Warren Ellis's Blog, page 29

#morning

Bookmarks for 2013-02-19

What if Google Could Think Like You Do? – ReadWrite
"The New York Times reported Monday that the Obama Administration is close to announcing the Brain Activity Map, which scientists quoted by the paper say could be on the scale of the The Human Genome Project, a $3.8 billion project to map the human genome that, the Times reported, returned $800 billion in jobs and other benefits."
(tags:sci med neuro )
The nuclear reactor in your basement
"How would you like to replace your water heater with a nuclear reactor? That's what Joseph Zawodny, a senior scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center, hopes to help bring about. It would tap the enormous power of the atom to provide hot water for your bath, warm air for your furnace system, and more than enough electricity to run your house and, of course, your electric car."
(tags:sci tech energy )
Curves in spacetime violate Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle
"If an object traveling through spacetime can loop back in time in a certain way, then its trajectory can allow a pair of its components to be measured with perfect accuracy, violating Heisenberg's uncertainty principle"
(tags:sci timetravel )
BBC News – Tenerife beheading: Murder suspect ‘haunted by voices’
"Answering questions in Bulgarian via an interpreter, Mr Deyanov said voices had told him he was "an angel of Jesus Christ who is going to create a new Jerusalem"."
(tags:crime )

A Notice About My Newsletter

If you didn’t get MACHINE VISION 038, the latest step of my newsletter, yesterday – check your spam filters.  Gmail, Comcast and Verizon users especially should take a look.

If you didn’t see it, the web version is at this link here.  If you’re not a subscriber, you can still look, too.  And, if you’re interested, you can subscribe at this link here.  You only get emails from me, and, at this point, I’m only going to be posting a newsletter a couple of times a week.

(Older subscribers will laugh at that, because I can go weeks at a time without posting, not least because, unlike my old list, there’s not really an easy mobile option with this system.  But things are a little more sorted now.)

Anyway, if you are a subscriber, I’d appreciate you checking your traps this week.

SCATTERLANDS 002

#morning all

Bookmarks for 2013-02-18

Hannah Donovan – Notes from New Adventures
"IDEAS WANT TO BE UGLY! This one goes in all caps because it was one of the most important lessons I learned that day. So many times I’ve apologised to my peers for the scratchy, ugly looking sketches I did in that rushed moment while I tried capture a fleeting idea. Never again will I do that! Of course it’s ugly, it’s an idea."
(tags:working )
The Human Division gets serialized and serious about experimentation | Ars Technica
"“Today, publishing is where film was in the 60s and 70s," Scalzi said."
(tags:books )
BBC News – Lab rats ‘acquire sixth sense’
"An experimental device allowed the rats to "touch" infrared light – which is normally invisible to them."
(tags:sci tech bodymod )
Iran Leader: Having Nukes is ‘Crime Against Humanity’ – US Sanctions Actually Target Fuel Enrichment
"Long-time readers know that I think Iran wants nuclear latency or ‘the Japan option,’ i.e. they don’t want to make or stockpile nuclear warheads, but do want the deterrence of invaders that comes with the known ability to put one together in short order"
(tags:pol war )
Christian woman in Egypt Shoe-whacks Salafi Fundamentalist for Calling her a Harlot (Photo)

(tags:pol cult culture photo social )
New Chapters
" "5 Unexpected Factors That Change How We Forecast The Future," is my first essay for Co.EXIST, a FastCompany spinoff focusing on "world changing ideas and innovation""
(tags:future )
Water on the moon: It’s been there all along
""Because these are some of the oldest rocks from the moon, the water is inferred to have been in the moon when it formed," Zhang said."
(tags:space )

booklist 2013: YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE, Jonathan Ames

This novella is pitched as “a tribute to Raymond Chandler and to Donald Westlake,” but, while there is certainly a tincture of Parker and Marlowe here, it reads to me more like Ames looking at the likes of Jack Reacher and other modern hard-man crime characters and saying to himself, “what would that protagonist and their stories really be like?”

The end result is as black and sticky as graveyard dirt.  It almost but not quite tips into parody at a few points, but, although I don’t doubt the author had a chuckle to himself in a couple of places, it comes good as a study in steely-eyed extrapolation.  It is, in fact, a ruthless depiction of that “violent but good-hearted loner hero” and the actual consequences of that life.  Hugely entertaining grimness, cleverly written. 

There’s an excerpt here, which includes purchase links (ebook only).

SCATTERLANDS 001

 

So I’d been talking about newspaper strips, and an idea that amused me: to lay a daily single-panel strip down on the website.  I mean, I’d been talking about various options, but that one did kind of make me smile.  And then Jason Howard, a frequent collaborator with Robert Kirkman, emailed and said “I could fancy that.”  So we got to talking, and discovered that certain musics and certain kinds of science fiction were mutual pleasures, guilty and otherwise.  And we came up with SCATTERLANDS.  A largely improvised comic strip that will run here Mondays to Fridays, one panel a day.  We’ll take a short break every four or five weeks, at which point we’ll run a digest of that block of panels somewhere or other (we have no serious plans in this direction beyond the intent, and are basically making shit up as we go along).  But here they will be daily and free.

Just a bit of fun, as they say.

(So much so that I’m tempted to do a second and bookend each weekday with a panel.)

And with some terrific cartooning by Jason, whom I suspect will regularly surprise the people who believe they know his work.

You can find Jason on Twiiter as @thejasonhoward.

#morning Thanks, Doug Rushkoff! #receivedgoods

Bookmarks for 2013-02-15

NASA study finds that Middle East’s water is disappearing fast | FP Passport

“…the Tigris and Euphrates basins — which are ripe with border disputes, conflict over Kurdish minorities, and now major conflicts in Syria and Iraq — might be more prone to the insidious effects of water instability than other places around the globe.”

(tags:eco war pol )
Neon Gods & Funeral Strippers on Vimeo

Neon Gods & Funeral Strippers Video shot and directed by Alex Zhang Hungtai. from “The Statement” LP 4 way split Slim Twig, Dirty Beaches, Ela Orleans, U.S. Girls, 2012, Clan Destine Records clandestinerecords.bigcartel.com/ Alex Zhang Hungtai

(tags:ifttt vimeo video )
The beginning of BotWorld « Magical Nihilism

“The world of domesticated, tiny AIs that Matt was talking about two years ago is what BERG is starting to explore, manufacture – and sell in every larger numbers.”

(tags:berg tech little+printer future )
The best videos of the Chelyabinsk meteor | FP Passport

“The extraordinary developments were captured on video, in part through the automobile dash-cams that are nearly ubiquitous in Russia.”

(tags:video )
4,000-year-old shaman’s stones discovered near Boquete, Panama

“Archaeologists working at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama have discovered a cluster of 12 unusual stones in the back of a small, prehistoric rock-shelter near the town of Boquete. The cache represents the earliest material evidence of shamanistic practice in lower Central America.”

(tags:history shamanism )