Blog

Multitasking: You can’t do it, my friends

2 Comments

babbage

It might seem like a strange thing to say, coming from a person who’s drinking coffee, answering office email, listening to Juliana Hatfield’s great new album How to Walk Away which I really recommend, and blogging, but multitasking is just about impossible, according to MRI experiments.

…[A] man lying inside the scanner would be performing different tasks, depending on the color of two numbers he sees on a screen. … [W[hen the man in the scanner sees green, his brain has to pause before responding — to round up all the information it has about the green task. When the man sees red, his brain pauses again — to push aside information about the green task and replace it with information about the red task. If the tasks were simpler, they might not require this sort of full-throttle switching. But, [U. Michigan neuroscientist Daniel] Weissman said, even simple tasks can overwhelm the brain when we try to do several at once.

Modern life expects us to do more and more things more quickly, if not simultaneously. If that’s not even possible, at what point do we reorder our tasks and expectations? How will your Bartleby-like character cope?

[Charles Babbage’s brain by Gaetan Lee]

Blog

Friday Free Fiction for 3rd October

It’s Friday, and this week the free fiction cup runneth over…

***

Just one (very short) story from Manybooks:

  • “Cully” by Jack Egan

***

Feedbooks have yet another Futurismic re-release: “Maquech” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia.

And a bunch of other stuff:

***

Here’s another couple of free chapters from The Quiet War by Paul McAuley; chapter 4 parts one and two, and chapter 5.

***

Via SF Signal, Elizabeth Bear is in on the free excerpts game, too. Here are chapters one, two, and three of All the Windwracked Stars.

***

It’s new issue time at Subterranean Online:

Chris Roberson kicks off the Fall 2008 issue of Subterranean Online with part one of a long novelette set in the world of his Celestial Empire, in which the future space race doesn’t go quite as anyone intended. “Mirror of Fiery Brightness” is action filled, the result of strange conjectures, and imbued with humanity, as are most of Chris’ entries in this future history.

***

This week’s offering from Strange Horizons: “Kimberley Ann Duray Is Not Afraid” by Leah Bobet.

***

From the charmingly affable Paul Cornell (yeah, that guy who writes Doctor Who scripts; he does other stuff too, y’know):

I was very pleased to have a story included in Pyr Books’ new original SF anthology Fast Forward 2, which will soon be available in all good book stores. I was even more pleased when editor Lou Anders told me he’d be launching the anthology by putting my story “Catherine Drewe”, complete, up on the Pyr website…

***

Tor have got a new original Terry Bisson story available to read in full; it’s called “Catch ‘Em In The Act“.

***

Via the superbly-monikered Cat Rambo, who’s holding the fort at Jeff VanderMeer’s Ecstatic Days at the moment:

The new issue of Farrago’s Wainscot is up, which includes my story, “The Fisherman’s Child“.

***

SpaceWesterns have got themselves a spiffy RSS feed, which makes keeping on top of their updates much easier from my point of view. It also means I’m pleased to report that the following stories have materialised over there:

  • A serialised version of H.P. Lovecraft and Zelia Bishop‘s “The Mound” in seven parts; latest updates are parts two and three.
  • Amanda Spikol‘s “Old Habits“, which is apparently a prequel to “A Few Sunsets Too Many“.

***

Being the beginning of the month, it’s new issue time for many a webzine. First up, Clarkesworld:

***

From Apex Online:

***

Lone Star Stories:

***

Reflection’s Edge seems to lean toward fantasy, but the new issue has one story marked out as sf:

***

Via BoingBoing, Small Beer Press are at it again:

To celebrate the publication of Kelly Link‘s new collection, Pretty Monsters, most of Kelly’s previous collection Magic for Beginners is now available as a free download in various completely open formats with no Digital Rights Management (DRM) strings attached. It is licensed under a Creative Commons (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0) license…

***

John Joseph Adams just can’t stop himself – maybe he got bitten by something?

