Category Archives: Blog

Blog

Black holes and litigations*

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CERN Large Hadron Collider In a world replete with frivolous and silly lawsuits, the two guys pressing a lawsuit (in Hawaii) to stop the CERN Large Hadron Collider being turned on are surely leading the pack. They’re allegedly worried that the LHC will create a miniature black hole that will OMG SWALLOW TEH URTH!!1! [image by Spadger]

It appears that their fears are at least partly founded in reality, though. Phil “Bad Astronomy” Plait explains the potential risks of colliding subatomic particles … but he goes on to point out that the scientists in charge of the LHC project have already looked into the possibilities and concluded that the risk is so small as to be negligible.

Of course, they might be wrong. But given the choice of going with either the scientific method or the opinion of two guys who made a beeline for a Hawaiian courtroom, my money’s on the fellows wearing the lab-coats.

*See, Tomas – it’s not just you who can sneak obtuse references to British rock bands into Futurismic posts! 😉

Blog

Why not build your own robot?

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The Hexapod ‘Spider P.I.G. robot by Fredrik AnderssonWith people starting to talk about the rights of robots, I thought it’d be a good time to link to the fun site ‘Let’s Make Robots’, which has a pretty comprehensive set of blog entries and guides to building your own cybertronic friend. Start at the post advising you the best way to build your own robot and work your way through some of the variety of constructions made by the team.

Of course, if you’re not in the mood for a bit of android DIY, there’s plenty of other places you can watch other people’s creations. Try the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA, or the hovering Drone soon to be working for Miami Police . Alternatively, if you don’t care about robot rights and just want to watch them take each other apart, try some of the Robot Wars sites like Roaming Robots or the homesite of Tornado, the winner of the 6th UK wars. There’s even recent highlights from Japan’s ROBO-ONE, which pits bipedal robots against each other in the ring. After all, one of the Robot Wars judges thinks that we’ll be watching real battles of robots ‘within ten years’. A British group is already campaigning against autonomous robots capable of killing humans.

[picture via Let’s Make Robots of a robot by Fredrik Andersson]

Blog

Friday Free Fiction for 28th March

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So, how was your Easter weekend? I was having a high old time of it at Orbital, this year’s incarnation of the British National Science Fiction Convention – which probably explains why I’m still exhausted now! But no matter – free fiction waits for no one. So let’s bring it on …

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Just the two from Manybooks.net:

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This week the VanderMeers celebrated New Weird Wednesday to mark the launch of their anthology, er, The New Weird.

In free fiction terms, that means you get a free downloadable PDF version of Jay Lake’s “The Lizard of Ooze“. The good Mr Lake has also recorded a podcast version of the same story, so you can hear it exactly as its author intended it.

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Tachyon Publications (publishers of the above-mentioned The New Weird, as it happens) offers Michael Swanwick‘s Hugo-nominated “A Small Room in Koboldtown” as a PDF download.

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Pyr is offering a Sampler eBook containing “sizable excerpts” from Joe Abercrombie‘s Before They Are Hanged, Kay Kenyon‘s A World Too Near, Theodore Judson‘s The Martian General’s Daughter, Robert Silverberg‘s Son of Man, David Louis Edelman‘s Infoquake, and Mike Resnick‘s Stalking the Unicorn and Stalking the Dragon.

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Gwyneth Jones is planning a redesign of her webspace. In the interim, she has set free two stories: “The Fulcrum” and “The Voyage Out“.

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Via BoingBoing we discover that …

“… Night Shade Books has just made Jon Armstrong‘s novel Grey available as a free download. This stunning “high-fashion dystopia” has been nominated for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award.”

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Fantasy And Science Fiction Magazine have posted Benjamin Rosenbaum‘s “Start The Clock” over on their blog.

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The nice people at Eos are getting into the spirit by sharing two pieces of short fiction that are in the running for a Hugo this year:

Two of my personal favourite authors right there, and two stories I’ve not yet read. Result!

Eos also has the Hugo-nominated novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon available for online browsing. Our cup brimmeth over!

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Via the relentless Cole Kitchen (who doesn’t even have a website I can link to in thanks, poor fellow):

“Scott Sigler‘s new horror novel Infected is available as a free PDF download from the Random House Web site, but only until March 31.”

That’s a pretty small window, folks, so get on over and slurp that file down. You can always read it later, right? Cheers, Cole!

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Here’s a new addition to the free fiction sidebar: AtomJack Science Fiction Magazine.

The content is hidden behind a Flash frontpage, but it looks like there’s a good few back issues there. If you go take a look and fancy writing a review, drop us a line!

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And finally, Friday wouldn’t be Friday without the Flash Fictioneers, now would it?

First the catch-up entries from last week that arrived too late for me to include – both of which, to my shame, were posted by wi-fi from elsewhere in the same hotel as me! Shaun C Green was obviously pretty discomforted by the foyer service if “Deadblogging” is anything to go by, and Neil Beynon was feeling “Crushed“. Travel will do that to you.

And here’s something from a new recruit: Clive Birnie invites you to “Open The Doors“.

And now we move on to the fresh material –

There’s more Jay Lake goodness in the form of the ultra-short “Smoke“, while Greg O’Byrne goes over the word count with “The Bard And The Girl“, but that’s OK – we’ve all done that once or twice.

The majority of the UK chapter (arf!) of the Fictioneers did a flash fiction writing workshop at Eastercon, and some of the results have surfaced today:

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That’s your lot for this week, boys and girls – don’t forget to send us your plugs and tip-offs for next week. In the meantime, have a great weekend!

Blog

Won’t somebody think of the robots?

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robot horse Jamais Cascio is a sensitive soul; he doesn’t like seeing beasts of burden being abused and pushed around. Even robotic ones:

“My reaction to seeing this robot kicked paralleled what I would have had if I’d seen a video of a pack mule or a real big dog being kicked like that, and (from anecdotal conversations) I know I’m not the only one with that kind of immediate response. True, it wasn’t nearly as strong a shocked feeling for me as it would have been with a real animal, but it was definitely of the same character. It simply felt wrong.”

This throws an interesting light on the “robot rights” debates that keep surfacing. While I think we can all agree that a non-sentient machine doesn’t require the vote or union-mandated coffee breaks, this sort of psychological reaction to machines with a visual semblance of life may cause problems in early-adopter workplaces. [image by TwoBlueDay]

After all, even battle-hardened US Army colonels have been known to balk at sending machines to their doom.

Blog

More advances lead towards smaller, flexible computing

Flex those… silicon chips…A couple of neat new advances in computing this week. The first is an amazing flexible silicon chip designed by US researchers. The components of the chip are applied onto a thin layer of plastic, at first glued down to a substrate. When the circuit is completed, the glue is disolved and the plastic peels away a flexible chip. The researchers think that removing the traditional blocky form of a chip allows the bendable material to be used in many new applications such as brain implants or smart clothing.

“Silicon microelectronics has been a spectacularly successful technology that has touched virtually every part of our lives,” said Professor John Rogers of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “In many cases you’d like to integrate electronics conformably in a variety of ways in the human body – but the human body does not have the shape of a silicon wafer.”

Meanwhile, Japanese scientists working on the developing technology of printing circuitry like an inkjet printer have developed a technique they believe is good enough to print TFT computer monitors. With all the components of a computer getting smaller and easier to manipulate, the days of the traditional shape of a desktop tower are surely numbered…

[ image and stories via BBC technology]