Does Not Equal is a webcomic by Sarah Ennals – check out the pre-Futurismic archives, and the strips that have been published here previously.
Tag Archives: science
BOOK REVIEW: The Coming Convergence by Stanley Schmidt
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
Undecided voters: Yeah, right
Undecided voters have probably made up their minds. They just don’t know it yet. U. Virginia psychologist Brian Nosek and colleagues got 25,000 people to take an online test (you can try it yourself). The test mixes up pictures of Obama and McCain with “good” words like “friend” and “bad” words like “enemy,” and asks you to press a key through several cycles of screens.
On average more undecided voters reported explicitly feeling slightly warmer toward Obama than McCain, but Nosek’s implicit measurements showed the undecided subjects had a slight preference for McCain over Obama.
Color me skeptical: I scored a slight preference for the candidate I already didn’t mail in my ballot for.
[Image: gapersblock]
The Earth’s cooking… so let’s move it further away from the sun!
Towing an entire planet out of trouble… sounds pretty crazy, doesn’t it? About as gloriously pulpy a sci-fi plot as you could ever think up. Thankfully it’s not the latest geoengineering idea designed to cope with global warming, but a suggestion on how we might cope with the expansion of the Sun as it ages, which won’t be a problem for a good billion years or so. Then again, it won’t be a problem for us at all unless we get through the next century or two…
Either which way, moving entire planets isn’t something that could be accomplished in a timescale of any great use to humans in a solar emergency, but it makes a nice hypothetical scenario for scientists modelling the dynamics of planetary systems. [image by alicepopkorn]
Unbreakable quantum crypto! Or, er… not.
Another frustration of science news-following – the contradictory stories. According to the BBC, a conference in Vienna saw the launch of “the world’s first computer network protected by unbreakable quantum encryption“. [Hat tip to Darren ‘Orbit’ Turpin]
Meanwhile, at Trondheim in Norway, another researcher has discovered that quantum cryptography can be hijacked by shining a bright light into the equipment. Someone sort these people out with an RSS reader!