Hat-tip to George Mokray for emailing me about this one; Global Voices Online is carrying a translation of a short story by the once-imprisoned Chinese dissident netizen known as Stainless Steel Mouse… who, as her nickname might suggest, is well into her science fiction. “The Interrogation” is pretty short, highly allegorical (or so I’m assuming), and probably loses a great deal in translation, but personally I’m pleased to see sf ideas being used as metaphors for social change, and Stainless Steel Mouse’s courage and persistence – and that of others like her – should be an example for those of us in the West complaining about our governments running amok over our freedoms. In the grand scheme of things, we’ve still got it pretty easy, and the best most of us can manage is ranting about it in the comment threads of internet news stories.
The physiology and psychology of living in space
Via BigThink, Robert Lamb of Discovery News has compiled an overview of the physical and mental adjustments a human being makes to living in the microgravity of an orbital space station:
Stage Three: Sometime between week six and week 12, you can expect things to get a little moody aboard the old space station. Russian observations found that a number of the symptoms were linked to boredom and isolation. You become hypertensive, irritable and less motivated. Expect to fly off the handle whenever a crew member drifts into your personal space or borrows your iPod without asking. You can also expect increased sensitivity to loud noises, changes in musical preferences, exhaustion, sleep disturbances and loss of appetite. It should come as no surprise that this sometimes results in an “accusation of negative personality traits.”
Mundane/hard SF writers, take note – plenty of scientifically verifiable story triggers in there. Especially in Stage Four, which is all about “prevailing feelings of euphoria” and “new insights into the meaning of life and the unity of mankind”… so, kinda like watching 2001 with a headful of Owsley’s Old Original, then. (I’m kidding, of course. Well, mostly.)
Of course, the above research can, perforce, only describe the effects of a relatively short tenure at the top of the gravity well; for anything longer than a five-moth stretch, you’re probably gonna want to go cyborg…
Podcast interview with Tim Pratt
Title says it all, really; Tim Pratt’s a mean lean fiction writing machine, and his appearance here at Futurismic with “A Programmatic Approach to Perfect Happiness” is just one publication among very many. Over at SF Signal, you can hear Karen Burnham and Patrick Hester in conversation with Tim, which strikes me as an ideal way to screen out the tedium of April 1st on the internet. I’ve not listened to it yet, but I’m hoping it contains news about the potential global syndication of the #officebaby franchise…
Another ‘soft’ graffiti form: thread tagging
A definite close cousin to yarnbombing, thread tagging looks to be a way to make anti-burglary grilles a little less grim:
Via Lauren Beukes. To reiterate, what’s important here (at least to me) isn’t the criminality or otherwise of urban vandalism/redecoration, it’s the sudden expansion of its forms and practitioners beyond the traditional “angry young men with spraycans” demographic; that’s a profound cultural shift whose meaning has yet to fully play out.
I mean, look at my own word choices in the headline: ‘soft’ resonates with attributes considered feminine – nurturing, decoration, gentleness – whereas ‘graffiti’ conjures images of male aggression/destruction. A core dualism of Western culture is being subverted here, albeit in interstitial and largely apolitical urban spaces… but then, change tends to start out on the edges of things, after all.
Roastbusters! Firefighters of the future to zap flames with electric charge?
I try to avoid doing the old “hey, look at this cool tech idea that may never make it past the drawing-board!” posts these days, but I hope you’ll forgive me this one. I mean, c’mon: who among us can’t get enthused about the idea of tomorrow’s brave firefighters fighting back the flames with Ghostbusters-style backpacks that shoot electricity out of a sort of wand? Sounds crazy, but it’s apparently Real Science™ [via Science Not Fiction]:
Firefighters currently use water, foam, powder and other substances to extinguish flames. The new technology could allow them to put out fires remotely — without delivering material to the flame — and suppress fires from a distance. The technology could also save water and avoid the use of fire-fighting materials that could potentially harm the environment, the scientists suggest.
In the new study, they connected a powerful electrical amplifier to a wand-like probe and used the device to shoot beams of electricity at an open flame more than a foot high. Almost instantly, the flame was snuffed out. Much to their fascination, it worked time and again.
The device consisted of a 600-watt amplifier, or about the same power as a high-end car stereo system. However, Cademartiri believes that a power source with only a tenth of this wattage could have similar flame-suppressing effect. That could be a boon to firefighters, since it would enable use of portable flame-tamer devices, which perhaps could be hand-carried or fit into a backpack.
If someone manages to get this idea to a viable production stage, finding volunteers for forest fire suppression duty should become a lot easier…