All posts by Paul Raven

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Fabbing your new fingerbones

X-ray of a human handWhile 3D printing may be used predominantly for rapid prototyping of consumer goods (with all the potential risks that entails), it may turn out to have more humanitarian deployments as well. Proving a concept we mentioned a while back, a team of Swiss doctors have used a 3D printer to build replacement bones for a man’s thumb:

Weinand loaded the printer with tricalcium phosphate and a type of polylactic acid – natural structural materials found in the human body. The resulting bone “scaffolds” contained thousands of tiny pores into which bone cells could settle, grow and eventually displace the biodegradable scaffold altogether.

The bones still have to be ‘grown’ around the scaffold (using a surrogate mutant mouse, much like the famous Vacanti ear experiment), so it’s not a completely non-biological process. But it’s a step closer to a world where we can buy spare parts for our meat-machines ‘off the shelf’. [image by ansik]

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Friday Free Fiction for 6th March

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Is it springtime yet? It keeps trying to act like it here, but then winter comes bounding back in out of nowhere and letting my hopes down. Still, at least I’ve got plenty to read while I’m sat inside with the heating running… and so have you, because it’s Friday free fiction time at Futurismic!

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Just the one from ManyBooks:

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A couple more pieces of fiction round off the winter issue of Subterranean Online:

Tim Pratt fans (and you should all be Tim Pratt fans) should keep a close eye on this here website in the weeks to come! 😉

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New month, new issue of Clarkesworld:

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Likewise with Apex Online:

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Strange Horizons presents “Diana Comet” by Sandra McDonald

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Rudy Rucker curates the seventh issue of his delightfully-named Flurb webzine, which contains all this:

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Guess who’s back? Yup, you guessed it – Shadow Unit is ramping up for Season 2 wirh “Lucky Day”

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Courtesy of Chris Roberson, here’s his story “Two Birds”

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Via pretty much everyone, Random House’s Suvudu genre fiction webhubsitecommunitythingy has a bunch of free full-novel PDFs to download. It’d be rude not to, wouldn’t it?

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Via Nick Mamatas comes news of a new super-short fiction outlet; Brain Harvest has kicked off with a super short piece from Mamatas called “Patmos Like Pink Elephants“.

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A message from the intriguingly named Kirk Ultra:

Hi, our website Electric Children has five short stories on it that I thought would be great for Friday Free Fiction. The first and newest is a sci-fi story called “Connector” by Dean Verheyen.

The second two are by Hillary Ferris: “Valentine” and “The Key“. And finally we have two short stories by Barbara Ann Crumm, “The Acid Journal” and “The General Store“. Hope you enjoy!

Cheers, Kirk!

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Via SF Signal we discover that Pyr is now offering The Crooked Letter by Sean Williams available as a free PDF download.

Speaking of SF Signal, it seem’s they are sticking with the bulk-posting of free fiction links, which if nothing else makes things a little easier for little old me…

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Time constraints once again mean that I’ll be unable to catch all the Friday Flash Fiction offerings, but here’s a few carried over from last week. From Sarah Ellender we have “The Torture Orchestra“, while Sumit Dam has been churning ’em out: there’s “Damocles“, plus five microfictions under the title “Running Without Scissors“.

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And there’s your lot! Don’t forget to drop us a line if you have any tip-offs; in the meantime, have a great weekend!

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Wisdom in strange places – Dinosaur Comics on predicting future technology

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Dinosaur Comics - 5th March 2009Some of you may already follow Ryan North’s Dinosaur Comics; those who don’t should give it a go for a few weeks. The po-mo mock philosophy isn’t to everyone’s taste, but it usually gets at least one genuine LOL a week out of me.

The latest iteration made me grin, because it seemed so apposite to yesterday’s post about the Stross/Anissimov disagreement. So click through and see the whole thing. Philosophy and dinosaurs – what more could you ask for on a Friday?

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Gold-farming still big business

World of Warcraft gold vaultVia BoingBoing, here’s a Guardian article on the MMORPG gold-farming phenomenon:

These virtual industries sound surreal, but they are fast entering the mainstream. According to a report by Richard Heeks at Manchester University, an estimated 400,000 Asian workers are now employed in gold farming in a trade worth up to £700m a year. With so many gamers now online, these industries are estimated to have a consumer base of five million to 10 million, and numbers are expected to grow with widening internet access.

As I mentioned last time, what interests me most about gold-farming is that it seems to be comparatively immune to the economic slump. WoW gold or weapons are surely luxury items by any economical definition, but for some reason they’re not going the same way as bling and gas-guzzler cars. Is this due to the low ticket price, combined with the fact that gaming is a comparatively recession-friendly pastime? Is it also a recognition that the one thing we value more than our money is the time to achieve what we want (virtual or otherwise)? [image by fernashes]

Looking forward, though, how soon before the market saturates? The collapse of Chinese manufacturing has resulted in an expanded pool of labour, but that just means more competition for the work. If, as some economists have suggested, the recession is a prelude to greater financial parity on a global scale, will gold-farming or its equivalents become an increasingly attractive employment option in the West as the traditional options for blue-collar work erode?

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Zingback! Anissimov vs Stross

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Lest anyone think that a spate of recent links from here to Charlie Stross means I’m only listening to one side of the story, here’s Michael Anissimov’s response to Charlie’s “21st Century FAQ” piece. Executive summary: he doesn’t like it, and doesn’t think much of Charlie’s books either:

1) The Singularity is not “the Rapture of the Nerds”. It is a very likely event that happens to every intelligent species that survives up to the point of being capable of enhancing its own intelligence. Its likelihood comes from two facts: that intelligence is inherently something that can be engineered and enhanced, and that the technologies capable of doing so already exist in nascent forms today. Even if qualitatively higher intelligence turns out to be impossible, the ability to copy intelligence as a computer program or share, store, and generate ideas using brain-to-brain computer-mediated interfaces alone would be enough to magnify any capacity based on human thought (technology, science, logistics, art, philosophy, spirituality) by two to three orders of magnitude if not far more.

[snip]

While I’m on this tangent, I might as well point out that Accelerando sucked. I don’t know how people get taken in by this crap. You can’t get an awesome story by shoving boring, stereotypically dark-n’-dysfunctional characters into a confused mash-up of style-over-substance futurist concepts and retro hipster cocktail party backgrounds. […] It’s like 2005, but oddly copied-and-pasted into space. Even the patterns and problems of 1970 were more different from today than today is from Stross’ future.

I think it’s fair to say that Michael is still hung up on a Gernsbackian idealist template for science fiction as a prediction engine; he’s much more qualified than I to talk about transhumanism and so on, but he doesn’t seem to recognise that sf is primarily a tool for examining the present (if indeed you consider it to have any value beyond pure entertainment, which is an equally valid opinion). But his closer is fairly telling:

Maybe Stross is a great guy in person. I don’t know him. But I can say that I wildly disagree with both his futurism and his approach to sci-fi. (Insofar as I care about sci-fi at all, which, honestly, is not a whole lot.)

Not a whole lot, but enough to get riled when an sf writer seemingly treads on your ideological turf? You kids play nice, now. 😉

(For what it’s worth, I read both Anissimov and Stross regularly; they may believe very different things, but the one thing they share is that they’re smart people.)