Manaugh we discover that people in India long ago found a solution to a shortage of affordable housing – they colonise ancient tombs and monuments, much to the chagrin of archaeologists and historians.
The city [New Delhi] is also home to tens of thousands of homeless people, and millions more who are desperately poor. Many of the otherwise homeless have made the reasonable assessment that the stout marble walls of the tombs and shrines and mausoleums that litter the city make a much nicer home, especially in monsoon season, than the sidewalk.
Some seek only temporary shelter. But others such as nine families living inside a federally protected monument called the Atgah Khan tomb, built in 1566, are so thoroughly ensconced that they can produce title deeds going back generations. They have plastered the walls, had the crypt wired to run the television and installed a fine kitchen, with wood cupboards built into the handy arched recesses.
It’s a tough call to make; history must be valued and protected, but people have to live somewhere. How can you tell a homeless family that they can’t live in an otherwise unoccupied building – you, with your job in archaeology and your apartment to go home to? You do it because it’s your job, of course, and because you believe that history must be preserved – but it can’t be much fun. [image by varunshiv]
And as the world becomes increasingly urbanised, perhaps we’ll see this sort of behaviour occuring in comparatively affluent Western cities as the less fortunate arrive in droves to seek employment and shelter. Imagine the Lincoln monument thronging with a small town of migrants from the former corn belt, or the huge family tombs of London’s great cemetaries repurposed into ersatz condominiums, always occupied by a few of the family’s oldest and youngest members to prevent claim-jumping newcomers…
What could be better than complete panopticon-level surveillance over everything you own? Well, surveillance that only bothers you with issues you really want to know about, and which doesn’t send you an SMS every time the neighbour’s cat rubs itself against the garage door, of course!
The main difference with the Archerfish system is that alerts you by text or video footage only when certain āeventsā occur, which you define. Alerts can be sent to your cell or similar mobile device, as an email or to a customised web portal.
Unlike more conventional systems, you donāt need to monitor video around-the-clock or trawl through footage or rely on motion alarms.
Using a combination of video cameras, intelligent software (Smartbox) and a custom web portal (SmartPortal), Archerfish watches your premises for āeventsā. They can be defined as person, vehicle, intelligent object motion or external sensor trigger. This means the system can tell the difference between a human being and inanimate object like a car passing the camera.
At the same time, if the camera is triggered by human movement, you can check to see whether it’s a family member, an intruder or a delivery. You can also check live video through the SmartPortal, as long as you have access to a PC or web-enabled device.
Well, that’s a doozy… provided that you’re willing to trust the software not to goof. And that you’re willing to upgrade the software regularly. And that you’re willing to believe that no one will ever find a way to futz the cameras, or hack the backline hardware via that web portal… but other than that, complete peace of mind! Ain’t technology wonderful? [image by Cory Doctorow]
For a long time physicists thought it was impossible to see anything smaller than about half the wavelength of light.
That’s true if you look at the propagating component of light waves. But light also records smaller sub-wavelength details in its evanescent components, which do not propagate. At least not usually. What [John] Pendry showed [about 10 years ago] was that evanescent components can propagate in a material with a negative refractive index, and he pointed out that a thin film of silver ought to have just the right properties.
Since then, the race has been on to build superlenses. In 2005, Nicolas Fang at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign created one that could record details as small as one-sixth of a wavelength. That was a significant improvement over the diffraction limit, but why not better?
Fang and company recently achieved resolution of only one-twelfth the wavelength of light. The theoretical limit is now pegged at one-twentieth a wavelength, which should be small enough to watch molecules in motion.
The impact of such “transparency” on the micro level opens up fertile realm for speculation: Surely drug designers, among others, are going to want superlenses of their own.
[Story: Technology Review physics arXiv blog; thanks for the tip, dpodolsky; London neon sculpture photo: clry2]