Futurismic

It’s an old story, but worth bringing up because of the fundamental truth it teaches us. Back in the nineties, a company called Edutron Systems was trying to get schools to upgrade from the hopelessly antiquated pencil-and-paper test system to its disk-based gizmo, with predictable results:

It took all of one test for the students to find a flaw in the system: if one received an unsatisfactory score, he could simply retake the test. Classroom Assistant didn’t bother recording how many times each test was taken. Sure, retaking the test several times was time-consuming, but generally worth the effort.

On the second test, students found a slightly easier workaround: they could simply run a different test. Since the results screen did not indicate which test was taken, all one needed to do was open up the “Test Taking Tutorial” test and pass it with flying colors.

It gets worse as it goes on, of course - kids are resourceful when they want to avoid something onerous.

And so, the lesson is: everything can and will be hacked; the greater the motivation for a successful hack, the faster it will occur. Maybe time to back off on those ambitious plans for biometric passports, eh? [story via Hack A Day] [image by ccarlstead]

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Apparently for real, from PC maker Asus:

Floral Blossom is pink with a flowery smell; Musky Black sports graffiti art and emits an earthy musk; Morning Dew comes in pastel green and offers that refreshing early a.m. je ne sais quoi; and Aqua Ocean gives off an aquatic aroma and comes with sky and wave imagery on the cover.

MediaBistro, unimpressed:

I can’t wait to get on a plane in a middle seat in coach surrounded by this stuff.

[Floral by Asus]

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It is nice when someone points out the obvious fact that for most people, most stuff (i.e. consumer durables) is pretty good nowadays - at least compared with equivalent stuff from a long time ago. Whole Earth Catalog creator Stewart Brand discusses this is the 2008 World Question “What have I changed my mind about?” - he now believes that good old stuff sucks:

Well, I bought a sequence of wooden sailboats. Their gaff rigs couldn’t sail to windward. Their leaky wood hulls and decks were a maintenance nightmare. I learned that the fiberglass hulls we’d all sneered at were superior in every way to wood.

Remodeling an old farmhouse two years ago and replacing its sash windows, I discovered the current state of window technology. A standard Andersen window, factory-made exactly to the dimensions you want, has superb insulation qualities; superb hinges, crank, and lock; a flick-in, flick-out screen; and it looks great. The same goes for the new kinds of doors, kitchen cabinetry, and even furniture feet that are available — all drastically improved.

…

(New stuff is mostly crap too, of course. But the best new stuff is invariably better than the best old stuff.)

[via the Sachs Report][image from poagao on flickr]

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ReWalk is an Israeli-developed exoskeleton suit that gives paraplegics the ability to stand, walk - and even drive. This story has been floating around for a few days (including some typically tasteless Robocop comparisons from UK tabloid news outlets), but m1k3y at grinding.be posted the video and it looked so science fictional - that perfect balance between “wow, check it out” and no-big-deal workaday reality - that I thought it deserved a re-run here:

See what I mean about workaday? The whole atmosphere of the video is low-tech, almost mundane. Perhaps they’re playing down the technological angle for fear of attaching stigma, but it’s about as un-Robocop in style as you could imagine. What will promotional videos for the first commercially available brain-machine interfaces look like?

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A bold claim (or maybe not), but evolutionary biologist Randolph Nesse thinks he can back it up.

[He] compares the human brain with race horses: Just as horse breeding has selected for long thin legs that increase speed but are prone to fracture, cognitive advances also increase fitness — to a point….

People with aggressive and narcissistic personalities are the easiest to understand evolutionarily; they look out for number one. But even if 16 million men today can trace their genes to Genghis Khan…very few potential despots achieve such heights. Perhaps to check selfish urges, in favor of more probable means to biological success, social lubricants such as empathy, guilt and mild anxiety arose….

But too much emotional acuity — when individuals overanalyze every grimace — can cause a motivational nervousness about one’s social value to morph into a relentless handicapping anxiety.

[Wingnut by Gibna Kebira]

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The New York Times has a brief, appreciative item about Vernor Vinge and his novel Rainbows End. Here’s a nice if-this-goes-on snip:

“These people in ‘Rainbows End’ have the attention span of a butterfly,” [Vinge] said. “They’ll alight on a topic, use it in a particular way and then they’re on to something else. Right now people worry that we don’t have lifetime employment anymore. How extreme could that get? I could imagine a world where everything is piecework and the piece duration is less than a minute.”

[Image: cloudsoup]

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“Where’s my jetpack?”

Three words to strike fear in the hearts of futurists and SFnal types everywhere. Fed into google, it returns 59,600 hits, including - aptly enough - this xkcd comic. A paleo-futuristic emblem of faded dreams and disappointment.

