Technology

Orbital Death Rays Watch

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Worldcons often have panels about alternative energy sources, and one of the ideas that often gets brought up is putting mirrors in space to concentrate solar energy and beam it down to earth. Well, Nature reports on a trial.

The experiment in question doesn’t actually use a satellite, but it does send the microwave ray through 100km of atmosphere – the sort of journey that would be required for a space-based power source. The experimenters are enthusiastic. I am less so. Quite apart from the wisdom of creating what really would be orbital death rays, I note that the efficiency of the trial was something in the region of 0.000001%, and the estimated cost of putting a small trial plant in orbit is around 100 times the cost of building a large new nuclear power station. Obviously this can be improved with sufficient investment of time and money, but I think this is still a little way off.

Designing to Asimov

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Ah, if only he were around to see it. Engineers at the University of Pisa are looking at how they can design new robots that will comply with Asimov’s Laws.

The robots developed by Phriends will be intrinsically safe, since the safety is guaranteed by their very physical structure, and not by external sensors or algorithms that can fail.

Of course much of the SF written about Asimov’s Laws since they were first formulated has looked at ways in which they can be circumvented.

A Nation of Doomsayers

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

With the Large Hadron Collider due to start operation next week, papers in Britain are all getting back on the “end of the world” bandwagon. The Guardian has a helpful poll in which you can choose between the products of the LHC being a Higgs boson or a black hole that swallows the planet. Currently votes for the black hole are running at between 25% and 30%.

While this is still nowhere near the percentage of Americans who believe in angels and UFOs, it is still the sort of thing that is likely to get Gordon Brown meddling with the education system. I foresee a new compulsory exam on the benefits of high tech engineering projects. It will, of course, be run as a public-private partnership in conjunction with British Energy and EdF.

I suspect that similar polls are going on all over Europe right now, and there are probably already proposals being written for academic papers that will study the comparative mental health of different European countries based on their reactions to these polls. So, will Britain turn out to be the nation in Europe with the largest population of Marvin-like depressed doomsayers? Or is it just the country with the largest number of mischievous science fiction fans who are voting for the black hole for a laugh?

Manga and the History of Printing

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Jennifer Ouellette has long post about the history of printing, inspired by a very lucky encounter a book of sketches by Katsushika Hokusai. Apparently the Chinese invented movable type some time in the 11th Century, long before Guttenberg was born. And Thomas Edison invented the dear old mimeograph. But my favorite bit was this:

There was a device called the hectograph in the 1870s

This, of course, is impossible. As we all know, fanzines were produced on hectographs, and fanzines were not invented until the 1940s when science fiction fandom was invented. But maybe those hectographs were in China.

Yes, I know, I’m being silly. I put it down to the unexpected sight of blue sky two days in a row.

Books from the Replicator

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Print-on-Demand is due to come to the high street in the UK later this year thanks to Blackwells. The bookstore chain is set to install “an ATM for books” in one of its branches (yet to be decided, but I think Charing Cross Road is a good bet, as is their HQ in Oxford). So you’ll be able to stick your credit card in the machine and select a book from over 400,000 titles (mainly from Lightning Source), and a few minutes later a brand new, freshly printed book will be available for you to take away.

All we need now is for the machine to be able to produce “Earl Grey, hot, black” as well, and it will be perfect. (Or perhaps “grande mocha no whip”.)

But here’s my question: will the books smell newly printed? I don’t know what “newly printed” smells like, but I have a sneaking suspicion that a good smell would be a killer marketing gimmick.

The Future of Publishing?

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Via Juliet McKenna I have discovered a blog called The Digitalist. It is a production of the “digital team” at Pan Macmillan. Straight off I am impressed to discover that Pan Macmillan not only has a “digital team”, but they have been allowed to have a blog. This sounds very constructive to me. But what about the content? Well, the thing that caught Jules’ attention, and mine, is a the start of a series of postings by Sara Lloyd entitled “A book publisher’s manifesto”, which purports to be a meditation on the future of publishing a digital world. Some of it comes across as vacuous marketing-speak, but there’s plenty in the two sections posted thus far to suggest that Ms. Lloyd has indeed thought quite a lot about the topic. She may also have read The Diamond Age (or if she hasn’t I think she’d enjoy it).

