Those with a burning urge to live the airborne life they were promised by watching The Jetsons every week should keep their fingers crossed that this flying trike-autogyrocopter thing makes it into production. Completely unnecessary, probably very expensive and dangerous – but I’d still really like one.

While not exactly what you might describe as practical, anyone who decides to install a huge Tesla coil on the roof of their car is alright by me, whatever the reason they did it for. Speaking of the man Edison owed his reputation and fortune to, BoingBoing linked to a profile of Tesla over at the Fortean Times. One of the most fascinating characters of Victorian-era engineering, without a doubt.

This either represents an apogee of convenience engineering, or says something deeply unsettling about paranoia and material possessions – you can now sign up to an online service that allows you to unlock, start, locate, disable or alarm your car. Without, you know, actually being there. All we need now is a way to drive the things without being in them … thanks to Bruce Schneier for the link, who quite rightly points out that it’s a system that just howls to be hacked.

If Bill Gibson could somehow conspire to sue reality itself for intellectual property theft, he’d never need to write again. He could certainly take DARPA to task for dreaming about replicators and blatantly ripping off the idea of Nanofaxes that he came up with in Idoru.

(Yeah, so loads of other sf books and shows have had replicators. I just happen to like Gibson best.)

Ah, conventions – that much misunderstood mainstay of genre fiction fan-dom. I’m off to my second con ever early next month, and I can’t wait. But I wish I’d had this list of sf con etiquette dos and don’ts with me last year, because then there’d be less people I need to avoid this year … [SFBC]