The BBC has pictures of SpaceShipTwo, the Virgin Galactic passenger vessel. One is an artist’s impression, the other from inside the factory where the first prototype is reportedly 60% complete. Got your ticket yet?
Update: See also the New York Times, which has an even better painting.
At last, a contact lens I might actually want. (Hat tip to fellow uber-geek Sean Williams.)
The Economist has weighed in on the music industry story. I love their opening paragraph:
IN 2006 EMI, the world’s fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free. “That was the moment we realised the game was completely up,†says a person who was there.
(Hat tip to Tim Anderson).
Scary stuff, though fortunately I can’t yet see a situation where you could put a pile of free books out at Worldcon and no one would take one. And not only because most people at Worldcon haven’t been teenagers for several decades.
There have been a few interesting stories related to music and copyright over the last couple of weeks, and they have a definite bearing on the future of book publishing.
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According to the BBC, the UK government is planning to introduce legislation that will legalize the ripping of MP3s from CDs that you already own.
When it is raining so much outside (praise be and thanks to the Goddess for filling our aquifers) that you really ought not go for walks, how is one to get exercise? Why, drive the the mall and walk around there instead. A few serious fashion bargains later, we also went for a walk around The Toy Shop Fry’s where, as Kevin explains, we bought a UPS. However, being an incorrigible gadget-hound, and being faced with an overnight trans-Atlantic plane flight next week, I also bought one of these. It is a very nice piece of design. The cover has slots to hold either a hardback or paperback-sized book, and there’s even a handy bookmark. I’ll let you know how I get on with it.
Work to do, cricket to watch, no time to blog. But here’s a quick train story that will probably make Feòrag happy and Kevin disgruntled.
Continuing what appears to have become today’s theme, I discover that National Museum of Nature and Science in Tokyo is running The Great Robot Exhibition over the next few weeks. John Coulthart has the scoop.
Clockwork crab robot. Want, want, want…
My regular Google Alert for major SF awards has turned up an interesting post on a blog dedicated to eBooks. The post starts by noting that Michael Andre-Driussi’s Lexicon Urthus is currently going for between $119 and $284 on Amazon (second hand – it is out of print). It is good to know that people place such value on study of the Book of the New Sun but, as the Garson O’Toole points out, it would make so much more sense if works such as Andre-Driussi’s were available as annotated eBook editions of the original. Then you could actually read the book and look up the annotations as you went along. So much easier than footnotes (though I do dearly love Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell). Might we actually have found a purpose for eBooks at last?
Of course for such a thing to happen, various other things have to line up. To start with Gene Wolfe may not want an annotated edition made available. Equally Tor may not want the book available in electronic form. And of course someone would have to do the work. But it is an interesting concept.
Ever since the demise of Fopp I have been wondering what I should do about music buying. Sure there are still music stores out there, but HMV and Virgin are not up to the same standards as Fopp – less choice, higher price. I’ve avoided music download sales in the past because I refuse to buy any music that I want to keep if it has DRM. There’s no point in having a great album if I can’t archive it, or download it to my MP3 player. But recently Amazon opened up an experimental DRM-free MP3 store. It is only open in the US right now, but aside from that it seems to work. Obviously they don’t have quite the same selection as they have on CD – some record companies still insist on DRM – but there’s a lot of music there. Time to experiment.
After a brief browse I decided on Pink Floyd’s The Wall. I’ve been meaning to get it on CD for some time (I bought it on vinyl when it first came out). Amazon had it available for only $9. And it all worked. Even though I’m in the UK right now, my US credit card got me the purchase. The download was a little slow, but that was at least in part because I was doing some off-site backups using another PC at the same time. I now have the whole album. It is downloaded onto my MP3 player, and is playing away happily as I type. I think I can class that experiment an unqualified success. I suspect I’ll be buying a lot more music from Amazon.
The BBC reports from the International Data Protection and Privacy Commissioner’s conference in Montreal. Their correspondent is gloomy about the efficacy of our current privacy laws:
Critics argue that both notice and consent are today little more than legal fictions, as consumers ignore overly complex notices and shrinking technology makes it virtually impossible to obtain informed consumer consent.
And he goes on to note that many things that it was once though not necessary to apply privacy law to (e.g. details of what you buy, or even which web sites you browse) are now major causes of concern. Privacy experts are, it appears, very worried by all this.
Me, I’m more worried by the news that US immigration will soon be taking all 10 fingerprints on entry to the country, not just two. I suppose I should be pleased, as this will lessen the chances of them erroneously identifying me as a terrorist, but I suspect the primary effect is going to be much longer lines at passport control.
The TV coverage of The Ashes from Direct TV is mostly quite good. However, around 10:00pm or so it starts to get a bit juddery. Some days it has been worse than others. As it is a time of day phenomenon, Kevin and I suspected it might be an issue with satellite positions. I took a look at the controls we got on the web site and noticed that there was a section at the bottom about choosing another network if you were having trouble with the signal. Naively I thought this was something about re-routing the Internet connection. I was wrong. The default coverage if from Channel 9, but choosing Network 2 instead gave me coverage from BSkyB. Wow!
And this proved the point. The picture quality from Sky was not as good as from Channel 9, but the judders vanished completely. I’m assuming this is because the signal that Direct TV is getting in this case comes across the Atlantic rather than across the Pacific.
All we got commentary-wise last night before we had to go get some sleep (the alarm being set for 3:00am because of a very early flight) was Athers and Naz wittering on aimlessly, but I have high hopes of Kevin getting to listen to Bumble and Boycott in full flow. Sky gives us their ads too, which will be interesting (though I’d much rather see the Australian ads, or better still New Zealand ones which, from what we’ve seen with the rugby, are hilarious).
I think I have blogged about The Antikythera Mechanism before. It is a device found on the wreck of a Roman ship that appears to make astronomical predictions. The writing on it is Greek so it is presumed to be of Greek manufacture. Initially there has been some debate as to what it could do, but a team of astronomers has now confirmed that the device could be used to predict both lunar and solar eclipses. It also seems likely that it could track the movements of Venus and Mercury, and perhaps other planets as well. Not bad for 100 BC or so. The BBC has more details, including news of a forthcoming Radio 4 program that will doubtless be available over the Internet.
Update: Here’s Nature’s article on the device.
The BBC has a report on one of those Home of the Future things. You know, where everything is hooked up and run by computers. Except that these homes are very real and are available to buy in Seoul. I think I could do with one. It might remind me when I’ve left laundry in the drier.
The BBC has an interesting story about some clever guys who think we can get away from our reliance on power cables by transmitting energy wirelessly. I’m a little dubious myself, but if it works it will be wonderful.
Deanna has beaten me to this one, but it is still worth spreading. Australian scientists have invented a t-shirt that senses your motions when playing air guitar and generates actual music based on them. Sadly it doesn’t promise to make good music, so my air guitar would doubtless turn out to be just as bad as my actual guitar playing.
Update: Even The Guardian has noticed, which I guess shows just how popular air guitar is.
As Kevin has reported on his LiveJournal, our home entertainment system has died, probably with a defunct power supply. Getting it repaired is likely to cost more than buying a new system, so I’ve started looking around.
Wandering through Comet this morning if found quite a lot of systems advertising recording from camcorders and even direct recording to DVD from TV. But I’ll be buying the system in the US, and Circuit City has hardly anything available with those features. It does have some, so I guess it can’t be a legal issue.
Other features I’m looking at are second-room-wireless support so that I don’t need a separate sound system for the office, and an input for my MP3 player.
Recommendations appreciated.