Author of Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain, and the eco-terrorist thriller State of Fear Michael Crichton died two days ago of cancer.
I enjoyed Jurassic Park, and whatever you thought of the controversy surrounding the opinions on global warming expressed in State of Fear he was a decent writer.
The fat lady hasn’t yet sung for Google Booksearch. Just a few days after the announcement that the Big G had settled with the author and publisher associations to pay them a fair price for online access to digitised books, Harvard University is dropping out of the program:
“As we understand it, the settlement contains too many potential limitations on access to and use of the books by members of the higher-education community and by patrons of public libraries,” Harvard’s university-library director, Robert C. Darnton, wrote in a letter to the library staff.
He noted that “the settlement provides no assurance that the prices charged for access will be reasonable, especially since the subscription services will have no real competitors [and] the scope of access to the digitized books is in various ways both limited and uncertain.”
As TechDirt points out, the settlement looks good at a first glance, and has probably mollified a lot of writers and publishers, but it actually gives Google a tighter hold on the content:
Rather than making the world’s information accessible and findable, this move is an attempt to lock up the world’s information in Google’s proprietary format, so that Google can charge people for it. It sets in place a forced business model that actually diminishes the potential usefulness and value of books, and sets a bad precedent for just about everyone else.
So it would seem that by clamouring for short-term advantage, the publishers and libraries may actually have lost the long game. We’ve not heard the last of this, I’ll wager. [image by Dawn Endico]
The natural world still has plenty of surprises waiting for us, it seems. Scientists have discovered a Patagonian rainforest fungus that produces something pretty close to diesel by consuming cellulose:
The fungus, called Gliocladium roseum and discovered growing inside the ulmo tree (Eucryphia cordifolia) in northern Patagonia, produces a range of hydrocarbon molecules that are virtually identical to the fuel-grade compounds in existing fossil fuels.
Of course, burning the stuff is going to do as much environmental harm as the oil-based equivalent, but if they can scale up the process it might be an attractive renewable alternative to making fuels from dwindling oil supplies or otherwise useful food crops.
Chalk one up for us Brits in the space tech column; boffins at the Rutherford Appleton Labs have developed a ‘mini-magnetosphere’ that could well protect astronauts in spacecraft from harmful solar radiation:
… their prototype offers almost total protection against high energy solar particles. By mimicking the natural protective environment of the Earth, the researchers have scaled the protective magnetic bubble down into an energy efficient, yet powerful deflector shield. This astounding achievement is a big step toward protecting sensitive electronics and the delicate human body against the radioactive effects of manned missions between the planets.
The best bit?
… they have devised a system no bigger than a large desk that uses the same energy as an electric kettle.
All of a sudden, space seems a lot more open to colonisation, and a pulp sf trope edges close to being a mundane sf reality. w00t! [via Paul McAuley]
The Coming Convergence by Stanley Schmidt, PhD
Prometheus Books, April 2008; 275pp; $27.95 RRP – ISBN13: 9781591026136
The Coming Convergence nestles at the better (i.e. not too sensational) end of the pop-science niche, and could easily be strap-lined as “a beginner’s guide to the singularity”. Schmidt’s degree in physics means he’s no stranger to the scientific method, but his twenty-five years as editor of Analog Science Fiction Magazine suggests he should have a pretty decent grasp of how to make science into a story that’s engaging to read. I don’t doubt he has; what I do doubt, with hindsight, is my suitability as a reviewer for this book. Continue reading BOOK REVIEW: The Coming Convergence by Stanley Schmidt