Now, finally, an answer - “!!FUSIONMAN!! has it.”

Last week, The Guardian reported on how FUSIONMAN (also known as Swiss aviator-inventor Yves Rossy) had been preparing for an attempted crossing of “the English Channel propelled by a jet-powered wing” with a number of test flights;

“Yves … jumped from a plane above the Swiss town of Bex and reached speeds of up to 180mph during his 12 minutes of jet-powered flight before landing at an airfield in Villeneuve. Rossy first unveiled his jet-powered wing in May with an 8-minute aerobatic display over the Alps.

“Everything went well, it was awesome,” said Rossy after the flight. “It’s my longest flight with this wing. If there are no technical problems, it’s OK for the English Channel. I can’t wait for this next challenge!”

His attempt had originally been thwarted by a collection of technical failures, including a leaking gas tank and two aborted flights during which the engines stopped within seconds of jumping from his support plane. He blamed these failures – which forced him to deploy his parachutes early – on “electronic interference problems”.

The successful flight involved him jumping out of the aircraft at 2,300m, flying horizontally under jet power from a height of 1,700m and then switching off the jet engines before deploying two parachutes at 1500m and 1200m.

The wing does not include moving parts such as flaps to control direction, but Rossy is able to steer by shifting his weight and moving his head.

When he reached the ground he still had 2 litres of fuel left in his wing, suggesting that he would have some margin for error during the cross-channel flight.”

The cross-channel attempt is scheduled for the 24th September (weather-permitting), and will be streamed live on the National Geographic Channel.

(image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

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History may only just be beginning, but we already have a lot of data stashed away as a species, and as we know, it’s always good practice to back it up.

But if you’re thinking in terms of centuries or millennia, it might also be a good idea to record information about our languages so that future historians won’t have to contend with undecipherable writings, like Rongorongo, due to linguistic drift.

The Long Now Foundation has created a modern day Rosetta Stone to help solve this problem, here is a description from Kevin Kelly’s website:

One side of the disk contains a graphic teaser. The design shows headlines in the eight major languages of the world today spiraling inward in ever-decreasing size till it becomes so small you have trouble reading it, yet the text goes on getting smaller. The sentences announce: “Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,500 human languages assembled in the year 02008 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 13,000 pages of language documentation.”

This graphic side of the disk is pure titanium. A black oxide coating has been added to the surface. The text is etched into that, revealing the whiter titanium. This bold sign board is needed because the pages of genesis which are etched on the mirror-like opposite side of the disk are nearly invisible.

This business side of the disk is pure nickel. Picking it up you would not be aware there were 13,500 pages of linguistic gold hiding on it. The nickel is deposited on an etched silicon disk. In effect the Rosetta disk is a nickel cast of a micro-etch silicon mold. When the disk is held at the right angle the grid array of the pages form a slight diffraction rainbow. You need a 750-power optical microscope to read the pages.

Kelly’s description of the project is fascinating, and it seems like a wonderful project, both in practical terms and in artistic terms.

[story via Slashdot]

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OK, hypothetical question - let’s say you could pick any personality trait to be chemically enhanced. Which aspects of your personality would be in the top three? [image by Tom Saint]

According to a recent study, you’re most likely to be willing to tweak the parts of your psyche that you don’t consider fundamental to to your identity as a person - your ability to concentrate, for example, or maybe the number of hours of sleep you need each night. [via FuturePundit]

Human enhancement drugs are still very much in their infancy at the moment; to draw an analogy, many people were pretty leery of plastic surgery when it was first becoming more commonplace. So I suspect that we’ll see the ‘early-adopter’ pattern with more drastic enhancements, with artists, outcasts and other pioneers of the psyche venturing out beyond mere ‘cosmetic’ cognitive enhancement… after all, think how useful it would be to become autistic for a week.

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Does Not Equal is a webcomic by Sarah Ennals - check out the archives. Part 2 next Sunday!

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Gordon Van Gelder - editor-in-chief of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction - has opened up a debate about genre fiction short stories and their online availability. Understandably, as a publisher of a physical ink-on-paper magazine, he’s wondering if the sheer quantity of free fiction online has devalued the form in general:

Here at F&SF, we’re open to experimentation and for the past year or so, we’ve been publishing one reprint a month on our Website. Last month, the free story was “The Political Officer” by Charles Coleman Finlay. A few days ago, someone posted on our message board that he wanted to read that story. I explained that it was no longer on our Website but he could buy a copy of that back issue from us or from Fictionwise.

