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Time is fleeting: Strange clock at Cambridge

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“Conventional clocks with hands are boring,” says inventor John Taylor. Much more interesting to build a four-foot-wide mechanical timepiece that has no hands or numbers, uses blue lights flashing through slits to tell the time, and is accurate only once in five minutes. Watch it work in a short video narrated by Taylor.

He based the clock on a design by longitude pioneer John Harrison, who was calibrating the one he built himself when he died in 1776. The ominous grasshopper sculpture atop the face is a tribute to another Harrison invention, the “grasshopper escapement” that releases a clock’s gears with each swing of the pendulum. The “Chronophage” (time-eater) was unveiled at Cambridge by Stephen Hawking, in a ceremony that ran 14 minutes and 55 seconds late. Taylor says:

“I … wanted to depict that time is a destroyer – once a minute is gone you can’t get it back …. That’s why my grasshopper is not a Disney character. He is a ferocious beast that over the seconds has his tongue lolling out, his jaws opening, then on the 59th second he gulps down time.”

[Hawking unveils the chronophage by rubberpaw]

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Science and storytelling

story-corpsWhy do people love stories, anyway? Scientific American reviews recent research and speculation, rounding up ideas — stories, really — from psychology, neurology, anthropology, and evolutionary theory. A taste:

In support for the idea that stories act as practice for real life are imaging studies that reveal similar brain ac­tivity during viewings of real people and animated cha­racters. In 2007 [Raymond A. Mar, assistant professor of psychology at York University in Toronto] conducted a study using Waking Life, a 2001 film in which live footage of actors was traced so that the characters appear to be animated drawings. Mar used functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan volunteers’ brains as they watched matching footage of the real actors and the corresponding animated characters. During the real footage, brain activity spiked strongly in the superior temporal sulcus and the temporoparietal junction, areas associated with processing biological motion. The same areas lit up to a lesser extent for the animated footage. “This difference in brain activation could be how we distinguish between fantasy and reality,” Mar says.

[Story Corps van: photo by Omar Omar]

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The Body Politic

sakharovWe had a lively (but civil!) discussion about the psychology of political choices last week.  So how about physiology?  Science published a report suggesting that people who respond most strongly to disturbing images seem to have political views that most people would call conservative.  The test used gadgets to measure skin moisture and blink intensity. Pictures included a big spider on a face and a guy covered with blood.

Yes, I’m skeptical too.  The subjects were Nebraskans, residents of one of the more conservative of these United States in terms of voting. And if you showed this arachnophobic left-leaning blogger some of those disturbing images he’d cry like — well, like a Wall Street banker, this week.

Meanwhile, in another poli-sci story: When vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s email was easily hacked and screen-shots pasted all over the internets, she and her supporters immediately called for a repeal of the Patriot Act and warrantless surveillance, because now they know what it feels like to have their privacy invaded without warning and for no good reason.  Civil liberties enjoyed a resurgence in the U.S., and …

Sorry.  Dreaming on the job.

And just to confirm that, as The Posies sing, everybody is a frakking liar (video):

The world’s largest particle collider malfunctioned within hours of its launch to great fanfare, but its operator didn’t report the problem for a week.

[Bust of Dr. Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov: photo by dbking]

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Friday Free Fiction for 19th September

The world of finance may be in a flux, but there’s no shortage of free fiction flooding through the marketplace. Thrifty science fiction readers, get clicking!

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Just the one from Manybooks, an Uncanny Tales anthology from 1916.

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Feedbooks have been on a little Mary Robinette Kowal binge:

And they’ve a couple of titles for Doctor Who fen, also:

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Via SF Signal, more classic shorts at the bizarrely-named Munseys:

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Aussie pop-sci outpost COSMOS Magazine has published “Micro Expressions” by Stephen Gaskell.

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This week’s red-letter free-fiction announcement (in my humble opinion) is issue #6 of the irregular sf webzine Flurb, as curated by the endearingly oddball Rudy Rucker. In this issue, we have some Futurismic favourites among the new names:

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This week’s offering at Strange Horizons: “Cowboy Angel (part 1 of 2)” by Samantha Cope

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Some topical Alaskan political sf courtesy of Gordon van Gelder at F&SF:

…in the meantime, all the recent light cast on the political scene in Alaska (compliments of the nomination of the state’s governor for Republican V.P.), we’ve gotten permission to reprint George Guthridge‘s “Nine Whispered Opinions Regarding the Alaskan Secession” for a month. This story first appeared in our July 2004 All-American issue. It will only be on our site until October 20, 2008.

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Mind you don’t cut yourself on Jayme Lyn Blaschke‘s 24th sliver of Memory.

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Subterranean Online has a timely reminder…

… that we’re in the homestretch for Mike Resnick’s companion novella to his multi-award winning Kirinyaga series of stories. We think Kilimanjaro stands proudly with those earlier stories.

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Paul McAuley has posted up the second chapter of his new novel The Quiet War for you to read. I finished the book a few weeks ago, and I think it’s well worth your time, but go take a taste and decide for yourself.

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Via John Joseph Adams, Shimmer Magazine is getting into the spirit of International Talk Like A Pirate Day:

In honor of this most glorious holiday, Shimmer is making the electronic edition of the Pirate Issue freely available, for September 19th only.

Won’t you help us spread the word? Free pirate booty, there for the taking!

Wired’s GeekDad blog is in on the act as well; they’ve got a sample story from the forthcoming anthology of piratical fiction from the ever-prolific VanderMeers:

… top of my list so far has been Boojum, by Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette.  And, as a special bonus for GeekDad readers [and anyone else, I guess], the publisher [Night Shade Books] has agreed to make this story available as an exclusive [pdf] download.

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Thanks to the tireless SF Signal gang for spotting this one; Antipodean SF is up to issue number 124, which is a pretty impressive run. There’s a big old bunch of stories to be found there, too.

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A brief message from Ben Rawluk:

A flash fiction piece I wrote is available [over at NegativeSpace.net]; it’s called “Phone System World“.

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And finally, some Friday Flash Fiction:

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And that’s it for another week, free fiction fans. I’m off to dose the heck out of the head-cold I seem to have acquired; in the meantime, keep your tip-offs and plugs coming in, and have a great weekend!

Presenting the fact and fiction of tomorrow since 2001