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Angry Robot’s acrostic story competition

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Just a quick heads-up for those writers among you who, like myself, find themselves better motivated to write when faced with a deadline, a stylistic restriction and a small potential reward: new UK genre press Angry Robot have just announced their latest just-for-fun short story competition. The rules are simple, so I’ll quote ’em in full:

Write a short story about any subject you like. The only rules are:

  1. It has to be 13 sentences long
  2. The first word of the first sentence must begin with T, the first word of the second sentence must begin with H, the first word of the third sentence must begin with E, and so on, so that the first letters of the sentences, printed one under the other, spell out “THE WORLD HOUSE”.

The best entries will be sent to Guy Adams for judging, and the winner gets an Angry Robot USB drive plus a choice of any book Angry Robot published in 2009. No geographical restrictions.

Send your entries (in Word or RTF format) to: theworldhouse [AT] angryrobotbooks.com

Competition ends Sunday 14th February.

A bit of fun for your Monday morning, there. Maybe I should start running some little contests like this here at Futurismic – what do you think?

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Is killing a drone operator a legitimate act of war?

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Here’s a tricky modern conundrum for you, via Cheryl Morgan. Over at Crooked Timber, people are discussing a recent BBC radio program about the increasing use of remote-controlled drones and UAVs by Western military forces, specifically in theatres of the “War on Terror”; I’ve not had the chance to sit down and listen to the re-run of the program, but the post at CT raises the titular question:

Some of the people controlling drones are in the military. Some of them are civilian contractors, perhaps based in a different country to the army they’re fighting for (such as British commercial operators based in Surrey, flying surveillance drones for the Dutch in Afghanistan.) The programme raised the issue of whether software engineers might one day be tried for war crimes. Looking at things the other way, if the Taliban contrived a way to blow up one of these operators on their daily commute in Nevada or Surrey, would it be a terrorist murder of a non-combatant or a legitimate act of war?

Leaving aside the fact that I’ve always found the notion of “legal warfare” to be more than a little ludicrous (as surely the laws of war are set by whoever won the last one, designed to maintain the geopolitical status quo, and hence inherently partisan), it’s an interesting question. The line between combatant and non-combatant has become increasingly blurred over the course of the last century, and the remote operations afforded by drone technology (not to mention guided missiles, and arguably any technology superior in accurate range to that of the opposition) are firmly planted in a sort of moral no-man’s-land. Is there a quantifiable difference between pulling a trigger to kill a man who you can see through your rifle sight, and pressing a button that kills a man who you can see on your computer monitor, thousands of miles away in a country you’ve never even been to?

It seems perfectly clear to me that there’s no moral difference whatsoever: to kill is to kill, no matter how it is accomplished or mediated. So the final question stands – is the drone operator a legitimate military target for the faction or nation he is deployed against? If not, why not? And where does that legitimacy spring from? Is it a genuine ethical construct, or is it a sort of retrospective justification after the fact? “Kill ’em all – let God the lawyers sort ’em out.”

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Life on Earth may depend on quantum processes

Not to go all new-age on you, but it is remarkable to consider that something as esoteric as quantum physics has been observed at work in biological processes.

University of Toronto physicist Greg Scholes has published in Nature the strongest evidence yet that photosynthesis itself uses “coherence,” or being in more than one place at a time:

The quantum wizardry appears to occur in each of a photosynthetic cell’s millions of antenna proteins. These route energy from electrons spinning in photon-sensitive molecules to nearby reaction-center proteins, which convert it to cell-driving charges.

Almost no energy is lost in between. That’s because it exists in multiple places at once, and always finds the shortest path.

“The analogy I like is if you have three ways of driving home through rush hour traffic. On any given day, you take only one. You don’t know if the other routes would be quicker or slower. But in quantum mechanics, you can take all three of these routes simultaneously. You don’t specify where you are until you arrive, so you always choose the quickest route,” said Scholes.

Scholes based his findings on studies of common marine algae. His University of Chicago colleague Greg Engel says “There’s every reason to believe this is a general phenomenon.”

These findings have implications for solar-cell and computer design, not to mention being something to wonder about.

[According to scientists, the Earth is by far the sassiest planet in the solar system by internets_diary]

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Phishing for carbon credits

power station chimneysWherever there’s a fast buck to be made, there you’ll find phishing scams and internet fraudsters. Some enterprising souls evidently decided that phishing for the credit card details of ordinary people was insufficiently ambitious, so they turned their attention to the nascent carbon credits market:

The hackers launched a targeted phishing attack against employees of numerous companies in Europe, New Zealand and Japan, which appeared to come from the German Emissions Trading Authority. The workers were told that their companies needed to re-register their accounts with the Authority, where carbon credits and transactions are recorded.

When workers entered their credentials into a bogus web page linked in the e-mail, the hackers were able to hi-jack the credentials to access the companies’ Trading Authority accounts and transfer their carbon credits to two other accounts controlled by the hackers.

[…]According to the BBC, it’s estimated the hackers stole 250,000 carbon credit permits from six companies worth more than $4 million. At least seven out of 2,000 German firms that were targeted in the phishing scam fell for it. One of these unidentified firms reportedly lost $2.1 million in credits in the fraud.

Now, in no way do I condone this sort of criminal activity… but I can’t help but feel that any organisation dealing with big-money transactions that doesn’t train its employees in decent email security procedures in this day and age is only getting what it deserves. Phishing is essentially a mediated version of the social engineering hack, and that’s an old enough phenomenon that you’d think any organisation with a lot to lose would take a little more care over it… I wonder if we’ll ever learn, or if we’re hardwired to fall for confidence tricks and bluff deceptions in perpetuity? [image by foto43]

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