Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 734

Musica Globalista: Erdjan –Viski Coca Cola

*One and quarter MILLION YouTube hits? Over two thousand comments? Man, for Balkan pop music, that is phenomenal.

*Gotta be the charismatic schtick of that keyboardist, I reckon.

Schizophrenic Design Fiction

*Sometimes people wonder: are science fiction writers crazy? Well, there's a scale of eccentricity, and then there is severe mental illness, which is like the difference between skipping along as you walk, and breaking your leg and having your thighbone come out.

*Occasionally one runs into a mad person who is also very into science fiction.
This guy was one. He was not using science fiction to navigate into unexplored conceptual
spaces (because he had lost that ability) — He was trying to...

There Are Days When I Need Stuff Like This

*Catching up with Rudy Rucker's blog.

http://www.rudyrucker.com/blog/

(…)

"Over the years, I've noticed that certain kinds of computations are inexhaustibly greedy, and that by dialing up certain of their parameters to values that seem not all that big, you can get a computation whose demands would overwhelm the physical world.

"So what kind of computation is C. H. Hinton doing? Well, I'm going to have him computing a series of 3D fractal shapes that are based on a 27th-power polynomial...

Russianime: Red Army's Paranormal Teens in "First Squad"

*Can't wait till io9 gets their sticky blogger mitts on this one.

http://readrussia.com/blog/film/00252/

"Ah, it's the old "teenage psychic and merry super-crew of killer young'uns get recruited by the Red Army for a top secret mission to necromance-up fallen Soviet heroes to fight dark Nazi magicians and their crusader-zombies" story—a classic bildungsroman! The anime is partially historically accurate to boot, promising real WWII accounts from real battles, minus the zombies…"

(((Yeah, to...

Fugitive Futurist: A Q-riosity by "Q" (1924)

*Hey, nice geolocative augmented reality apps in the magic box there.

Especially given that it's 1924.

*I like the analog special FX and the leisurely pace of the narrative.

Junk Mail Reply Pamphlet

*Yep, you're gonna want a look at the whole thing there.

http://centennialsociety.com/business...

"This small, sixteen-page pamphlet is produced to put inside the postage-paid, business-reply envelopes that come with junk mail offers. Every envelope collected is stuffed with the pamphlet and mailed back to its original company."

*Page One:

Spime Watch: Spime Inc Releases Mapman

*I dunno, you throw your visionary bread on the waters, and, eventually, some real-life

company releases a mapping app.

*I got about five mapping apps stuffed into my Android now. Those little

widgets are voodoo.

http://www.spime.com/products-mapman.htm

MapMan is a state of the art LBS mapping and navigation engine that powers customized map related applications to run on mobile handsets, netbooks, PNDs and MIDs. MapMan is available in a unique onboard or hybrid implementation that powers...

Clowns in, uh, cyberspace

*I just don't get 'em like this one every day, ladies and gentlemen:

To Bruce (((Yo!)))

Beyond the Beyond

Greetings from Second Life virtual world…we are the ChangHigh Trinity Sisters of Light, Life and Love… and we have over the last 2 and a half year performed artistic circus shows at on the virtual grid called Second Life. (((You don't say.)))

We are 4 people, respectively from Denmark, Holland, Portugal, Germany and our DJ from America, who over the years have created a super advanced live ...

Meanwhile, at the Baikonur Cosmodrome

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nasahqph...

*Nicole Stott, American engineer and Mom, in outer space:

@Astro_Nicole on Twitter:

GMT271/17:30, Just finished a video conference with my son's school. How fun was that!!

GMT271: Right below us, the Isle of Man is socked in again. It's going to be difficult to get a nice day shot of the island!

No problem except the needle popped out of my arm on the 6th of 7 tubes, so I had Mike poke the other arm to get the last tube.

G...

Urban Gardening in Torino

*One might have known good old Torino could not miss a trend like this.

http://www.giardiningiro.it/wp/?page_id=514

Join the Competition GIARDININGIRO!

Giardiningiro is an international event taking place in Torino (Italy), from 9 to 11 October 2009.

Giardiningiro is a project born on the initiative of Michela Pasquali and it aims at creating twenty temporary garden installations in the city of Turin, Italy, namely in the district called San Salvario, nearby the river Po. The project also...