All posts by Paul Raven

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Friday Free Fiction for 21st March

This will be fairly brief, I’m afraid, as I’m currently soaking up the atmosphere at Eastercon, and working on this post is eating into precious bar conversation time … 😉

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From Manybooks.net:

 

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Everyone has been linking to "Wikihistory" by Desmond Warzel, but that’s all the more reason to go and read it.

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"Dexterity" is the third episode of Shadow Unit, this time by Sarah Monette.

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John Joseph Adams has dropped M Rickert‘s "Bread and Bombs" on the Wastelands Anthology website.

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James Bloomer has a story at Every Day Fiction this week – "The Paths You Would Walk"

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Finally, there’s a few scattered examples of Friday Flash, but most of us are off-duty at Eastercon this week I’m afraid. Still, you get:

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That’s your lot for this week, folks -enjoy the holiday weekend!

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Boulder, Colorado – smart grid city

electric ultility pylon What the hell is a “smart grid city”? [via Worldchanging]

Well, maybe you could call it “Infrastructure2.0”, but whatever you call it, it’s a new (and hopefully more sustainable) way of looking at the issues of providing utilities to urban areas. According to Xcel Energy:

“The next-generation electricity grid will allow our company to better meet growing demands, address environmental challenges, maximize available resources and optimize the entire energy system. Ultimately, a “smarter” grid helps us serve our customers by creating more options for managing personal energy use, habits and costs.”

All hot air and sales jargon, you might be thinking. Well, Xcel seem to be walking the walk as well talking the talk – they’re going to make Boulder, Colorado into their first Smart Grid City, with the first phase predicted for completion this August. [image by tanakawho]

I’m pretty pleased to see the energy industry acting on these sorts of ideas instead of just paying them lip service, and I hope something similar starts appearing over here in the UK. Perhaps where Xcel leads, others will follow and surpass.

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Dave Edelman says the novel will die

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old-book-spines I’m out of town and away from the interwebs today (at a conference about Web2.0 in libraries, ironically enough), so I’ve left you these articles to chew over using the magic of scheduled posting. [image by Tom Maisey]

First off, David Louis Edelman repeats the oft-heard assertion that the novel will die, but he doesn’t see it as a downer:

“Very soon we’re going to have a medium for distributing the written word that’s not only easier but better suited to the task than books. So let’s dispense with the silly, sentimental arguments you often hear about why storytelling is never going to go electronic. “You can’t replace the feeling of a holding a book,” “I don’t like reading on a screen,” and “I can’t read an e-book in the bathtub” are some of the sillier excuses you hear all the time for why printed books are going to survive until the end of time.

I’m sorry, but “I can hold my entire library in my hand,” “I can download new books at will,” “I can search my entire library in a nanosecond,” “I can instantly send books to my friends,” “I can translate and define words on the fly,” and “I don’t have to devote an entire room of my house to holding my books” are going to trump reading in the bathtub any day of the week.”

Well worth a read. Now compare and correlate with Jason Stoddard’s recent posts on the future of creative writing … start with this one about creating fully featured alternate realities:

“What do you think this is? This is 100% writing – and this is some of the most powerful writing you can do. Instead of blogging about your dogs and your vacation schedule or how the world is going to hell to create a post every day, turn some of that energy towards this!”

And then move forwards chronologically through the next four posts or so.

And then … discuss, be you writer or reader!

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Clean serene blood-streams – anti-drug antibodies patented

MDMA-molecular-diagram New Scientist reports that a group of addiction researchers have filed a patent on a method for producing antibodies that can clean the bloodstream of “designer drugs” from the amphetamine family.

It’s not yet been tested in humans, of course, but the implication is that injections of these antibodies could eradicate the chemicals in question from a patients body, which would doubtless be of great assistance in withdrawal programs. [image from erowid.org]

But as we all know, the street finds its own use for things. Once stuff like this hits the black market, I think there’ll be a lot less people worrying about mandatory drug testing in the workplace.

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Why we shouldn’t be so hard on Spitzer

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George Dvorsky has been thinking about the Elliot Spitzer scandal, and while he’s quite certain that Spitzer transgressed the law and deserves to be punished as such, he thinks we’re overstating the strangeness of the transgression itself:

“Why did Spitzer go to a prostitute in the first place? Well, it’s not because he’s corrupt or evil; those are labels applied to his actions after the fact. Rather, it stems from a deeply hardwired desire to get some action on the side, for sexual fulfillment outside of marriage.

Simply put, he was being a typical guy.”

Just to reiterate, Dvorsky isn’t trying to let Spitzer off the hook here, but he is trying to point out that Spitzer is a flawed human being, just like the rest of us. If democracy has a future, I think it depends on us waking up to the idea that people in positions of power are just ordinary people – which, at the same that it removes them from their pedestals, should also remind us that we’re more than capable of falling from grace ourselves.