Offered for no other reason than that images like this still blow my mind in the same way that pictures from the Apollo missions blew my mind as a bookish seven-year-old protogeek: Nasa’s Deep Impact probe managed to get some photos of Comet Hartley 2 from just over 400 miles away [via MetaFilter].
![Comet Hartley 2 as seen by Deep Impact [image courtesy NASA]](https://futurismic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/comet-hartley-2-deep-impact.jpg "Comet Hartley 2 as seen by Deep Impact [image courtesy NASA]")
The Universe == Awesome.
If you’d asked me what the twenty-tens would look like back in 1985, I don’t think I’d have said “1985”. But that’s the oroboros of culture for you, I guess; not only are the streets of big cities packed with preening hipsters dressed exactly like the alpaca-esque post-punks I used to be somewhat intimidated (yet subliminally inspired) by as they lurked moodily around the local war memorials, but Sir Clive Sinclair – the chap who gave his name to the ZX Spectrum computers that lurked in the corner of every second British kid’s bedroom around that time – is once again making a bid to populate the urban streets of Britain with what is in essence an electric-assisted bicycle in a plastic shell.
You’ve got to admire Sinclair’s classic British pluck, really; the C-5 remains an iconic example of duff eighties futurism, a gloriously eccentric failure and testament to well-meaning but ultimately misguided innovative engineering. The C-5 was ugly, fragile, and more than a little silly. So, has Sir Clive learned from the mistakes of the past?
The Sinclair C5, circa 1985:
The Sinclair X1, circa 2010:
I’m going to go with “no”. Once more unto the breach, wot? Ours is not to reason why…
OK, I’m being a little over-snarky here, perhaps; I’m a big supporter of urban cycling and alternative transport, and I’d love to see the take-up on affordable and predominantly human-powered urban vehicles increase dramatically. But – and please forgive my cynicism – I don’t think that thing’s gonna do it. [images ganked from Gizmag]
It’s yet another hat-tip to George Dvorsky, this time for pointing out a paper by Gary Miller in which he lays out the obstacles in the path of supporters of cognitive enhancement pharmacology, and ways for overcoming such:
I argue that, regardless how miniscule the risks or how blatantly obvious the benefits, a majority of U.S. citizens is unlikely to support the unrestricted dissemination of cognition enhancing drugs, because each individual member of the majority will be led astray by cognitive biases and illusions, as well as logical fallacies.
If this premise is accurate, then the people of the United States may already be suffering an opportunity cost that cannot be recouped. While a minority of the U.S. electorate can challenge the constitutionality of a policy enacted by a majority, a minority cannot sue to challenge the legislature’s refusal to enact a specific policy. In other words, we in the minority have no way of claiming we were harmed by what “good” could have come—but did not come—due to the legislature’s inaction. We cannot claim the “opportunity cost to the greater good” as an injury, and we cannot compel a court to balance that opportunity cost of inaction against the individual interests that dissuaded the majority from action. Our only recourse is to compel the majority to change its stance via persuasion.
Sounds remarkably like Mike Treder’s suggestion that calm rational discussion of the pros and cons is the best way to advance the transhumanist project, no? No big surprise, I guess, given the overlap between the groups in question… though as I said before, as much as it’s the most morally sensible course of action available, I don’t know how much good calm rational advocacy will be on a an irrational and sensationalist political landscape. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
Interesting essay from Cory Doctorow over at Locus Online; I’m always a little leery of pieces that see science fiction fandom doing that pat-ourselves-on-the-back-for-being-a-little-bit-ahead-of-the-curve thing, but I think Doctorow may have a point when he claims that fandom – alongside many other modern subcultures, it must be said – can be typified by a sort of “gourmet cosmopolitan” attitude peculiar to the post-modern (altermodern?) networked world. In passing, he also makes some interesting points about a core philosophy of science fiction stories which I’d like to see further expanded:
… we tend to think of ‘‘cosmopolitan’’ as a synonym for ‘‘posh’’ or ‘‘well-travelled.’’ But that’s not what I mean here: for me, to be cosmopolitan is to live your life by the ancient science fictional maxims: ‘‘All laws are local’’ and ‘‘No law knows how local it is.’’ That is, the eternal verities of your culture’s moment in space and time are as fleeting and ridiculous as last year’s witch-burnings, blood-letting, king-worship, and other assorted forms of idolatry and empty ritual.
[…]
Which is not to say that cosmopolitans don’t believe in anything. To be cosmopolitan is to know that all laws are local, and to use that intellectual liberty to decide for yourself what moral code you’ll subscribe to. It is the freedom to invent your own ethics from the ground up, knowing that the larger social code you’re rejecting is no more or less right than your own – at least from the point of view of a Martian peering through a notional telescope at us piddling Earthlings.
[…]
Rule 34, the Amish, and fandom’s willingness to wear its sweaters inside-out are the common thread running through the 21st century’s social transformations: we’re finding a life where we reevaluate social norms as we go, tossing out the ones that are empty habit or worse, and enthusiastically adopting the remainder because of what it can do for our lives. That is modern, sophisticated, gourmet cosmopolitanism, and it’s ever so much more fun the old cosmopolitanism obsession with how they’re wearing their cuffs in Paris, or what’s on at the Milan opera.
Comments are open: what are your thoughts? (Unless they’re along the lines of “Doctorow is an [x]!” or “sf fans are [y]!”; these are opinions you’re entitled to, but I’d request politely that you find somewhere else to share them.)
Chances are good you’ve seen this already, but for those of you who haven’t, well, it really needs to be seen.
We can thank Charlie Stross for spotting it while trawling through Hansard, the official transcript publication of the proceedings of the UK Houses Of Parliament; depending on just how conspiracy-theory minded you are, it’s either an astonishing revelation about an unnamed and extremely wealthy organisation (such as, hypothetically speaking, The Vatican) offering to buy out debt-beleaguered Britain with a no-strings-attached cash donation of stupendous size, or an obscure back-bench peer of the House Of Lords with something of a history for rambling non sequiteurs having what we might politely and euphemistically refer to as a very public “senior moment”.
Just go read the whole thing, seriously; if it was sourced from anywhere other than Hansard, you’d have to dismiss it as a missing (and suspiciously well-written) Dan Brown chapter. It’s gonna be providing novelists with a high-grade Jonbar Point for years to come.
Additional: Justin Pickard picks out a comment from the thread on Charlie’s post which suggests mashing up textual analysis software with the government transparency project They Work For You to allow real-time assessment of the sanity of our elected and non-elected representatives. An interesting and strangely plausible project, but one whose result would probably bear more bad news than we really need at this precise moment in time…