Monthly Archives: June 2009

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Stross: how I ended up as a science fiction writer

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lifeCharles Stross is recounting the long journey to his current position has one of the stars of British science fiction, beginning with his first steps into education during the years of Thatcher:

I already knew (from an early age — 12 or so) that I wanted to be an SF writer. But there was a fly in the ointment — a fly called Margaret Thatcher. I turned 15 in 1979, the year the conservatives won an election and the Thatcherite revolution swung into action.

Unemployment soared from around one million to over three million in twelve months as the UK experienced the worst industrial recession since the end of the second world war (largely caused by Thatcher’s dramatic decision to cut most of the state-owned industries off at their knees, on the assumption that the workers would find new and more productive jobs sooner rather than later — a misplaced assumption, as it turned out).

I come from a middle-class background; I could expect to go to university, but not to rely indefinitely on parental hand-outs. “You’ll need some kind of way to earn a living while you’re trying to write,” the careers guidance teachers told me.

A familiar story, as this happy university dropout will affirm (except it was Blair instead of Thatcher and the economic collapse only really started after I left).
[image from The Wandering Angel]

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Crowdsourced justice, or just Vigilantism2.0?

Anonymous vigilantism against Kenny GlennThere’s been a steadily increasing number of stories about “crowdsourced justice” of late, a phenomenon that arguably started in China but which is spreading across the world to anywhere that has a population with ready access to the internet.

For example, you may have heard about the 4chan crusade against one Kenny Glenn, a teenager foolish enough to post videos of himself abusing a kitten; Anonymous doesn’t respect many things, but it sure loves cats, and swiftly unearthed enough information about Kenny to land him in very hot water (and to get the cats rescued, natch).

An article at H+ Magazine takes an in-depth look at the phenomenon, which the Chinese refer to as the “human flesh search engine”:

Fortunately, human flesh search engines don’t end the lives of their victims, like the witch-hunts or lynching of the past.

(Erm… they don’t yet.)

We will not know for some time how these cyber-hunts will shape the future of our privacy, freedom of speech and sense of justice and security. But there is no doubt that these cases are just the beginning a vast social change taking place right now. What we can see from these incidents is that the flow of information will no longer be controlled and that the power of public outrage will not easily be quelled.

Kitten Killer of Hangzhou and her cameraman will walk away from their brutal act.. An apology is hardly appropriate recompense for the death of the tiny tortured feline. But these small stories will remain a part of our collective human memory and help guide the decisions of future societies, because the Internet does not forget, does not forgive and cannot be stopped. Ever.

While containing more than a mote of hyperbole, that final sentence is very telling – not because it is de facto true, but because many people believe it to be true. It’s that motivation combined with the ease of acting upon it en masse that gives human flesh search engines their power. [image sourced from Anonymous’ Kenny Glenn site]

And via SlashDot we find that it’s not just animal abusers who can become the focus of public ire, even in censorship-ridden China: the China Digital Times has a report regarding the dissemination of personal information about one Chen Hua, a deputy director of the Beijing Internet Propaganda Office who was foolish enough to boast of his own corrupt practices to a girl he was seeing “in a personal capacity”. Whether the story is true or not is irrelevant; word got out, the human flesh search engines dug up a lot of Chen’s personal details, and Beijing is now trying to contain the viral spread of said information… which makes me wonder yet again about how effective the blackout on the Tiananmen massacre really is.

Much as with any other technology, the uses to which the internet can be put are decided by the people with access to it; most of these cases could be argued to be ethically justified to a greater or lesser degree (though the lines are as fuzzy as ever), but that may not always be the case. The lord of the flies tends to follow us wherever we go, and I can’t see the transition to the digital world slowing him down too much.

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Frank Herbert’s Fremen moisture traps made real

man walking on desert dunesChalk up another point for Frank Herbert; the moisture traps used by his Fremen characters in the Dune series to extract drinkable water from an otherwise bone-dry desert are a technological reality.

Research scientists […] have found a way of converting this air humidity autonomously and decentrally into drinkable water. “The process we have developed is based exclusively on renewable energy sources such as thermal solar collectors and photovoltaic cells, which makes this method completely energy-autonomous. It will therefore function in regions where there is no electrical infrastructure,” says Siegfried Egner, head of department at the IGB. The principle of the process is as follows: hygroscopic brine – saline solution which absorbs moisture – runs down a tower-shaped unit and absorbs water from the air. It is then sucked into a tank a few meters off the ground in which a vacuum prevails. Energy from solar collectors heats up the brine, which is diluted by the water it has absorbed.