I’ve just added the following two free stories to the Free Stories & Excerpts page of The Living Dead’s website:

There’s now six free stories here on the website in their entirety, plus all the excerpts. Be sure to keep checking back to see more!

(I’ve only linked to the HTML versions; there are other portable formats available too.)

***

Pick up the twenty-fifth piece of Jayme Lynn Blaschke‘s Memory… but mind you don’t cut yourself.

***

A quick message from Ben Rawluk:

Here’s another shameless, shameless self-plug for some of my short-short fiction: “Night on the Compost Heap“. Thanks!

***

And while we’re talking short-short fiction, here’s a handful of Friday Flash:

Nothing new from Phred Serenissima this week, but he has collected together his previous Friday Flash stories into a digital book called Consent To Be Monitored, now available on Scribd.

***

That’s it for this week – plenty to keep you busy there, I’m thinking. Don’t forget to send us your plugs, links and pitches before 1800 GMT next week… but for now, have a great weekend!

Blog

Virgin Galactic declines to take Rule 34 to space – suborbital sex movies delayed

2 Comments

Virgin Galactic logoSay what you like about Richard Branson, but the man’s got standards and he sticks to ’em. One of those standards would appear to be not corrupting his brands with what some punters might consider to be unsavoury business… at least that’s my guess after hearing that Virgin Galactic have declined an up-front offer of US$1 million cash to film the first* zero-G pr0n movie on SpaceShipTwo.

Who says ethics and entrepreneurship are incompatible, eh? Looks like Rule 34 as applied to zero-G will have to rely on camera tricks and cartoons for a while longer. [via SlashDot]

[ * – Well, the first one featuring humans, at least. ]

Blog

"I, for one, welcome our new robot milkmaids…"

1 Comment

644px-Cow_portraitOK, this isn’t actually new technology–it’s been around for years, just not in this part of the world –but it’s the first I’ve heard of it, and it struck me as an interesting example of how advanced technology seeps into everything while you’re not looking. (Via CBC News.)

A Saskatchewan dairy farm is using high-tech robotics and a computer program to milk the cows while the farmers sleep…

Each cow in the herd wears a chip that communicates with a central computer.

The system begins with a cow, feeling the urge to be milked or fed, moving through a series of gates to a stall where the animal knows it will be tended to. The computer system knows if Bessie is due for a milking or ready for more feed based on the history it has stored for each animal.

Sensors pick up the cow’s chip to provide location information, allowing the computer to open the appropriate gates to guide the animal along to either a feeding station or the milking system.

Inside the milking stall, a robot arm takes over. It uses laser beams to check udders and direct a fine spray to wash and disinfect teats. Then it attaches hoses and starts milking…

Next thing you know the cows will be blogging. (By the way, CBC’s headline is pretty funny: “The farmer in the DELL® uses a computer to milk the herd.”)

(Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

[tags]computers,agriculture,animals,robotics[/tags]

Blog

Cannabis is less harmful than alcohol and tobacco

9 Comments

Prohibiting the use of heroin and crack is stupid. Prohibition of cannabis is stupid and hypocritical, as further confirmed by a report (link is to background to the report) from the Beckley Foundation:

“Although cannabis can have a negative impact on health, including mental health, in terms of relative harms it is considerably less harmful than alcohol or tobacco,”

…

The Beckley Foundation, a charitable trust, claimed only two deaths worldwide have been attributed to cannabis, while alcohol and tobacco use together kill an estimated 150,000 people in Britain alone.

…

“Many of the harms associated with cannabis use are the result of prohibition itself, particularly the social harms arising from arrest and imprisonment,”

Ending prohibition isn’t like ending climate change – it’s a comparatively straightforward way of solving Mexico’s drugs problems, our drugs problems, and generally making the world a better place.

What does this have to do with science fiction? I hope that prohibition will seem like the product of a dystopian science-fiction novel someday, and join slavery and the divine right of kings on the trash-heap of history.

[via Physorg][image from aforero on flickr]

Presenting the fact and fiction of tomorrow since 2001