As I did so, I realized that I was putting a reader in a position where he had to decide if he would pay for something he could have had for free just a few days earlier… which doesn’t strike me as a good position. I know that I don’t like being asked to make such a choice.

So I started to wonder: has short fiction been devalued by the fact that so many places offer it for free online nowadays?

This is a question that interests me too, for obvious reasons. I run Futurismic because I care about getting good writing in front of the eyeballs that enjoy it, and I compile the Friday Free Fiction posts for the same reason.

The answers to Van Gelder’s questions suggest that some people do indeed think short fiction is devalued by there being more of it available for free, but that strikes me as being counter to basic economic theory - surely the good stuff becomes more valuable when there’s lots of rubbish? [Caveat - I am, by no means, an expert in economics.]

Of course, one’s definition of a good story or book is a very personal thing, and doubtless has a lot of connection to the demographic the reader belongs to, so I dare say there’s no definitive answer.

But nonetheless, I’d like to ask Futurismic’s readers the same question, though with a different angle to it: do you perceive the short fiction we publish as being inferior because you don’t have to pay to read it? And what effect has the availability of free short stories had on your buying habits?

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The New York Times has a review of Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko, a biography and critical study by Blake Bell (Fantagraphics). Stan Lee always knew how to promote himself, and the late Jack Kirby is getting the props he deserves. Ditko is less well known to the public, but of course every comics fan knows he was the original Spider-Man artist. (Tobey Maguire was such a great casting choice, capturing the antiheroic geekiness of the early Peter Parker.)

Ditko now seems now to be leading a strange, sad life, recounts Times reviewer Douglas Wolk:

He split with Lee and Marvel in 1966. By then, he’d fallen under the spell of Ayn Rand and Objectivism, and started producing an endless string of ham-fisted comics about how A is A and there is no gray area between good and evil and so on. “The Hawk and the Dove,” for instance, concerns two superhero brothers who … oh, you’ve already figured it out. Ditko could still devise brilliantly disturbing visuals — the Question, one of his many Objectivist mouthpieces, is a man in a jacket, tie and hat, with a blank expanse of flesh for a face — and his drawing style kept evolving, even as his stories tediously parroted “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead” at the expense of character, plot and ultimately bearability.

He drew Transformer coloring books and Big Boy comic books, almost as if he followed John Galt on strike.

(Self-indulgent note: Rand is always good for starting an argument, in my experience…)

[Image: book cover from Fantagraphics]

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Unless I’m very much mistaken, this is one of those rare occasions where the US and the UK get a long weekend at the same time - so let’s celebrate with some Friday free fiction, eh?

***

A trio from ManyBooks.net:

• “A Prize For Edie” by J F Bone
• “Planetoid 127” by Edgar Wallace
• “Wreckers of the Star Patrol” by Malcolm Jameson

***

From Paul McAuley:

I’ve added a new short story, “A Brief Guide To Other Histories“, to my fiction archive. First published in Postscripts #15, it shares the same multiverse as [McAuley's latest novel] Cowboy Angels.

***

The latest from Apex Online:

• “Through Thy Bounty” by Lucy A Snyder
• “The Finger” by Matt Hults

***

There’s some new stuff at Subterranean Online; I’m not entirely sure what’s newest, because either I’ve not been paying attention or their feed hasn’t been coming through to my reader properly of late. So, my apologies if I’ve posted any of these already, or missed any out:

• “Kilimanjaro” by Mike Resnick (the first instalment of a serialised piece; more to come in the weeks ahead)
  
• “Like Father” by John Farris
• “Big Man: a Fable” by Joe R. Lansdale
• “The Midland Specter” by David Prill
• “Them Shoes” by C. E. Murphy

***

From Jayme Lynn Blaschke, Memory #21:

Flavius recoiled from the creature, throwing up his arm between them. The thing stared at him briefly, nictating membranes sliding quickly across the eyes before its spindly arms abruptly produced a translucent, frosted dinner plate with crusted orange balls delicately arranged upon it. It deftly set the plate before Flavius as another arm deposited a tall flute of burgundy liquid on the table. It cocked its head without saying a word, then swiftly retreated straight up.

***

From Jay Lake:

The tarot issue of Behind the Wainscot has gone live. This includes my short-short “Heirophant Bridge“, along with a number of other short-shorts and flash pieces by a wide assortment of authors. Quick, interesting read.

***

The sixteenth (!) DVD extra from Shadow Unit is called “Mythology”

***

Via SF Signal, we hear that Jeffrey Carver has released his novel Neptune Crossing as a free ebook in a variety of formats, which you can download from Starrigger.com; looks like there’s some stories as webpages there, too.

