Warren Ellis's Blog, page 95

Bookmarks for 2011-09-30

'Darker-than-black' metamaterial could lead to more efficient solar cells
"(PhysOrg.com) — If typical black paint absorbs about 85% of incoming light, then a newly designed metamaterial that absorbs up to 99% of incoming light may be considered "darker than black." By taking advantage of the unique light-scattering properties of metamaterials, researchers have discovered that a hyperbolic metamaterial with a corrugated surface can have a very low reflectance, which could make it promising for high-efficiency solar cells, photodetectors, and radar stealth technology."
(tags:tech solar energy materials )
The washable wearable antenna
"This wearable antenna is able to send a signal to satellites using the Cospas-Sarsat worldwide search and rescue satellite system. It is made from highly flexible, lightweight material that is robust against water exposure and moist conditions, and resistant to wear and tear."
(tags:tech rescue comms )
Simon Faithfull Escape Vehicles
""Like all works in the Escape Vehicles series no.1 [1996] and no.2 [1997] are tinged with the melancholy of failure. "
(tags:art space )
Daniel Gray – Blog – On digital comics
"Which raises the question: does the comics industry actually need comics any more? "
(tags:comics digital+comics )
Blawan & Pariah launch new label…
"Blawan and Pariah, two UK producers who constantly push the boundaries of techno and bass music have started a new label series called  'Works The Long Nights'."
(tags:music )
Fireball – a prototype 500g throwable sensor "grenade" from Intel allows fire… -
"Fireball – a prototype 500g throwable sensor "grenade" from Intel allows firemen to monitor temperature and levels of specific gases (ammonia, nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide). The data is sent to a server in the fire engine, then sent back to the firefighters via smartphones or other devices."
(tags:tech rescue sensors )
Water supersaturation in the Martian atmosphere discovered
"Extremely high levels of supersaturation were found on Mars, up to 10 times greater than those found on Earth. Clearly, there is much more water vapour in the upper Martian atmosphere than anyone ever imagined."
(tags:space )
After the Deluge: Alex Lukas at the Guerrero Gallery
"Rising from the muck, much like the urban wastelands of JG Ballard's novels, Alex Lukas' remnant landscapes present viewers with a future vision of our ruined present. These works on paper hover into one's vision, offering fleeting memories of great cities, lost and then rediscovered. Cities or their fragments are inundated with water, scrub, marsh, and creeping vegetation. Older industrial ruins are covered with graffiti—signs of life without the existence of people or other animals. These scenes of a world, after an unnamed disaster, skirt the line between aestheticizing decay and asking revealing questions of meaning, memory, and mortality that arise when gazing at ruins."
(tags:cities sf art )
BBC News – Rocket launches Chinese space lab
"A rocket carrying China's first space laboratory, Tiangong-1, has launched from the north of the country. Tiangong means "heavenly palace" in Chinese."
(tags:space )
SpaceX says 'reusable rocket' could help colonize Mars
"The US company SpaceX is working on the first-ever reusable rocket to launch to space and back, with the goal of one day helping humans colonize Mars, founder Elon Musk said Thursday."
(tags:space probably+not+but+still )

Horsepetrol

I sent the BERG crew a gift, and they took a photo for me:

 

(I sent a case of 16.  You can find them here.)

Bits and pieces:

*  I'm attempting to use last.fm again.  This is me on last.fm.

*  I put together an hour-long music podcast for somebody else – basically just a mixtape of stuff – that I guess will be out in a few weeks.  And it really gave me the itch to podcast again.  I may just stick with doing 8tracks pieces more often, because 8tracks are at least licensed, and I don't think I have the time or energy to do another The 4am run… but.  Geezer needs a hobby, right?

* I'm also trying out Goodreads.  I can be found there at http://www.goodreads.com/warrenellis .  I do have a novel coming out next autumn, after all.