I Want My Flying Car

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

The BBC has been to a symposium on electric aircraft held (where else) in the Bay Area. There are interesting developments afoot:

But there is no reason to wait for Boeing’s hybrid vehicle according to a Slovenian company called Pipistrel. By the end of the year it plans to deliver the world’s first commercially produced, two seater electric aircraft to customers.

Their Taurus Electro can climb to 6,000 feet after taking off using a 30-kilowatt motor.

Recharging the glider’s lithium-polymer battery is meant to take about as long as charging a cell phone. And weather permitting, the glider can travel 1,000 miles a day.

Now if only the thing didn’t cost a minimum of $132,000 for a basic model. Not to mention presumably requiring a pilot’s license to operate. I’m not even going to ask where in the City you would land it.

And Now Lawyers Try To Save The World

~ Cheryl ~ 9 Comments

I joked last year about the possibility of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider creating baby black holes that would grow and Eat Us All!!! And of course other people thought about that too. Now Rick Kleffel tells me that some guys from Hawai’i are suing CERN because they are convinced we are all doomed unless the LHC is stopped. It has been in a science fiction book, but must be real, right? Anyway, Rick’s podcast is here. It has Rudy Rucker describing the beginning of the end of the world in it too.

The annoying thing is that I have a vague memory an SF book in which Earth was destroyed by an escaped black hole. I’m sure i reviewed it. But I can’t remember which book it was. Can anyone help?

Update: See here for a whole pile of background on the lawsuit story (thanks George!) and here for Bad Astronomy’s (equally dismissive) take on the issue (thanks Zemanta).

Cities of the Future

~ Cheryl

The History Channel has been running a competition for architectural designs for futuristic cities. The winning designs for Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Atlanta have been chosen, and it is now up to the public to vote on the final winner. You can see the San Francisco design here. (You wouldn’t want to vote for anywhere else, would you?)

Sadly there were no proposals for Flower Cities.

Locational Art

~ Cheryl

In Spook Country William Gibson wrote about a form of art that you could only see if you went online at a specific GPS location. I don’t know of anyone who has actually done that, and I suspect that Gibson may just have extrapolated a little from the concept of geocaching. However, it turns out that there are actually people who use GPS systems to make art. Details here.

(And as I have to attend an event in the Presidio in April I’m pleased to see so many cabs there because I’m going to need one to get back to BART afterwards.)

Holography Update

~ Cheryl

it is turning out to be a good week in The Economist. This article looks at the current state of hologram technology. We are already at the point where we can use holograms for data storage. The article talks about a commercially available 300 Gb drive. But this is write-once, because etching the hologram changes the physical nature of the disk material. Much more exciting is research into re-writable holographic storage, which works by changing electron distribution in the material instead. As the article points out, once we have this, we are not far away from having holographic TV. (Though emergency holographic doctors might take a little longer.)

Wearable Computing Update

~ Cheryl

The wearable computer has come yet another step closer with this story from the BBC about using nanofibres in your clothes to generate power from your movements. I can see the military being very enthusiastic about this, so it should get plenty of funding.

All Doomed Again

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

The NYT has a fascinating article about the rise of the “cellphone novel” – Japanese chick lit composed on cell phones and now taking over the best seller lists. I suspect this will get a few people going:

Rin said ordinary novels left members of her generation cold.

“They don’t read works by professional writers because their sentences are too difficult to understand, their expressions are intentionally wordy, and the stories are not familiar to them,” she said. “On other hand, I understand how older Japanese don’t want to recognize these as novels. The paragraphs and the sentences are too simple, the stories are too predictable. But I’d like cellphone novels to be recognized as a genre.”

Too many words, Mr. Mozart. Too many words.

But wait! Are cellphone novels a genre, or are they a style? Can you have cellphone SF, or does it have to be chick lit? We must categorize things! Where is Jay Lake when you need him?

Ah well, could be worse, at least we don’t yet have a ferocious debate between those people who want cellphone novels banned from the Hugos and those who think such works deserve a category to themselves.

The Economist on SpaceShipTwo

~ Cheryl

Today’s Economist has a long article on SpaceShipTwo and the commercialization of space. Significantly it reports that plans are already underway to use White Knight Two as a launch assistance vehicle for small satellites. And, as expected, work is underway on designing a successor to SpaceShipTwo that will be capable of long sub-orbital journeys and, eventually, a version that can get into orbit.