From the same tips list, a couple of titles at the curiously named Munseys:

• The Defiant Agents by Andre Norton
• “The Sundering Flood” by William Morris

***

And here’s a handful from the Friday Flashers:

• Neil Beynon is looking for “Ground Cover“
• Phred Serenissima is moving “Towards Sanction“
• Justin Pickard reminds us that “There Is No Lion“
• Gaie Sebold meets a “Foreign Student“

***

That’s your lot - plenty to be going on with there, I think. In the meantime, keep your tip-offs and plugs coming through - this time only the deadline is 1800 GMT THURSDAY, because I’m out of town on Friday week and will need to pre-compile. Have a great weekend!

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A splendid concept is being pursued to manipulate the roots of trees to create useful structures:

Pilot projects now underway in the United States, Australia and Israel include park benches for hospitals, playground structures, streetlamps and gates. “The approach is a new application of the well-known botanical phenomenon of aerial root development,” says Prof. Eshel. “Instead of using plant branches, this patented approach takes malleable roots and shapes them into useful objects for indoors and out.”

A company called Plantware is developing these, and similar methods, to create a wide variety of tree-based items. In addition researchers from Tel Aviv University are developing other environmentally friendly ideas:

Prof. Eshel’s team is also working on a number of other projects to save the planet’s resources. They are currently investigating a latex-producing shrub, Euphoria tirucalii, which can be grown easily in the desert, as a source for biofuel; they are also genetically engineering plant roots to ensure “more crop per drop,” an innovative approach to irrigation.

[story via Physorg]

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Novelist Ian Sales makes an interesting point - a lot of the stories and novels held up as classics of the science fiction genre are actually very bad adverts for the modern form:

I’ve complained before about the undeserving admiration given to many science fiction novels and short stories of earlier decades. Such reverence frequently results in fans recommending these works to people wanting to try the genre. And that’s not a good thing. Readers new to the genre are not served well by recommendations to read Isaac Asimov, EE ‘Doc’ Smith, Robert Heinlein, or the like. Such fiction is no longer relevant, is often written with sensibilities offensive to modern readers, usually has painfully bad prose, and is mostly hard to find because it’s out of print. A better recommendation would be a current author - such as Richard Morgan, Alastair Reynolds, Iain M Banks, Ken MacLeod, Stephen Baxter, and so on.

I think Sales has a good point there. I came to science fiction through the authors publishing in the eighties, and as such I’ve found that a lot of the classics are, while interesting from a historical perspective, pretty unfulfilling reads. And hell knows being made to read some of Dickens’ more tedious works at school gave me a knee-jerk reaction to literary classics, too. [Murray Leinster cover scanned by J Levar]

Which authors would you recommend to a reader wanting to dip their toes into the genre, and why?

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We just got a press release from Jayme Lynn Blaschke of the SFWA:

Mary Jane Engh, author of Arslan and Wheel of the Winds among other works, will be honored as Author Emerita by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America for the 2009 Nebula Awards® Weekend in Los Angeles, California.

“Well, I hope ‘emerita’ doesn’t mean ‘over the hill,’ but I’m truly honored — blown away, in fact,” Engh said. “It’s nice to know that somebody has noticed me.”

Under the pseudonym Jane Beauclerk, Engh published her first science fiction story, “We Serve the Star of Freedom,” in the July 1964 issue of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Over the next four decades, her short fiction appeared in a wide range of markets including Universe 1, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and Arabesques.

Congratulations, Ms Engh! I’ll be entirely honest and say that I’ve never read anything she’s written, but I figure the SFWA don’t just give honours like that away for peanuts. If anyone knows where some of her fiction can be found on the web, do let us know, and we’ll stick the links up.

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The Burj Dubai, soon-to-be-completed tallest building in the world. [via Phred Serenissima; image by David Hebcote, sourced from Gizmodo]

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Tired of specious and unsupported media claims that computer games are ruinous to the minds of children? Well, here’s the exact opposite - a number of studies discussed at the American Psychological Association convention demonstrate that computer games can actually develop problem-solving skills in younger players. [image by PhuSon]

Of course, that’s not really news to anyone from a generation that actually plays video games, rather than feeling intimidated by them. However, it does highlight the potential of games to be developed more deliberately as learning tools… but hey, let’s keep Orson Scott Card off the advisory committee, shall we?

[Tip of the horned battle helm to Guy Humphries via Darren "Orbit" Turpin]

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Further to yesterday’s post, the Phasma Ex Machina people sent me a link to a development clip for the film, and said they’d appreciate your feedback on it. So, here you go:

Pop on over to the Phasma Ex Machina forums to share your opinions of the clip, and on science fiction cinema in general. Only you can save independent cinema from skiffy cliché!

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