Lagoa Multiphysics 1.0 – Teaser from Thiago Costa on Vimeo. There’s music, but watch with the sound off if you must. This is interesting to me not just for pre-rendered things like movies and TV shows, but for interactive simulation, as shown at 1:47. If we’ve learned anything from the pressures on the digital processor [...]
A little more Academic technology from the real world. If you were to put a 1200 dpi reflective/transmissive display on each of those planes, then increase the resolution to the point of imperceptibility, then pack it full of sensors and computation, you’d get their smart Paper.
OK, now that you’ve watched Janelle Monáe rock her shit out, read what she has to say. She’s like James Brown, but she says smart things.
Over at io9, there’s an article about languages in science fiction, using as an example how much ours has changed since Shakespeare’s time. It’s neat, and timely, as I’m working on the language section of Shock:Human Contact next. If I do another Preview Edition, it’ll be about language and war. I’m also drawing on The [...]
So, I wrote this science fiction story in 1994. I’m not going to post it because it wasn’t very good. But in it, the idea of “home” was more or less abolished for most people. Homelessness was de rigeur (they’re called “HoPers” in the euphemism of the day) because most of what people needed — [...]
Fast Company has just posted the kind of panic article I ain’t seen since, oh, Jack Dempsey’s article, “I Can Whip Any Mechanical Robot“. It refers to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, even. And the company that they’re freeeeakin’ out about? Frog Design. The guys who designed the Macintosh. (And the Frollerskate.) The article also [...]
Check it! Downloads of Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, narrated by Aldous Huxley. Here’s side 1. Here’s side 2. A primer: An antiseptic world, where (almost) everyone is engineered and lives a life of pleasure while being grist for a self-perpetuating caste system wherein, in fact, none are free. Huxley thinks that it’s denigrating [...]
Over at Centauri Dreams, there’s an article about seeing alien planets up close, and what would be required. (Emphases mine) Huge space arrays could help follow up our investigations of such a discovery, but Schneider notes that to get a 100-pixel image of a planet with twice the Earth’s diameter some 16.3 light years away [...]
I don’t have much to say other than to nod along with this io9 article by Charlie Jane Anders, entitled Can You Update Pulp Science Fiction Without Being F-ed Up? but I really want to repost this sentence from the conclusion: And hey, it bears repeating: None of this would be such a problem if [...]
