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! ]
Hi folks; just a quick note to apologise for the radio silence here over the last week! I’ve been off doing that family thing for the festive season alongside finishing up all the fiddly details of my recent house move (an experience I’m glad to have seen the end of), and there simply hasn’t been time to update here at Futurismic. I hope you’ve found plenty of other good stuff to read around the web… or been busy enough with your own seasonal visits to not notice the absence!
And here we are a few days before Christmas – meaning that most of you will be spending some well-earned time away from your computers, as will I. Futurismic will be back up and running next week in the run-up to the New Year, so I hope you’ll pop back and join us then. In the meantime, here’s wishing you all whatever will make you happiest, wherever you may be located and whatever belief system you may subscribe to. đ
Happy holidays! – Paul R
Here’s another sf-nal thought experiment to keep your brain occupied. We frequently mention 3D printing and fabbing here at Futurismic, but usually in the context of its positive disruptive potential – a potential sea-change in capitalist economic systems, for example. But here’s a negative response from analyst Nick Jones of the Gartner corporation [via Fabbaloo]:
… do we really want an affordable domestic fabber? Fabbers will likely âprintâ objects using some form of plastic. So the inevitable consequence of mass market fabbing will be a huge increase in the amount of non-biodegradable plastic waste clogging up the planet for hundreds of years into the future. Should we maybe ban fabbers before the problem arises? Like most problems there are solutions, like biodegradable plastic. But if we wait until all the problems with a technology are solved before we permit it, then we will waste a decade or two of potential value; and in any case thereâs no way we can predict all the social and environmental issues associated with a new technology before it arrives.
I’d agree with Jones’ last point – social disruption patterns, particularly, are very hard to predict accurately (which is probably part of the reason they’re perversely fun to discuss), and it’d be a shame to lose out on the potential power of fabbing to transform the life cycle of many of the things we use on a daily basis.
But there will be plenty of people who will see fabbing as a threat, environmental or otherwise, and who will push for legislation to control or suppress it. A victorious climate lobby would certainly flex its muscle against a technology that promised to democratise mass manufacture, as would those corporations whose bottom lines would vanish overnight – not just delivery firms like FedEx, but the factories in developing nations that churn out tchotchkes and basic hardware at low-low prices. It will be interesting to see how the traditional left-right political binary will fall across this issue; I suspect it might not be in the direction most easily assumed.
Sometimes it really feels like science-fictional thinking is becoming a much more mainstream thing to do. Following on from yesterday’s mention of CCTV control software that can learn to recognise suspicious behaviour (as defined by operator feedback, natch), out-bound BoingBoing guest blogger Paul Spinrad decided to think out loud about what might happen in a society where you were always under surveillance in public. Granted, BoingBoing isn’t exactly aloof from the sf-nal mindset, but even so…
Teenage girls become statistically less fearful about body image, and anorexia rates drop. Rifts develop between groups with different attitudes towards concealment. A tipping point is reached, and in the Prisoner’s Dilemma of female modesty, power is taken back by the unionized-sisterhood strength of concealment over the winner-take-all competition of the freer playing field. Male attitudes toward women change as a result.
Meanwhile, law enforcement and the intelligence community don’t want faces covered, with all their face-recognition and tracking software. So anti-concealment laws are put in place. The cool rebel kids (along with true criminals) also push in the direction of concealment. A mini industry springs up of wearable concealing devices, analogous to radar jammers and license plate concealers, with a similar “arms race” between laws and the innovations designed to circumvent them. Welcome to the see-easy; check your headcover at the door.
The comment thread quickly knocks down the female modesty theory, but I think we can see the beginnings of that cold-war-ish escalation of technological advancement from the second paragraph happening right now… certainly in my RSS feeds, anyway.
I’m reminded again of David Brin’s Transparent Society, and remain convinced that sousveillance would be of great social benefit in the longer run. Private and gubernatorial surveillance, on the other hand, is terrifying me more and more as the months go by; the only upside I can see is that I’ll get my naive teenaged wish of living in a Gibsonian cyberpunk dystopia… [image by Caveman 92223]
With the cold weather really digging in for those of us in the Northern hemisphere, you may well be thinking of taking a holiday somewhere hot. Courtesy the US Geological Survey, you can now scout out the lay of the land on the hottest destination in the entire solar system, as their near-global maps of the planet Mercury are released to the public.
The map combines new observations from the Messenger spacecraft with earlier images captured by Mariner 10 in the 1970s.
Messenger completed the last of its three flybys of the planet on September 29th. The release of the map marks a new phase of the mission for the spacecraft, which will now orbit the sunâs innermost planet for a year.
The U.S. Geological Survey built the map from 917 images of variable resolution and lighting conditions, but sophisticated software was able to match up planetary features from different images to create the near seamless mosaic.
Click through on the image above (or here) to download various sized versions of the map – should make a nice wallpaper file, no?
If you don’t fancy Mercury (I’ve heard the food’s terrible, and the cost of bottled water is simply shocking), maybe a brief break in a space station as designed by Paolo Soleri might be more aesthetically appealing [via Tim Maly]? Granted, none of them have ever been built… but you’d have to admit they have a soupçon more je ne sais quoi than the utilitarian grace of the ISS, I’m sure. đ
