What do you get when you mix Cheech and Chong, Tron, and economics?
I simply cannot think of anything to say after that.
July 15, 2009
July 13, 2009
Office 2010: The Movie:
Wow. That makes me want to process some words.
July 10, 2009
Are you tired of movies that have nothing going for them but big robots, bigger explosions and occasionally Megan Fox? Have you had enough of swoopy starships that can escape from black holes, but never from plot holes? John Scalzi says:
The answer to that is actually the solution, which is that if you want studios to make those sorts of movies, go out of your way to see them in the theater, rather than just waiting until they wash up on Starz or HBO. It’s not that humans are getting stupider, it’s that people interested in entertainment that doesn’t EXPLODE aren’t going into theaters. So, you know. Go.
So I went. This afternoon I saw Moon. Phenomenal movie. Directed by Duncan Jones, and starring Sam Rockwell as Sam Bell, the movie’s main, and very nearly only character, Moon hearkens back to the more realistic SF style exemplified by Kubrick and Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, except where Kubrick created a movie grand in sweep, and distant in its view of humans, Moon turns the formula upside down to focus on character, and shows us a man who gets to spend far too much time isolated on the far side of the Moon, getting to know himself.
And he is in quite a predicament, the nature of which will not be revealed here. Rockwell gives a terrific performance. He has a gift for simply being sympathetic, even when the characters he plays should be annoying – like Guy Fleegman, the whiny second string cast member from Galaxy Quest - or could be outright repulsive - like Zaphod Beeblebrox, quite possibly the most egotistical character in all of fiction, in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. This time he’s just playing an ordinary guy with the worst job on or off Earth, stuck a situation that’s hellish enough before the accident that sets off the events of the movie. Once Sam begins to understand the true nature of his situation, he goes through the emotional reactions you’d expect, but without the overwrought melodrama that so often characterizes these things in the movies. This is helped along by a clever script by Nathan Parker that doesn’t waste time belaboring the obvious, and leaves things that can go without saying unsaid.
The only major character in the movie other than Sam is GERTY, the HAL-like robot that functions as Sam’s assistant and caretaker, voiced by Kevin Spacey. Here again, the usual clichés are deftly avoided. The company Sam and GERTY work for may be as soulless as Weyland-Yutani, but GERTY’s motivations are far more complex than than those of Ash, the Weyland-Yutani robot that served the crew of the Nostromo to the xenomorph in Alien, another of this movie’s antecedents.
Sigh. I hate to bring this up - I know Jones must want to be known more for his own work than for his family - but there’s no getting around it. The movie may be vastly different in detail, but the feel of it - simultaneously bleak and optimistic, lonely and isolated and enraptured - captures perfectly the emotional range of his father’s first big hit:
For here
Am I sitting in a tin can
Far above the world
Planet earth is blue
And theres nothing I can doThough Im past one hundred thousand miles
Im feeling very still
And I think my spaceship knows which way to go
Tell me wife I love her very much she knows
Charles Stross has been writing a series of posts detailing his history as a codemonkey before he achieved his success as an SF writer. It’s a fascinating read. It’s not hard to see where Accelerando came from. Stross had quite a checkered career, including quite possibly launching the world’s first denial-of-service attack, and inspiring the creation of the robots.txt file. It’s only about 25,000 words, and well worth reading.
July 9, 2009
This one’s pretty good:
But I still prefer this one:
And with that, I think it’s time to declare this meme played out, once and for all. It’s just not funny anymore unless it’s making fun of itself, and since that’s already been done, it’s time to let it go. Auf wiedersehen, Herr Hitler. May you roast in hell.
July 8, 2009
Well, this is good to know:
Drinking five cups of coffee a day could reverse memory problems seen in Alzheimer’s disease, US scientists say.
Even better:
The researchers say this is the same as is found in two cups of “specialty” coffees such as lattes or cappuccinos from coffee shops, 14 cups of tea, or 20 soft drinks.
Well, that’s one disease I shouldn’t have to worry about.
July 7, 2009
I never thought I’d see the day. Gmail finally – finally – comes out of beta:
Beta no more: Google apps graduate to non-beta status - Ars Technica
July 4, 2009
This rocks:
July 3, 2008
June 22, 2008
Here are a couple of interesting essays on the Singularity, and how it might be achieved without molecular manufacturing and artificial intelligence:
Achieving a Mundane Technological Transhuman Singularity
Response to Dr. Richard A.L. Jones’ IEET Spectrum Piece: ‘Rupturing the Nanotech Rapture’
Wow. With reviews like these, I have got to get one of these USB cables. They’ll make all my problems go away!
If I could use a rusty boxcutter to carve a new orifice in my body that’s compatible with this link cable, I would already be doing it. I can just imagine the pure musical goodness that would flow through this cable into the wound and fill me completely — like white, holy light. Holding this cable in my hands actually makes me feel that much closer to the Lord Jesus Christ. I only make $6.25/hr at Jack In The Box, but I saved up for three months so I could have this cable. It sits in a shrine I constructed next to my futon in Mother’s basement.
