A recent addition to the space tourism queue was one of the few living physicists to become a household name, and in a week and a half or so Stephen Hawking will be taking a ride on the notorious ‘Vomit Comet’ for a taste of low- and zero-gravity before the real thing. If the idea of a wheelchair-bound genius in orbit seems a little strange, though, why not compare it to the cognitive dissonance produced when someone lets you know that Congress has been discussing the Singularity. Interesting times.

When a court of law decides a chimp should be granted equal rights in parity with humans, that’s when. The decision hasn’t been made yet, of course, but we can rest assured that whichever way the decision ends up going, and awful lot of people aren’t going to like it. I wonder if anyone has asked the chimp how he feels about it? [SlashDot]

Imagine a world like the one in the Mad Max movies – a world where people take mortal risks to obtain precious hard-to-get resources. Now look at the real world – and wonder how many more people are going to be seriously injured or killed while scavenging for copper? [TechDirt]

The science fiction blog-vine is twitching vigorously today in response to a Bloggasm interview with Peter Watts and Nick Mamatas, two genre authors who’ve released their books as freely-available Creative Commons downloads on the internet with some degree of success. But is this a viable future for fiction as popular media, or is it a blip on the cultural radar? Only time will tell, I guess. But I can say with certainty that life is too short to make yourself finish reading a book you’re not enjoying, whatever format you got it in.

Perhaps it’s a mark of maturity when a species starts planning ways to cope with what futurists refer to as ‘existential risks’. Those risks don’t come much bigger than that of a big asteroid impacting the planet, which would devastate us ecologically and economically if it didn’t kill us out right. Maybe we could just launch projectiles made of the compacted remains of much-loved sci-fi actors at the oncoming rock?