Category Archives: Blog

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Friday Free Fiction for 28th November

All is quiet on the blogosphere… at least until tomorrow, when the States have recovered from Thanksgiving, I expect! Still, in the meantime here’s some free fiction to keep you busy until the bloggers get their engines cranked back up to speed.

There’s nothing from the big two this week, so let’s get straight to the webzines:

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Afterburn SF presents “Gliese 581” by Lee Gimenez.

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News from Paolo Bacigalupi:

Thanks to Lou Anders at PYR Books, my short story “The Gambler” which appeared in the original anthology Fast Forward 2 is now available online for free reading at PYR’s website.

A great story by a great writer in a great anthology. If you follow just one link from this week’s Friday Free Fiction, let it be this one.

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Strange Horizons presents “Up In the Air” by Richard Larson

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Tor.com presents The Buried Pyramid by Jane Lindskold. (Download for registered users only, but that don’t cost you nuthin’, mister.)

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COSMOS Magazine presents “Loop” by Peter J Bentley – “Being ‘born again’ and having the opportunity to live your life all over again sounds like a great idea – until it actually happens.”

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Electric Velocipede presents “Season of the Long Now” by Robert J Howe

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A handful via SF Signal, without whom we’d miss a great deal:

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And it just wouldn’t be a Friday without a little bit of Friday Flash Fiction, would it? Let’s see: Neil Beynon is “Remembering Lisa“, while Gaie Sebold is “Empty“.

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And that’s your lot, folks – your tip-offs and plugs are always welcome, though. I hope none of our American readers have mortally injured themselves by overindulging in seasonal NOM NOM NOM action, and that everyone has an equally great weekend.

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Swedish data bunker can withstand nukes in style

Charles Stross points to this fun datacentre in Sweden:

This underground data center has greenhouses, waterfalls, German submarine engines, simulated daylight and can withstand a hit from a hydrogen bomb. It looks like the secret HQ of a James Bond villain.

And it is real. It is a newly opened high-security data center run by one of Sweden’s largest ISPs, located in an old nuclear bunker deep below the bedrock of Stockholm city, sealed off from the world by entrance doors 40 cm thick (almost 16 inches).

Also Strosscommenters point to another Dr. Strangelove-referencing movie-design essay on the design of supervillain’s lairs: Who Stole My Volcano? Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dematerialisation of Supervillain Architecture.

[via Charles Stross, via Magical Nihilism][image from the article on Royal Pingdom]

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Attack of the giant self-propelled undersea amoebas!

Sea grapes on the move make like Fred Durst - rollin', rollin', rollin'.A new discovery from the world beneath the ocean waves: a single-celled organism the size of a grape that rolls along the sea-bed like some sort of aquatic tumbleweed. [image credit Sönke Johnsen; borrowed from linked article]

The researchers said that it’s possible that the sea grape may be a descendent of the creature that made the tracks that are well known from the fossil record. Or – like the tuatara or the coelacanth – the protist could be a living fossil, that has changed little for as many as 1.8 billion years.

I.8 million years is a long time – time enough, apparently, to allow even rocks and minerals to evolve. [via SlashDot]

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Should we be thankful for the anti-ageing movement?

8 Comments

ageing stencilHuman life expectancy keeps increasing steadily, thanks not only to medicine and technology but to social and cultural progress, too. Potential next steps on the ladder could well come from both camps: an example from the med-tech side might be custom-grown replacement organs from pigs; whereas a change in dietary habits could probably be classified as a cultural change informed by science (although drinking ‘heavy water’ sounds a bit too much like snake-oil to me). [image by r000pert]

But the question is: how far should we go? Outspoken longevity evangelists like Aubrey de Gray claim a millennium-long life is not only possible but within our grasp, but such ideas have their opponents as well – some arguing from faith-based perspectives, others not. [via grinding.be]

Would you choose to extend your life-span, and if so how far?

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Big blue publishes big five innovations list

IBM has published it’s third annual Next Five in Five list of innovations that they believe are going to change the way people work, live, and play over the next five years. They are:

  • Energy saving solar technology will be built into asphalt, paint and windows
  • You will have a crystal ball for your health
  • You will talk to the Web . . . and the Web will talk back
  • You will have your own digital shopping assistants
  • Forgetting will become a distant memory

Read the full lowdown on each entry here.

[via Physorg][image from Looking Glass on flickr]