Because of the vacuum, the boiling point of the liquid is lower than it would be under normal atmospheric pressure. This effect is known from the mountains: as the atmospheric pressure there is lower than in the valley, water boils at temperatures distinctly below 100 degrees Celsius. The evaporated, non-saline water is condensed and runs down through a completely filled tube in a controlled manner. The gravity of this water column continuously produces the vacuum and so a vacuum pump is not needed. The reconcentrated brine runs down the tower surface again to absorb moisture from the air.

Crafty stuff… and if climate change brings the increased desertification that some suggest it will, there’ll be a lot of people in need of technology just like this. [via SlashDot; image by Gret@Lorenz]

On a similar note, here’s an architectural concept that uses a similar process to extract potable water from air humidity on hot sunny coastlines…

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Pseuicide – faking your death on the internet

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fake death?Via Chairman Bruce comes a great article at Wired UK about the phenomenon of Munchausen By Internet – members of online communities who fake serious illness or death for a variety of reasons, be it to dig themselves out of their other untruths or because they enjoy being the focus of mass sympathy:

In his 2004 book Playing Sick, Dr Marc Feldman, a clinical psychiatrist at the University of Alabama, offers the first published investigation into a disorder he refers to as “Munchausen by internet”, or MBI, which introduces an online element to the symptoms of Munchausen syndrome, the condition whose sufferers fake sickness and may demand medical treatment for a illness they do not really possess.

“The easy and ready access to the internet propagates MBI,” said Feldman in a recent email. “In fact, I believe that MBI is more common than MS in ‘real life’. The reason is that it is so easy to use the net to research medical conditions, post fallacious materials, and engage others without the need to literally enact an ilness. Many of these people seem to be very lonely, and the internet offers a readily and continually-available source of unconditional support.”

In one startling case, a woman from New Zealand named “Sara” approached Feldman with an 8,000-word confession of her own Munchausen by internet, a story of vast complexity and novelistic detail in which she created more than eight online aliases, constructed intricate relationships between them, and killed at least five.

It’s grimly fascinating to see how the internet is amplifying some of the weirder parts of human psychology. I can’t help but wonder whether or not this might become some sort of performance artform, though; one of the earliest examples of a faked death online was a guy on USENET:

In 1999, when online interaction was still in its relative infancy, a prominent poster on the popular usenet group alt.religion.kibology perpetrated one of the earliest fake deaths, partly as a way “to be a fly on the wall at my own funeral” but also purportedly as part of an investigation into the nature of online relationships. A long-time and regular poster named M Otis Beard suddenly became unusually argumentative with fellow contributors over a brief period, before one of Beard’s friends, who had met him in real life, posted a muted and thoroughly credible notice that Beard had killed himself.

[…]

Some days later, Beard himself resurfaced with a message that, while overbearingly smug in tone, is underpinned by what he claimed was an intellectual motive. After a gleeful pronouncement that “rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated”, Beard announced that his “little escapade” had been a method of testing the sense of community in the group and had been designed to offer a perverse sense of catharsis when the deception was revealed.

“You thought you had irretrievably lost something; that something is now returned to you,” he wrote. “If I hadn’t made you sad by pretending to be dead, I wouldn’t have been able to make you happy (well, OK, angry and THEN happy) by jumping out of my coffin, whole and hale. Forgive me for putting you through the emotional roller coaster ride, which I hope was a healthily cathartic experience for all of you.”

That sounds exactly like the sort of stunt that the 4chan/Anonymous massive might come up with, keen as they are to shatter expectations, wind up the over-emotional and disrupt internet communities using the very tools used to construct them. I can easily imagine some sort of annual awards for the most convincing, most audacious or most ridiculous faked deaths… and increased awareness of the phenomenon will only make it seem more of a challenge. [image by aliscarpulla]

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Bussard ramjet revisited

star_and_barsAn interesting discussion of Bussard ramjet interesteller propulsion technology here at Centauri Dreams and Adam Crowl:

Robert Bussard put the interstellar ramjet into the public eye back in 1960 in a paper proposing that a starship moving fast enough would be able to use the hydrogen between the stars as a source of fuel, enabling a constant acceleration at one g.

One of the key problems with Bussard ramjets is the speed of the fusion reactions:

Physicist Daniel Whitmire tackled this problem in a 1975 paper that proposed using hydrogen for fuel but exploiting a catalytic nuclear reaction chain instead of straight proton burning.

It’s all interesting stuff, but even if the Bussard ramjet is unfeasible as a propulsion system it may be feasible as a brake for interstellar spacecraft.

[image from kevindooley on flickr]