Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 782

Typhoons and Earthquakes, Together At Last

*Okay, that’s messed-up. Why? Because — if you think this through — it

suggests that a violently destabilized atmosphere could cause violently

destabilized *tectonics.* That’s right: Greenhouse megastorms triggering

earthquakes. What the heck next? Monsoon failure triggering continental

drift? We blow too much methane and Mercury jumps out of its orbit and

whacks us? I don’t even wanna go here. But, well, there appears to be

scientific evidence.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227

Toxic Florida Real-Estate Blown Away by Greenhouse Winds

*Man, this is straight outta Southern Gothic. And to think I was scolding Indians

about drying up the Ganges.

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/world_us/20090614_As_hurricane_season_meets_housing_crisis__fears_deepen.html

“Mike Manikchand points toward his neighbors - a half-dozen empty, foreclosed-upon homes, sitting on weed-strewn yards - and he wonders: What will happen if a hurricane slams into southwest Florida this year?

“His simple answer: “A lot of these places will get destroyed.”

“Unoccupied

India 2020: More Solar Power than the Whole World Has Now

*Unfortunately, the whole world doesn’t have much solar power now. And India is

world greenhouse gas emitter #4. “Yeah, but we Indians are poor, or we used to be!

You can’t blame POOR GUYS for destroying the planet, can ya?”

*Green gestures like this oughta appease Indians when they realize that their
Himalayan glaciers have melted and the sacred Ganges is drier than a bone.
“We didn’t slow our carbon emissions, but we slowed our RISE in carbon emissions!
The Ganges is bound to understand our good

Design-Fiction With Grass

http://www.yankodesign.com/2009/06/12/10-concepts-on-grass/

*Okay, if you actually grow and mow grass — like, with livestock and pastures? –

some of these clever interventions may seem far-fetched.

*Let’s make that “ludicrous.”

Mythbusters fish in a barrel

*I think the boys have finally managed to nail their core demographic with this one.

*Yes, I watched the whole thing. Laughing endlessly. It’s Sunday. Sue me.

Liquidate Big Media By Firing Tired, Overpaid Baby Boomers

*I hope the awesome youth rebel here is all philosophical when he himself gets

shuffled off with a yellow robe and wooden begging bowl circa 2035 AD.

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2009-04/01/peter-kirwan-the-great-transition.aspx

(…)

“As a member of Generation X, I’m situated on the right side of the fundamental psychographic divide of our era. I don’t mean the gulf between digital natives and digital immigrants: what I’ve got in mind is the deeper fault line that separates the baby-boomers f

Now that we’ve augmented some reality, how ’bout blasting some zombies?

*Georgia Tech! Go Yellow Jackets! *bam* *blam* *kabooom*

They’re playing Philip Glass live on unicycles

*It’s a bit BoingBoing, but I felt you needed to know….

Dead Media Beat: Evolution of Computer Languages

http://paulgraham.com/hundred.html

THE HUNDRED YEAR LANGUAGE (((hey, that’s a good start)))

April 2003

(This essay is derived from a keynote talk at PyCon 2003.)

It’s hard to predict what life will be like in a hundred years. There are only a few things we can say with certainty. We know that everyone will drive flying cars, that zoning laws will be relaxed to allow buildings hundreds of stories tall, that it will be dark most of the time, and that women will all be trained in the martial arts. (((

Massive Urban Gamers with British Government Research Funding

Hey Bruce, (((yo!)))

Having apparently mised the official day of unsolicited email for Beyond the Beyond, I was a bit wary of diving in with our project spiel but … well, what the heck …

Funded by NESTA (the UK’s national endowment for innovation-type things), (((uh-oh))) Playmakers is a project looking to bring structures of participation, collaboration & so forth to a process of game design. We’re making a new game (which involves cumbersome and brighly-coloured camera tripods), which Ivo Gor