Who doesn’t love science of the future? Today I’m linking to 7 Man-Made Substances that Laugh in the Face of Physics, which mentions several things which we are now able to create. Granted, most of them are still only produced in limited quantity rather than being ready for mass-market. And at least one (non-Newtonian fluids)
On the opening of the new Star Trek movie, I had to make sure you got your dose of Klingons. So here it is: Floris Schönfeld has written a Klingon Opera, which was performed at the Water Mill in New York. NPR did a story on it today and provided a link to the Klingon-Terran
Wired has a story on Settlers of Catan, “Monopoly Killer“. It’s a nice mix of discussion of the game’s mechanics, the story of its creation and its inventor, and the status of German games in general, among other things. But what really piqued my interest was this graph: The article says that Catan has started
Fantastic Contraption This is a most amazingly addictive game. You build machines. Machines! Simple machines that do things. Amazing things. All in service of getting an object to a target area. Once you’ve struggled your own way through the various levels (fun and frustrating at times), you can see some of the incredible things that
A lot of science fiction deals with how our future economic world will be structured–from libertarian autonomous corporations (Jennifer Government or Snow Crash) to a single global government entity (Star Trek). Given our current economic climate, I thought I’d share a couple of recent thoughts in those directions. First is an idea that I find
Apparently (so says The Guardian), there’s a popular new poster in the UK, which reads, “Keep Calm and Carry On”. This poster was originally made during World War II, in case of a German invasion. Recently rediscovered, people are supposedly thronging to it (on the order of thousands), in an age where people want some
I feel like I shouldn’t need to preface this, because everyone should know Calvin and Hobbes already. But for those who don’t, it’s one of the best comic strips of all time, drawn by Bill Watterson from 1985 to 1995 (and rerunning on the web at gocomics.com). If you’ve somehow never seen it before, you’re
A friend of mine pointed out that the 12th Annual People of Color in SF Carnival is seeking submissions now–they’re looking for weblinks, blog entries, and the like. They’ll then weave them together to give a sense of what the present conversation is when thinking about race in SF/F. You can check out the call
I love our posthuman future. I want a heads-up display that tells me what I’m looking at, a radar sense of objects around me, and an internet hookup in my brain. In the meantime, I’m interested in smaller mechanical ways to give additional senses. The classic example of this, for me, is a magnet in
Carrotmob is exactly the sort of thing I think the flash mob community should grow into. It creates a strange scene, but does so in a way that directs resources for positive change. In this case, getting a flash mob of people to show up and buy something from the store committing the most money
