Month: February 2008
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The Spiraling Web a Free Science Fiction E-Book by Ryan Somma
The Spiraling Web Years of writing and rewriting this novel and peddling it around to dozens of agents have made me realize it could eventually be overcome by events and never be read. This is a hard-SF cyberpunk novel that I wrote in 2003, and have been rewriting ever since. Here’s the pitch: The cycs…
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Ant Farm Woes
Not My Ant Farm Photo by jurvetson (Who has a lot of cool Science Flickr Sets) Last year I finally bought myself an Ant Farm, one of those new, hip gel ant farms, this one from Uncle Milton Industries. I’ve always procrastinated about buying one of these because I’m an instant-gratification kind of person, and…
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Off-World Environmentalism: Fighting Space Pollution
Tracked Debris Orbiting Earth Photo by NASA All the politicians and military strategists were buzzing about China’s missile test in January 2007, where the country blew up one of its old satellites in orbit. After the debates about the diplomatic and militaristic implications of this demonstration had settled down, scientists took the opportunity to get…
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Taking the “Carbon” out of “Carbon Sequestration”
Are dittoheads trying to out-stupid each other? Tom Harris, Ottawa-based mechanical engineer and executive director of the Orwellianly-named Natural Resources Stewardship Project, which lobbies for innaction on Global Warming, has an article in the Washington Times that should be titled “Hey Everybody! Watch How Far I Can Shove My Head Up My Butt!” In it,…
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The North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences: NC’s Natural Treasures
Pileated Woodpecker The centerpiece of the NCMNS’ first floor is a room filled with displays of taxidermied animals living in North Carolina, many of which are endangered, and one on display, the Carolina Parakeet, only parrot indigenous to the United States, is extinct. The display impresses on us the wealth of biodiversity all around us,…
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“Simulation’s End” Posted to Oort-Cloud
Miniscule zygotes, Grow up to form memes, Verily, Verily, Verily, Verily, Life is but a real-time strategy game. I’ve been playing around speculatively with this whole Physical World as a Virtual Reality concept and wrote a short story exploring some of the implications: Anzel took a deep breath and closed his eyes as the cooling…
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Super Science Ninja Squad: Alan Turing
Sadly, after his chemical castration, Turing committed suicide by eating a cyanide-laced apple.
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The Digital Big-Bang
One Gigabyte 20 Years Ago (left) One Gigabyte Today (Right) source Bill Gates is often misquoted as having said, “no one will ever need more than 640K of memory,” in the 1980s. 24 years ago, my Commodore 64 personal computer ran games like “Mail-Order Monsters” and “Archon” on a mere 64 kilobytes of memory. This…
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Naomi Oreskes: The American Denial of Global Warming
“This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through… a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.” – Lyndon Johnson, 1965 This extremely well-researched talk given by Naomi Oreskes and posted to Scientific American is generating some discussion online, and should generate much more. It reveals…
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Stephen Wolfram’s “A New Kind of Science”
A New Kind of Science Many books I like to read with a yellow highlighter, reading Stephen Wolfram’s ANKOS I was compelled to whip out a red pen. While his 1,000-plus page field-guide to cellular automata and complexity theory is brimming with fantastic examples of all shapes, sizes, and dimensions, Wolfram’s writing and failure to…