Writer and particle physics student from Bristol, England. My story 'A Shogun's Welcome' featured in Aberrant Dreams #7 and 'The Shogun and The Scientist' will be published in the anthology 'The Awakening' in January 2008. I review at SFCrowsnest and wrote the fictional blog miawithoutoil for the world without oil project.
This funky partly-submerged oddity is a design for a floating house, with five stories and enough room for six people. Featuring a bathroom and guest room slightly underwater and a lower level observation room for looking into the ocean depths, this would be a room fitting of many a sf or Bond villain! It even includes an electrical generator and enough storage for weeks of food and water. The entire structure is plastic, fibreglass and acrylic but will cost potential buyers a cool $2.5 Millon, which isn’t actually that much compared to a lot of mansions these days.
In a move that will excite many science fiction fans, a political scientist from Norway has suggested there may be a third way to solve the coming environmental problems of the21st century: Space. He posits that there are two theories for sustainable development. One, Ecologism, aims for a post industrial era of lessened use of carbon and requires a change in the way our current political and social climate works. The other is Environmentalism which aims to keep life much as it is, only using funds to develop, repair and nurture the environment. However, he thinks that by tapping into the resources offplanet, it may be able to solve the Earth’s issues. Reading the brief it seems like very much a political rather than scientific hypothesis but there’s definitely a place for space in the coming time when resources become scarce – we just have to know where to look.
Having sold VoIP stalwart Skype to Google Ebay (and being paid more than they should have for it), founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis have been quietly working away on Joost, an online television program. This week the program went free to all interested downloaders (previously you had to be invited to the beta). The content available depends on the region but the UK gets a great selection of films from Paramount including Star Trek Insurrection and the absolute classic Chinatown, which I think has one of the best screenplays of all time. There’s also content from Aardman Animation, Happy Tree Friends, CSI and scifi show Lexx, among others.
A lengthy study of nuns, priests and monks by a medical researcher in Chicago produced a stunning correlation between the conscientiousness of the person and the likelihood of dementia in later life. Conscientiousness was described as someone self-disciplined, scrupulous and dependable. Those that scored in the 90th percentile for conscientiousness in 1994 had 89% less chance of contracting Alzheimer’s than someone in the 10th percentile as well as less cognitive decline. The researcher’s hypothesis for the link is that determined and dependable people are more resilient and adaptable to change.
I’ve been saying for a few years now that as soon as a major band started selling their own records on their own website, the music companies were doomed. Today it looks like the revolution has started. Radiohead, the superstar band that finished their contract with EMI following their last album ‘Hail To The Thief’ have announced that their new album ‘In Rainbows’ will be released on October 10th, purely through their website. In a move that’s going to send ripples through the music industry, the album download has no set price. The website literally says ‘Pay what you want’. With Nine Inch Nails pledging to sell all their records direct to fans after their contract ends, it’s looking like the future of music is going to be very different.
Radiohead’s move is a very smart one – bands make the majority of their money by touring under the current economic model. Even if large numbers of people download the album for free, aside from the small cost of recording and the bandwidth for their website, the album has virtually no overheads as a digital download. That means that any money donated by downloaders goes straight into the band’s pockets without going through ten different middle-managers first, exactly as I said in my post about amazon’s DRM free model last week. Even if the average payment for a download is £3, Radiohead will perversely still get a fair bit more money than the 5% -odd royalty cut of a £10 CD sold in HMV or Virgin. It’s reassuring that the move has been made by a band that in my opinion is one of the best in the world.
This funky partly-submerged oddity is a design for a floating house, with five stories and enough room for six people. Featuring a bathroom and guest room slightly underwater and a lower level observation room for looking into the ocean depths, this would be a room fitting of many a sf or Bond villain! It even includes an electrical generator and enough storage for weeks of food and water. The entire structure is plastic, fibreglass and acrylic but will cost potential buyers a cool $2.5 Millon, which isn’t actually that much compared to a lot of mansions these days.