Or…
After I took delivery of my $500 Denon AKDL1 Cat-5 uber-cable, Al Gore was mysteriously drawn to my home, where he pronounced that Global Warming had been suspended in my vicinity.
Yes, I had perfect weather: no flooding, no tornadoes, the exact amount of rain necessary, and he pronounced sea levels exactly right and that they were not going to rise within five miles of my house.
Additionally, my cars began achieving 200 mpg and I didn’t even need gasoline. I was able to put three grams of cat litter into the tank and drive forever.
But watch out…
I installed one of these cables between my gigabit ethernet switch and my Canon Pixma 6700 color printer. I know it’s not a sanctioned use, but I was looking for the ultimate in speed and color fidelity. I’m freaky that way.
The first time I downloaded a picture to the printer over this cable, the bits moved so fast the printer collapsed into a naked singularity, right there in my office.
Since then, I can’t find the cat, and my entire set of VAX/VMS 4.7 documentation (DEC Will Rise Again!) (Mmmmm, orangey!) has gone missing.
Use responsibly.
June 21, 2008
Nick Mamatas spills the beans on what editors really want:
I propose a moratorium
…on the phrase, said by editors of venues who publish short stories (magazines, anthologies, collections, etc.) “I just want good stories.”The reason I think editors should no longer say this is because it is a lie and a transparent one. Editors clearly do not just want good stories.
For one thing, most stories aren’t any good at all. When was the last time you read an issue of a magazine containing several stories and said “Wow, these are all good stories!” Or an anthology? Or a collection? Most stories are just there to take up space and to “satisfice” (my favorite portmanteau!) some perceived need, and that need can be to full 256 pages or to make sure there is one story about a spaceship in each issue or because the story was written by someone who used to be famous or because it was the best of a bad bad lot and the editor has no idea how to cultivate a slush pile or solicit actual work and the thing is due in five days.
And that’s not the half of it.
June 17, 2008
Check out the Trons, playing “Sister Robot”:
Not exactly heavy metal.
June 4, 2008
Live like common people:
June 3, 2008
The NY Times profiles Ray Kurzweil and the singularity.
Dr. Kurzweil’s predictions come under intense scrutiny in the engineering magazine IEEE Spectrum, which devotes its current issue to the Singularity. Some of the experts writing in the issue endorse Dr. Kurzweil’s belief that conscious, intelligent beings can be created, but most think it will take more than a few decades.
He is accustomed to this sort of pessimism and readily acknowledges how complicated the brain is. But if experts in neurology and artificial intelligence (or solar energy or medicine) don’t buy his optimistic predictions, he says, that’s because exponential upward curves are so deceptively gradual at first.
“Scientists imagine they’ll keep working at the present pace,” he told me after his speech. “They make linear extrapolations from the past. When it took years to sequence the first 1 percent of the human genome, they worried they’d never finish, but they were right on schedule for an exponential curve. If you reach 1 percent and keep doubling your growth every year, you’ll hit 100 percent in just seven years.”
Dr. Kurzweil is so confident in these curves that he has made a $10,000 bet with Mitch Kapor, the creator of Lotus software. By 2029, Dr. Kurzweil wagers, a computer will pass the Turing Test by carrying on a conversation that is indistinguishable from a human’s.
I’m not as confident those graphs are going to hold up for fields besides computer science, so I’d be leery of betting on a date. But if I had to take sides in the 2029 wager, I’d put my money on Dr. Kurzweil. He could be right once again about a revolution coming sooner than expected. And I’d hate to bet against the chance to be around for this one.
June 1, 2008
But here’s the thing. The reason science really matters runs deeper still. Science is a way of life. Science is a perspective. Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding in a manner that’s precise, predictive and reliable — a transformation, for those lucky enough to experience it, that is empowering and emotional. To be able to think through and grasp explanations — for everything from why the sky is blue to how life formed on earth — not because they are declared dogma but rather because they reveal patterns confirmed by experiment and observation, is one of the most precious of human experiences.
As a practicing scientist, I know this from my own work and study. But I also know that you don’t have to be a scientist for science to be transformative. I’ve seen children’s eyes light up as I’ve told them about black holes and the Big Bang. I’ve spoken with high school dropouts who’ve stumbled on popular science books about the human genome project, and then returned to school with newfound purpose. And in that letter from Iraq, the soldier told me how learning about relativity and quantum physics in the dusty and dangerous environs of greater Baghdad kept him going because it revealed a deeper reality of which we’re all a part.
May 31, 2008
The Predator movie I want to see:
May 29, 2008
Ginia Bellafante delves into the mysteries of Lost:
“Lost,” which concludes its fourth season on ABC on Thursday night, refuses our passive interest while it denies us the satisfaction of ever feeling that we might confidently explain, to the person sitting next to us at dinner, that we have a true grasp of what is going on — of who among the characters is merely bad and who is verifiably satanic. To watch “Lost” is to feel like a high school grind, studying and analyzing and never making it to Yale. Good dramas confound our expectations, but “Lost,” about a factionalized group of plane crash survivors on a cartographically indeterminate island not anything like Aruba, pushes further, destabilizing the ground on which those expectations might be built. It is an opiate, and like all opiates, it produces its own masochistic delirium.
Very perceptive.