Category Archives: Blog

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Catholics on Alpha Centauri?

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It seems strange that the same religious body that refused to apologize to Galileo until 1992 for claiming that the Earth was not the center of the universe (among other things) would welcome extraterrestrials as brothers. Yes, it’s true, aliens from another planet would be welcomed with open arms by the Catholic church. Without getting overly reactionary, it seems like an interaction like that would slowly begin to bring us a little too close to a Dune-like scenario of futuristic religious practices that have to cope with an increasingly expansive population – and not all on one planet.

How does one send out missionaries to the other planets in the universe? What would that do to intergalactic politics if there are aliens who have no sense of our history running around as Catholics? It seems like a very perplexing possibility, indeed. The Catholic church assures us, though, that

“Since God created the universe, theologians say, he would have created aliens, too. And far from being weakened by contact, Christianity would adapt. Its doctrines would be interpreted anew, the aliens greeted with open — and not necessarily Bible-bearing — arms.”

Modernity brings a lot of things to people, but it seems like a strange change for a religion as large as the Catholic church to express such a new theological stance. Perhaps it’s a good sign of their adaptability; perhaps it’s just a sign of their desire to convert the whole of existence. Who knows? It’s certainly an interesting topic for discussion.

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Entangled Up in Blue: Quantum Images

quantum-catsResearchers at the Commerce Department’s Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) and the University of Maryland have used laser beams to produce less “noisy” images, according to Science Express via Science Daily. The experiment could lead to better computers and information-storage. The images are born in pairs, “like twins separated at birth,” at slightly different frequencies. None of that is necessarily weird, but:

Look at one quantum image, and it displays random and unpredictable changes over time. Look at the other image, and it exhibits very similar random fluctuations at the same time, even if the two images are far apart and unable to transmit information to one another. They are “entangled”–their properties are linked in such a way that they exist as a unit rather than individually.

The photo-montage of quantum cats is made from color-treated images used in the experiment. The lines suggest how entanglement occurs. What else could we do with quantum entanglement? It would be fun to make entangled drawings or paintings.

[Image: Vincent Boyer/JQI]

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Friday Free Fiction for 13th June

The intarwebs are my dumpster, and you are my fiction-freegan cohorts – come round for a Friday fiction feast!

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Here’s a handful from Manybooks.net:

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FeedBooks is proving to be quite a rich vein (though I’m seeing titles there that ManyBooks had first):

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Free stuff from the High Lord of Free Stuff, Cory Doctorow:

IDW adapted six of my short stories for a comic book, publishing them as singles in 2007. In 2008, they published the full collection in a single set of covers, and I released them as a Creative Commons download under the Attribution-ShareAlike-Noncommercial license. Collected in this volume are adaptations of my award-winning stories “Craphound,” “Anda’s Game,” “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth,” “After the Siege,” “I, Robot” and “Nimby and the D-Hoppers.”

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A message from Fred Himebaugh:

In case Tony C. Smith hasn’t let you know, the Starship Sofa Podcast features the following free fiction this week:

Main Fiction: Secret Life by Jeff VanderMeer

A vision of the building from on high: five glittering floors surrounded by a dull concrete parking lot. To the west lay a forest. To the east, the glint of a shopping mall, substantial as a mirage. To the north, highways and fast food restaurants. To the south, a perpetual gloom through which could be seen only more shadow.

Article – Fouque by Amy Sturgis; Flash Fiction – “Toujours Voir” by David Brin; Poetry – “Confessions Of A Body Thief” by Bruce Boston

Cheers, Fred!

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Here’s instalment 15 of Memory from Jayme Lynn Blaschke:

Beneath the palace, running the length of the perimeter was a colossal Ketza’qua. The yellow-bronze specimen was old and reeked of power. The trusses and cables holding it in place groaned and cackled every time the serpentine body flexed, but showed no signs of breaking.

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Michael Roberts just missed the boat last week, but his mention on BoingBoing probably more than made up for that. He says:

This week I wrote two more Tales of the Singularity: “Paul Bunyan and the Spambot“, and “Bruce Schneier and the King of the Crabs“. If and when I write more, they’ll be found in the relevant category of my website.

Thanks, Michael – sorry I missed your email last week!

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The Friday Flash Fictioneers are a trifle thin on the ground this week, but there’s still a skeleton crew:

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Non-fiction bonus, via BoingBoing:

“Jonathan Zittrain gets so many things right in The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, his book about what he calls ‘generative technology’ and why it’s so important. It’s chock-full of all sorts of issues that make Boingers salivate – freedom of speech, copyright, open source software, digital rights activism, privacy, censorship – put together into a very convincing argument in favor of unbridled innovation. This is definitely a book that you don’t want to pass up. It’s licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike 3.0 license and freely downloadable from the book’s website.”

Looks like it’ll be worth your time; I scanned through a few pages after downloading it, and there’s plenty of food for thought in there.

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Webcomic collection bonus! If you’re a fan of Diesel Sweeties, you probably already know that R Stevens has collected the first 2000(!) strips into ten Creative Commons licensed PDF books that you’re free to download, trade and share.

If you’re not a fan yet, here’s an ideal opportunity to become one – Stevens’ wit is like Distilled Essence of Intarwebs, and his pixellated characters are surprisingly sympathetic. Or maybe it’s just me that identifies strongly with Indie Rock Pete …

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Anyway, that’s about your lot for this week. Don’t forget to hit us up with plugs and suggestions* – in the meantime, have a good weekend and happy reading!

[ * For future reference, the deadline for submissions to Friday Free Fiction is 1800 hours GMT; adjust for your local timezone, please! 🙂 ]

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Exoskeletal Awesomeness

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Human augmentation and science fictional brilliance collide with real life in the HULC – the Human Universal Loads Carrier. According to sales-jabber from the Berkeley Bionics website:

The Human Universal Load Carrier (HULC™) is the third generation exoskeleton system from Berkeley Bionics. It incorporates the features of ExoHiker™ and ExoClimber™, exhibiting two independent characteristics:

1) It takes up to 200 pounds without impeding the wearer (Strength Augmentation)

2) It decreases its wearer’s metabolic cost (Endurance Augmentation).

Like most people I’m ambivalent about the idea of a runaway military industrial complex, but aside from the military applications this sort of technology has a lot of applications for paraplegics and the disabled. Check out the video for more corporate propaganda and quasi-transhumanist possibilities:

Fans of Iain M Banks’ wonderful Player of Games will be fully aware of the dark side of exoskeletal systems. My bet is it’ll be about 10 years before these are available to consumers: and will probably be expensive, heavily regulated and licensed when they are.

[via Gizmodo]

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Words for Worlds: What We’re Calling Pluto Now

pluto-protestYou might think that a dwarf planet is, oh, a planet, and that would settle it. But the International Astronomical Union just decided that the new classification for Pluto-like objects such as Eris, Ceres — and, presumably, Sedna, Orcus, Varuna, and Quaoar — is “plutoid.” Fearless prediction: Nobody is going to like this word. If you were the first to set foot on any of these objects, wouldn’t you want credit for being first on a planet? Bad enough that I have to tell my son that Xena was only the unofficial name for Eris, and that Buffy probably won’t stand as an astronomical name, either.
[Children protest Pluto’s reclassification, c. 2006, Wikimedia Commons]