I’ll bet you all know one – someone who reads just as many books as you, but who sticks to the high-brow literary authors and disdains that pulpy science fiction stuff you like, no matter how many times you try to explain that it’s not all Star Trek and Buck Rogers. David Louis Edelman asks which science fiction novel should you give to a literary reader, if they give you one chance to convert them? I have a few titles that have worked in the past, but Dave’s got a whole list of them – as well as ones to definitely avoid.

It’s not just scientists at the cutting edge of technological development who get to have big conferences and get-togethers, you know. The UK’s own Nottingham University is playing host to a symposium for scholars who specialise in researching health issues as they were seen in medieval Europe. In related news, the UK government has ruled that ‘intelligent design’ is not science and must not be taught as such in schools – hopefully reducing the chances of us returning to the attitudes the aforementioned scholars are discussing.

Danah Boyd, a PhD candidate at the University of California – Berkeley, has written a soon-to-be-published academic paper examining the trend of affluent, future-focused teens aggregating on Facebook, while social outcasts and the non-college bound stick with MySpace.  There’s an interesting argument, among many, that claims that class divisions in the U.S. are based more on social networks (in the non digital sense), geography, and other factors, rather than income levels.   Perhaps Cory Doctorow’s second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe, with the central conceit of people organizing themselves into classes/groups based on their time zone, was more realistic than I thought when I first read it.

If for no other reason, read the article for the terms “hegemonic teens” (“good” kids playing in the system, focusing on education) and “subaltern teens” (everyone else, but especially the fringe), which conjures an image of teenagers self-dividing into Eloi and Morlock. MySpace will definitely be the social network of choice for Morlocks.

More Martian handwaving, yippee! Physicist Lowell Wood presented his ‘Mars Manifesto’ at the Aspen Institute, suggesting we experiment on a planet that we’re not living on, and that the terraforming of the red planet could be essentially complete by the end on the 21st Century. And before you raise the usual objections, he thinks that “It is not technology, nor money […] the pacing ingredient is marshaled will.” Maybe he’s right; the space geek in me would love to see it. But I can’t help but side with Bruce Sterling’s comments back in 2004, when he stated he’d “believe in people settling Mars at about the same time [he sees] people setting the Gobi Desert.”

The gap between art and technology has never been thinner; the extent to which it exists at all is down to the individual artist or engineer. Leonel Moura seems to be straddling the line, having created Robotarium X – a ‘zoo’ for artificially intelligent robots that respond to the presence of visitors and fight amongst themselves in imitation of biological ecosystems. Sound like a J. G. Ballard plot to me.