Category Archives: Blog

Blog

Nothing says “future” like a big fat airship

As Charles Stross says, “Zeppelins have always been an icon of futurism” and I’ve always wondered why the heck we haven’t gotten over the Hindenburg and moved in to our Bright New Future. The Register gives us the lowdown on all the various engineering problems that need to be overcome for airships to be viable as a mass transport system, and how engineers are trying to solve them:

A Ukrainian airship visionary based in California has won further US military funding to develop his miraculous “Aeroscraft” sky-leviathan design. However, some question marks remain over the craft’s unique – almost miraculous – buoyancy-control technology.

[image from the Register story]

Blog

Sarah Palin’s Second Life

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Two different Sarah Palin avatars in Second LifeYou don’t have to pick sides to say that Sarah Palin’s nomination as Republican VP candidate has been controversial. No medium is devoid of discussion about her, be it positive or negative – and even in the metaverse of Second Life, both poles of opinion are represented.

But of course, a virtual world allows ways of expression support or disdain that are arguably impossible elsewhere, like creating walking talking embodiments of Palin’s attributes as perceived by the creator. As Wagner James Au at New World Notes reports, some are positive:

“Sarah has some pretty distinct features,” she says. “I’m used to making more round and smooth featured faces, and while I could just make a square head I wanted to try for something more realistic.” She pretty much kept her Palin avatar’s body generic. “I can only guess as to what type body frame and build she has.”

While some are more critical:

… the Sarah Palin in the fur bikini, which its creator, Cymbal Constantine, developed as a satirical riff off the notorious bikini Photoshop.

“I don’t agree with her hunting views or her views regarding women’s rights,” Ms. Constantine tells me. “I am highlighting her extremist views which I do not feel the media is doing a good job of [covering]. As a woman, Sarah is deeply insulting to me.”

It’s hard to concentrate on our conversation, because Bobby the chatbot baby insists on gurgling random sentences out loud. “You make me feel loved!” he babbles.

Cymbal Constantine nods to him. “My child of course. Prop baby.”

Second Life’s much-touted potential as the next platform for internet business seems to have been moved to a back burner, but I think its potential for creative peaceful protest and socio-political satire has yet to be fully explored. [image from linked New World Notes article]

Blog

Dark matter, dark energy…and now, dark flow

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800px-Big_bangIf this doesn’t boggle your mind, your mind is un-boggleable (Via Space.com):

Patches of matter in the universe seem to be moving at very high speeds and in a uniform direction that can’t be explained by any of the known gravitational forces in the observable universe. Astronomers are calling the phenomenon “dark flow.” The stuff that’s pulling this matter must be outside the observable universe, researchers conclude.

***

A theory called inflation posits that the universe we see is just a small bubble of space-time that got rapidly expanded after the Big Bang. There could be other parts of the cosmos beyond this bubble that we cannot see. In these regions, space-time might be very different, and likely doesn’t contain stars and galaxies (which only formed because of the particular density pattern of mass in our bubble). It could include giant, massive structures much larger than anything in our own observable universe. These structures are what researchers suspect are tugging on the galaxy clusters, causing the dark flow.

“The structures responsible for this motion have been pushed so far away by inflation, I would guesstimate they may be hundreds of billions of light years away, that we cannot see even with the deepest telescopes because the light emitted there could not have reached us in the age of the universe,” Kashlinsky said in a telephone interview. “Most likely to create such a coherent flow they would have to be some very strange structures, maybe some warped space time. But this is just pure speculation.”

Even though I was a teenager in the 1970s, I don’t say this very often, but…far OUT!

And I mean that literally.

(Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

[tags]cosmology, Big Bang, astronomy, outer space[/tags]

Blog

A new hope? Another call for positive science fiction

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As an antidote to the previous doom-flavoured post, here’s recent Clarion alumni Damien G Walter suggesting that it’s time science fiction started taking a more hopeful and positive look at the future:

But there are no end of reasons to have hope for tomorrow. Biotechnology and genetic research offer fantastic advances in medicine, yet their portrayal in science fiction is typified by the gloom of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. The internet is already democratising many new areas of society, but our political future is still most commonly depicted as one flavour of Big Brother dystopia or another. Environmental or economic collapse might plunge us all headlong into the apocalypic future of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, or we might respond to them with intelligence and ingenuity and take the opportunity to find better ways of living. To look at the infinite possibilities of the future and see only darkness is a failure of imagination.

Here, Walter echoes similar calls from Jason Stoddard and Jetse de Vries, and doubtless some others I’ve not noticed (or, just as likely, forgotten about); it definitely appears to be a theme with some of the young turks of science fiction writing. Are we witnessing the first stirrings of a new movement?

And what about the readers? OK, so the writers are bored of dystopic futures, but how many of us would like a little more optimism in our escapism?

Blog

Climate change steps on the gas

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melting Arctic iceHoooooo-boy. Just in case global financial disasters and geopolitical instabilities haven’t given you enough things to worry about, here’s a another: remember when scientists suggested that melting ice-caps at the poles of the planet could end up releasing massive reservoirs of sub-oceanic methane into the atmosphere, amplifying the greenhouse effect and accelerating climate change to an even greater degree?

Turns out that we’re finding more evidence for that theory than anyone really wants to find. Anyone wanna buy us out of this little problem? [via WorldChanging; image from linked Independent article]