*  And it seems that Dame Helen Mirren announced that RED 2 is go for next year. I haven't been cleared to say anything, but, well, no-one's going to argue with Dame Helen.

Bookmarks for 2011-09-28

Sino Superfund
"Urbanization in China–explosive and seemingly boundless in potential–has in some cities reached a 'natural' obstacle. A vast ring of post-industrial sites surrounds cities like Tianjin, Guangzhou and Shanghai. Although the factories have moved further afield, the remaining land and groundwater is often seriously contaminated."
(tags:cities pol )
fecal politics
"According to the World Bank, in 2008 46 percent of Indian urbanites – or nine out of every ten living in a slum – lacked "improved sanitation facilities", meaning that people living within them lack sewerage and public toilets3. Where community toilets do exist, poor maintenance and overuse often render them unsanitary before long. For example, a survey of 151 slum settlements in Mumbai conducted by Mahila Milan/NSDF found that there were 3,433 municipal toilet seats, 80 percent of which were not working, to serve one million people – a ratio of one toilet for every 1,488 people4. Likewise, a 1993 survey of half a million slum-dwellers in Kanpur found that 66 percent had no toilets. Lacking facilities, they shit in the open or in waterways."
(tags:pol cities eco med )
Guernica / Nick Turse: Obama's Arc of Instability: Destabilizing the World One Region at a Time
'In his book The One Percent Doctrine, journalist Ron Suskind reported on CIA plans, unveiled in September 2001 and known as the "Worldwide Attack Matrix," for "detailed operations against terrorists in 80 countries." '
(tags:war pol pmeth )

THREE PANELS: Marley Zarcone

Marley Zarcone

Related articles

Planet Pulp (warrenellis.com)
GUEST INFORMANT: John Reppion (warrenellis.com)
SECRET AVENGERS 16 Sold Out (warrenellis.com)

Bookmarks for 2011-09-26

The Future Desktop
"…And therein lies the answer to why hardware manufacturers are so eager to prematurely declare the PC dead: they need to sell more devices quickly before the silicon chip maxes out. And, they can already see that Moore's law will collapse entirely within the next 10 or so years. In other words, their desperation is showing."
(tags:comp money )

Obey Voice You Horrible Little Thing

Anyone remember Siri?

 

Siri was a voice-activated "personal assistant" for iOS, made by an independent developer.  It was last year, I think.  It was the beginnings of something very interesting.  Voice-driven search agent.  "Siri, call me a cab," you'd say, and it'd do it.  "Siri, book me a table at my favourite restaurant," you'd say, and if it had that information and web service details, it would.  Like I say, the beginnings.  It might have wound itself deeper into iOS itself, as well as broading its search and action agency.

And then Apple bought it, a year ago, and it went away.

I bought myself a little bluetooth earpiece, a Jawbone Shadowbox, to make it easier for me to listen to podcasts.  So today I'm sitting at my work table in the back garden, and decide that I want to send a voice memo to someone while I'm working.  I hold down the button on my Shadowbox that activates voice control on the phone, and say "voice memo."

It redials my last-used number.

I try again.  It dials into my phone provider's voicemail service.

Hmm.

The hell with it, I think, and, while voice control's on, I tell it to play a Grouper album I have on the phone.

Terrifyingly, it dials the mobile phone of an executive at 20th Century Fox.

I decided that this was annoying.  And then I thought, wait, Apple bought Siri a bloody year ago.  Siri was apparently capable of telling me the weather in New York City and booking me a ticket to go and see Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.  But the bloody phone voice control tries to wake up a movie studio VP at 530 when I ask it to play a record.

All of which are beyond trivial, as problems go.  I can, of course, just pick up the phone and make it do what I want.  But if you're going to put voice control on there, and allow third-party devices to access it, isn't there an onus on you to make it a bit more useful?  Especially when you've had Siri in-house for a year?  Maybe this is what's coming with iPhone 5.  I've read that Android voice control is better.

