Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 673

New material makes clean fuel from noise.

*I'm getting tired of the blaring miraculousness of all these miracle energy solutions.

As planetary distress mounts steadily, they're starting to seem like cruel hoaxes.

*On the other hand, if you could hook one of these newfangled zinc-oxide gizmos to

the endless demented screaming of denialists and produce pure hydrogen,

hey, who couldn't like that.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18661-crystals–sound–water–clean-hydrogen-fuel.html

Crystals + sound + water = clean hydrogen fuel

12:41 16 ...

Spime Watch: Stickybits

*They're a social-media barcode-scanning startup.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/08/stickybits-barcodes-message-boards/

*Interesting that they go out of their way to namecheck spimes, however.

Resilient, uneducated, densely networked, and, especially, disastrously poor

*Man, TIME magazine, which used to be the Poet Laureate of Middle-Class America, is getting weirder and weirder lately. Maybe because they themselves lack a business model… you just gotta wonder how many former employees of the Time-Life empire are living lives of pure Favela Chic today.

*This little article is a Favela Chic anthem. From a FORBES columnist. "The Dropout Economy." Remember how well that dropout stuff worked in the '60s? Well, Baby Boomers, after they starve great-grandpa's ...

Turinese poet shows up, apropos of nothingness

*Cesare Pavese. I wasn't looking for the guy, I promise. I was just blogging SXSW here and this ultimately melancholy Torino writer showed up on my laptop screen. Moaning about his bridges on the Po.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=181996

(…)

I know of her what I've always known of all girls:

that she works, that she's sad, and that, if I asked her,

"Do you want to die tonight?" she'd say yes.

(((Great lines, aren't they? Fantastic! Man, that was
this Pavese guy all...

More newspaper calamity.

*The gothickest of Gothic High Tech. Imagine a vast Fifth Estate castle with 45 percent of its stones and bricks blasted out of existence.

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/ean...

The State of Newspapers? Think of Sand Falling in an Hourglass, Pew Report Says

By Jennifer Saba

Published: March 15, 2010

NEW YORK Newspaper advertising revenue plunged an astounding 45% over the last three years forcing publishers to make drastic reductions to the a...

A Brave New Future for Book Publishing.

*Attending the panel at SXSW. I haven't seen this much Gothic High-Tech graveyard whistling in quite a while.

#futurebook

alfaqueque RT @timgrahl: "part of the problem is that big publishers are built for a world that doesn't exist anymore" - @debbiestier #futurebook

(((Does this iconic gizmo look like a "book?")))

*Ideal contemporary best-selling authors arrive pre-supplied with massive online tribes so you don't have to waste money promoting 'em. Helps plenty if they are user-friendly for...

Bollywood movie about vernacular video

*This is for the SXSW Film devotees, who are crowding the streets.

*An interesting development here as the Bollywood indie scene experiments with MMS video and shaky handheld digital cinema-verite. Cinema gets a little geekier every day.

http://www.bollywoodhungama.com/movies/review/14205/index.html

(…)

LOVE SEX AUR DHOKHA signifies the changing face of Hindi cinema. Ekta Kapoor's first foray into experimental cinema has all it takes to be a cult film that might just trigger off a new trend in B...

Meanwhile, at the SXSW "Wired Digital Rebirth" panel

SaraBAllen The funny thing about print is that it never runs out of battery life. #wireddigitalrebirth less than 20 seconds ago from TweetDeck

  

STUARTFOSTER RT @bobbbyg: "Advertising is just as important as content." - Dadich, Wired Magazine #wireddigitalrebirth #sxsw half a minute ago from HootSuite



stitchmedia Seeing a demo of last month's Wired on a tablet. Looks fantastic. #wireddigitalrebirth half a minute ago from Tweetie



toddmckee RT @mattmckee: Better design leads to easier...

Grimoire Shibuya

*I like how this Japanese goth-Loli store gets its outre effects through the simple expedient of importing clothes from Eastern Europe. via @GreatDismal

http://tokyofashion.com/grimoire-shibuya-japanese-dolly-kei-vintage-fashion-wonderland/

Boom times at the Internet Crime Complaint center

*I always reflexively doubt statistics of this kind. Still, it's impressive to learn how many Internet bandits pose as the FBI.

http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2010/03/losses-from-internet-crime-more-than-doubled-in-2009.ars

Losses from Internet crime more than doubled in 2009

By Matthew Lasar

(…)

The Federal Bureau of Investigation reports that the total dollar loss from all cases referred to its Internet Crime Complaint center was $559.7 million in 2009. That's more than double the previous y...