Science fiction and routes into space are two of my favourite subjects. Now there’s an opportunity to get both in one convenient package – the ESA sponsors an annual science fiction contest, the Clarke-Bradbury International Science Fiction Competition, and this year the theme was ‘space elevators’. The winning entries are collected in a book entitled ‘Running The Line’, available from print-on-demand site LuLu.

Ian Pearson has my dream job: he’s a futurologist for British Telecom. IT Wales’ interview with him has got an average of one good SF story idea per sentence (and is pretty scary if you’ve got a fondness for the human race).

Buttons is a camera that takes someone else’s picture. When you click the shutter, it records the exact time you pressed the button and searches Flickr for other photos taken at that same time. Eventually (when a photo with the right time stamp is uploaded) Buttons displays your photo. Random, meaningful links: it’s the future of community.

If, as as some predict, the scarce resource of the future will be fresh water, there’s an awful lot of urban paving that could one day collect and purify rain water.

The United States has always wielded a big stick and a big carrot in the Western hemisphere, but lately Hugo Chavez has been defying the stick and offering bigger carrots. Whether this is anomalous or a sign of realignments in the Americas we’ll have to wait to see.