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Predictions in Chinese Futurism

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io9‘s Lisa Katayama makes her predictions for five trends that will follow China into the future.  What we are looking forward to will include the growth of the world’s largest consumer markets:

…Right now, companies like GM, Johnson and Johnson, and Coca Cola produce first and foremost for the US market. But this will change. As the Chinese customer base catches up in size and influence, the way products are marketed and business is done will inevitably shift to meet demand…the global market would be more collectivistic, harmony-oriented [and] less rights-conscious.

and the new cool in green architecture and web-based tech:

According to EcoWorldly.com, [China] currently produces about 6GW of wind energy, which makes it fifth in the world. Some experts believe that China will reach at least 100GW in the next 12 years…

What Lisa is mentioning here is mainly plausible, sans the explosive growth in renewable energy infrastructure.  My personal two cents is that there’ll be huge steps made in urban planning and public transport to cope with China’s massive metropolises and web based tech. that will develop as investment flows into China’s large, inexpensive and growing skilled labor base.  Any predictions from Futurismic readers? What new trends will make their way into China’s future?

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Friday Free Fiction for 15th August

Ah, Friday afternoon – the sweet smell of impending freedom from the workplace. And the appetising aroma of all the free genre fiction the web has to offer, too! Get busy with the buffet…

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A trio in the inbox from Manybooks.net:

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Feedbooks‘ science fiction output has this week consisted entirely of rolling out stories from the Futurismic back-catalogue in useful formats (as mentioned earlier), so stock up on some of our greatest hits for your commute:

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The latest dose from Apex Online is from George Mann, top dog at Solaris Books, no less: “The Nature Of Blood“.

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Small Beer Press are on the give-away tip once more; right now you can get the entirety of The Ant King and Other Stories by Benjamin Rosenbaum in digital format over there.

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John Joseph Adams is celebrating the release of his new Seeds Of Change anthology by releasing a bunch of stories and excerpts from it for free on its website. You can find links to them all in various convenient formats like PDF and MobiPocket, but here are links direct to the HTML versions of the full stories to be getting on with:

I might point out that all three of those writers have worked with Futurismic; Jay Lake has a story here co-written with Ruth Nestvold, and both Tobias and Jeremy have been bloggers here. A lot of talent passes through this site, y’know. 🙂

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Via the Scalzi:

Mary Robinette Kowal has a page that will point you to some of her fiction online. Find out why she’s this year’s Campbell Award winner, and enjoy!

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There’s yet more “deleted scenes” in the seemingly endless stream of DVD extras from the production team at Shadow Unit.

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Via Nathan Lilly, here’s what’s new at SpaceWesterns.com:

  • “The Hard Deal” by John M. Whalen – A young man plans revenge on a rich industrialist for the death of his father, but his plans go awry when he encounters an indigenous life form.
  • “Corazón”—Part 2 by Jens Rushing – Jens Rushing brings us a Space Western/Fantasy, in three parts. In Part 2 Dixie O’Dell winds her way along the Ghost Trail to track down Gomez.
  • Space Western Senryū Contest Winners by Alana Joli Abbott, Mark L. Van Name & Seamus Kevin Fahey

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Email from Lise Andreasen in Copenhagen:

Here is Chapter 4 in my Intervention story.

And as you’re supposed to do with chapter 4 of an SF story, it’s animated. So… does 23 pictures qualify as flash? Oh no, wait. A picture is worth a 1000 words.

Thanks, Lise!

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And finally, a trio of Friday Flashes:

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There we go – should keep you busy for a while. In the meantime, we need your plugs and tip-offs; deadline is 1800 GMT on Friday, as always. Have a great weekend!

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A beautiful synergy

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we_the_peopleIn a wonderful example of what Jeff Bezos describes as Artificial Artificial Intelligence researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a system whereby words from old documents that cannot be read by OCR scanners are used as CAPTCHAs to prevent spamming ‘bots accessing websites, thereby simultaneously assisting in digitizing our written heritage and hindering malicious spammers, from the ScienceNOW article:

The team developed a new program, called reCAPTCHA, which collects words flagged as unreadable by optical scanners as they digitize texts. Those words, in the form of computer optical scans, are then sent to cooperating Web sites and used in place of random CAPTCHAs. The software presents one optically unreadable word and one “control” CAPTCHA word. Getting the control word right identifies the user as a human, and the program records his or her response to the unreadable word and adds it to a database.

[story at ScienceNOW via KurzweilAI.net][image from Thorn Enterprises on flickr]

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True Dungeon – D&D without the dice

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LARP dungeon warriorFantasy roleplaying games are either played out around a snack-strewn table or sat at a high-powered gaming rig, right? Well, not necessarily. LARPing is a fairly old phenomenon, but True Dungeon is an interesting twist on the idea that I’d not heard of before:

“Each year at Gen Con Indy, a massive gaming convention held in Indianapolis, Martin and a cadre of volunteers assemble a life-size dungeon, complete with traps, monsters and treasure. More than 3,000 people — some dressed for the part — take on the role of a fantasy adventurer and travel through the dungeon each year, attempting to avoid traps, defeat monsters and claim treasure.

From the 6,000 hand-carved stones that make up the walls to True Dungeon‘s immersive sound effects, Martin strives to provide the ambiance of a classic fantasy dungeon. Some monsters are portrayed by volunteers in makeup, while others are sculpted creations or animatronic puppets. Martin adds more detail and complexity each year, within the limits of the space available.”

So yeah, my inner geek thinks that would probably be a guilty pleasure it’d quite enjoy as well. But I wonder if there’d be enough interest in it that a permanent installation somewhere would be a viable business proposition? Both fantasy worlds and RPGs are big business these days by comparison to their outsider status of a few decades ago, after all. [image by Danielle Blue]

Imagine what you could do with a couple of empty warehouses… and you wouldn’t have to stick to fantasy settings, you could just as easily whomp up something more science fictional. Hell, why stop at a couple of warehouses – once they’ve been emptied by the urban drift, you could make an entire town into an RPG setting! Oh, wait, hang on…

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Light buffet: Entanglement, warp drives, and slower beams

star-gate-openResearchers in Geneva are trying to figure the speed of quantum entanglement, aka “the fact that measuring a property of one particle instantly determines the property of another…” Experiments with photons 18 km apart suggest that entanglement “moves” at least 10,000 times the speed of light. “I think there’s probably much deeper issues,” comments one of their British colleagues. [SciAm]

Meanwhile, to propel your starship by real-life warp drive, two Baylor U. physicists say you can too change the laws of physics. Just bend the space around the ship by recreating conditions that existed when the universe was expanding, and light moved faster than it does today. All we need is 11 dimensions a la string theory, and a mass the size of Jupiter to convert to pure energy. And we thought an invisibility cloak was impressive. [io9; Discovery News; preprint]

Back in this millennium, bulky, expensive, and complicated electronic routers are slowing down the Internet. A possible solution: slow down light itself, through the use of “metamaterials” to do away with all that tedious mucking about during the switching process.

“With these materials, you could imagine something more like a single chip with the metamaterial handling the routing—all the capability of one of these big filtering systems, but the size of your fingernail,” says Dr [Chris] Stevens [of Oxford].

[image: Star Gate by Imbecillsallad]

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