But – at least in my head – there's a broader point.  People are beginning to come to terms with the idea of the phone screen as ghost box, as viewer and mediator of the invisible world of informational connection and flow.  Augmented Reality is helping that along, in certain quarters.  I am, however, amused by the idea that Apple, whose general design policies seem mostly informed by Star Trek: The Next Generation (and note how the design of the new Star Trek film evoked nothing so much as an Apple Store with added LEDs and lens flare), let something as obviously Eighties-science-fiction as voice interface get away from them.  Which is why I nodded sagely, as is my wont, when they bought Siri.

(Also amused by the idea that, in an era of voice interface, New Aesthetic would become No Aesthetic overnight.  Or, at least, would have to somehow become audial.  Would audio glitch even be possible in voice interface?  Maybe activation pings would become the basis for next-gen chiptunes.)

Noise-cancelling technologies make voice interface more feasible by the day.  If you already have a voice control system, why not tie it deeper into your OS, rather than keep it as a part-functional appendage?  Right now, it's sort of a vestigial tail on iOS.  And, while I don't want to seem entitled or pushy – Apple moves slow with iPhone, and, hell, the phone didn't become a useable device until the 3GS iteration as far as I'm concerned – they bought Siri a year ago, and voice interface is right in the wheelhouse of a company that makes Star Trek goods.  And not everybody wants to look at a screen for everything.

This too-long post was brought to you by Random Jabbering As A Warm-Up For The Day's Work.

8TRACKS: Moonbase DOA

Moonwood are on Bandcamp.

Seven Feathers Rainwater are on Bandcamp.

TASH WILLMORE are on Bandcamp.

WITCHBØØK

?WI?CHBØØK? Presents COVENFVCK by Various Artists

If you are old like me, you will remember Morrissey once ...

If you are old like me, you will remember Morrissey once singing "Hang the blessed DJ/ Because the music that they constantly play/ It says nothing to me about my life." And then lots of people singing "Hang the DJ."

I went shopping for comics today. Felt much the same way.

But the new issue of CASANOVA is on Comixology now.

Related articles

Never The End: Comics And MP3s (warrenellis.com)

Bookmarks for 2011-09-22

Computer simulation shows Solar System once had an extra planet
"A new study published on arXiv.org shows that, based on computer simulations, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune may not have been the only gas giants in our solar system. According to David Nesvorny from Colorado's Southwest Research Institute, our current solar system could never have happened without the existence of a fifth planet."
(tags:space )
Scientists Use Google Earth to Understand Mysterious Giant Wheels
"Thousands of geoglyph "wheels," almost completely unknown to the public, are now part of public knowledge thanks to advances in technology, both photographic and social. These wheels are scattered across the deserts of Jordan and adjacent countries."
(tags:geo history cult )
BBC News – Speed-of-light experiments yield baffling result at LHC
"Puzzling results from Cern, home of the LHC, have confounded physicists – because it appears subatomic particles have exceeded the speed of light."
(tags:sci probably+not+but+still )
shopwork » tumblelog » space is massive
space is massive, from shopwork http://www.shopwork.net/
(tags:ifttt googlereader shopwork )
russell davies: talking on the radio / the internet with things
"It reminds me of a thing I saw in a coffee shop a while ago. A little plastic thing, a bit like an ice-cream spoon. I couldn't work out what it might be for. And then I realised that it's to go into the hole in the coffee cup lids to stop the coffee spilling out. That feels a bit like the technological moment we're in with the social web. Were fiddling around at the edges of mostly solved problems."
(tags:web comms unsure+about+this+but+interesting )
BBC News – Murder victim Maire Rankin 'beaten with crucifix'
"Prof Jack Crane said Mrs Rankin had bruising on her chin consistent with the crown of thorns on Jesus' head."
(tags:crime cult )
supernatural jewels for surrealist darlings by BloodMilk on Etsy

(tags:shop )