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Ray Bradbury on the real Martians

bradburyRay Bradbury has written the foreward for a recent issue of National Geographic, fans of The Martian Chronicles will apreciate his sublimely poetic enthusiasm for space exploration:

I like to think of the cosmos as a theater, yet a theater cannot exist without an audience, to witness and to celebrate. Robot craft and mighty telescopes will continue to show us unimaginable wonders. But when humans return to the moon and put a base there and prepare to go to Mars and become true Martians, we—the audience—literally enter the cosmic theater. Will we finally reach the stars?

Also check out the accompanying art by Michael Whelan.

[via Boing Boing][image from Kuja on flickr]

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ULTra – Urban Light Transit concept

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Having spent a little time this holiday scurrying around on the UK’s woeful excuse for a public transport system, I’m very receptive to a technological revamp of the ways we get around. The ULTra – Urban Light Transit – system looks like just the ticket if the video below is anything to go by, though it has the launch date for the Heathrow Airport installation wrong – ULTra themselves have it pegged for operation in spring 2009.

More than a hint of the Jetsons about it, isn’t there? I wonder if it could genuinely scale up to coping with the sort of traffic the London or New York subway systems handle? [via Tomorrow’s Trends]

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Spend your gift money at Apex Book Company

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Michael Burstein - I Remember the FutureIf you’ve got some cash to hand after the seasonal blow-out, and if you fancy spending it on something worthwhile at the same time as helping out a small business that’s fallen on tough times, you could do a lot worse than pop on over to Apex Book Company (the people who put out the excellent Apex Online webzine) and buy a little something. Jason Sizemore explains:

… Apex Publications needs an influx of revenue. Quick.

What this means is that if you’ve ever thought of buying an Apex book, now would be a damn good time to do so.

The most effective, easiest and most fun way to pump some blood into Apex is to buy a book directly from our store. You get damn fine literature (and free media shipping if your order is $25 or more (applies to US orders only)).

If you’re strapped of cash, then blog about our books or authors and try to coerce people into giving us a try.

I figure we need about $2500 in revenue over the next two weeks.

So go buy a book, or a back issue of Apex Digest, the excellent print mag that has now morphed into Apex Online. You get something nice to read, and to rest assured that another small press survives to publish more quality fiction – sounds like a win-win deal to me.

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Homebrew genetic engineering

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We’re beginning to see the earliest signs of the “garage startup” genetic engineering company:

In her San Francisco dining room lab, for example, 31-year-old computer programmer Meredith L. Patterson is trying to develop genetically altered yogurt bacteria that will glow green to signal the presence of melamine, the chemical that turned Chinese-made baby formula and pet food deadly.

Regardless of what any particular hobbyist or entrepreneur is actually looking for, if you have enough people experimenting there is a good chance they will find something remarkable (what Nassim “black swan” Taleb calls “stochastic tinkering“). Unfortunately there is also a downside:

Jim Thomas of ETC Group, a biotechnology watchdog organization, warned that synthetic organisms in the hands of amateurs could escape and cause outbreaks of incurable diseases or unpredictable environmental damage.

Here’s hoping a balance can be struck between regulation and innovation.

[article from Physorg][image from frankenstoen on flickr]

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