Staying in the Far East for a moment, here’s a pretty radical proposition – an article at Wired suggests that not only will “Chinglish” become more prevalent and internationally influential due to the sheer number of people who speak it, but that it may actually and up making English into a more efficient language.
Category Archives: Blog
Japanese teen smokers hack age verification with bank-notes
Everything can and will be hacked; once you have the motivation sussed, the exploits will be close behind.
Point in case: Japanese cigarette vending machines have age-verification cameras fitted to them to prevent teens from illegally purchasing tobacco. A great idea, and a typically Japanese high-tech fix for a social problem, right? [image by midorisyu]
Well, it might have been – if the kids hadn’t sussed out that the cameras can be fooled by not just pictures from magazines but the portraits of historical figures on bank-notes. Back to the drawing board – I wouldn’t want to be on the R&D team of the company that makes those vending machines right now.
A Different Kind of Science Fiction
As science fiction writers and readers, we tend to think a lot in technologies, and medical advancements, and visitors from other worlds. But there is a vast array of science fiction that surrounds us that I believe a lot of writers have left untouched for a long time: social sciences. Dystopian fiction was popular in the 60s and 70s with the Cold War in full swing, and the obvious excesses of a corrupt government were evident (not that they’re any less so now). Now, people are fascinated with cyber technology and nanobots and all sorts of other modern marvels, and the way of the Dystopian (or the anti-Utopian) writer have fallen a bit by the wayside. [Picture courtesy of happysnappr].
What do science fiction writers think of global conflict? What happens when the world falls into chaos after environmental collapse? Where will the world be if we eradicate ourselves with biological warfare? There’s no grand technological breakthrough that lies at the heart of these types of stories. No, there stories that have been told many times, but they’re present, and they’re modern, and they’re pertinent: they are human, and that is what makes them so profound. Socially conscious writing is important, in my opinion, because it begins to bring back to science fiction what it began as: a way of questioning that which is potentially dangerous. [Photo courtesy of hdptcar].
Man is the greatest weapon the Earth has ever seen, and we work daily to destroy it. Unlike Mundane-SF (and the near-fanatical movement that surrounds it), traditional, socially conscious science fiction ought to teach the reader something; it ought to make them walk away with some new insight not only into the mind of the writer but also into the way in which the world around them operates. And while any good writer makes tech-driven science fiction a commentary about the world around us, those works written with the thought in mind of being there to teach, in addition to being entertaining, makes for great works that bridge the gap between the great literary canon and the small guys of science fiction.
Ray Gun Crowd Control
It doesn’t get more SFnal than this:
The Sierra Nevada Corporation claimed this week that it is ready to begin production on the MEDUSA, a damned scary ray gun that uses the “microwave audio effect” to implant sounds and perhaps even specific messages inside people’s heads.
I wasn’t really scared about the gun, until I thought about what was written next:
The pulses create a shockwave inside the skull that’s detected by the ears, and basically makes you think you’re going balls-to-the-wall batshit insane.
Thankfully, civilians probably wont have to worry about the gun, it’ll mainly be used to track down bad guys by the military. But what other uses can this device be put to? Will it just be another tool for the miltary, or will we find other commercial uses? In recent memory, that description really reminds me of the device used in Iron Man by Obadiah Stane, but the MEDUSA can’t be blocked out by headphones.
[Story from New Scientist, via Slashdot], [image by Nic Name]
Another step forward: mapping the brain
There has been another development in the ongoing effort to map the human brain. Using a new technique called diffusion tensor imaging, scientists at Indiana University have created the first high resolution map of the human cortical network:
Diffusion imaging is a new twist on MRI that uses magnetic resonance signals to track the movement of water molecules in the brain. In gray matter, water tends to diffuse multidirectionally. But in white matter, it diffuses along the length of neural wires, called axons, and scientists can use these diffusion measurements to map the fibers.
An intriguing discovery is that of a “core” area – so called by cognitive neuroscientist Olaf Sporns – of highly interconnected neurons near the back of the head:
The node lies on the shortest path between many different parts of the neural network. “It’s highly connected amongst itself, but also highly central with respect to the rest of the brain,” says Sporns. “Network studies in other fields, from the Internet to protein interaction networks, suggest that these kinds of highly connected nodes tend to be very important for determining what the network does as a whole.”
It’s interesting how research in diverse areas of science can inform each other: such that studies of the behaviour of networks, or waves, or mathematical ratios, can crop up again and again.
[story via Technology Review][image from Mikey G Ottowa on flickr]