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How could anyone doubt—or vote against—Hillary after watching this magnificent example of her composure under fire?

Quoth Dave Barry:

Whatever happens with the Florida Democratic delegation, neither Obama nor Clinton will have enough delegates to win the nomination. They’re locked in a bitter struggle that I predict will continue right through the Democratic convention, and then through the November presidential election. Next January President McCain will be giving his inaugural address, while somewhere else in America, Clinton and Obama will be holding their 1,387th debate, with the hostility level between them having reached the point where the debate consists entirely of spitting.

Sounds about right.

Space 1899:

The Hugo nominations are out.

Scalzi comments.

Don’t worry about a thing. Every little thing gonna be all right.

Those words, from Bob Marley’s 1977 classic, Three Little Birds, echo through I Am Legend as a perfect counterpoint to the action on the screen. Robert Neville, as portrayed by Will Smith, should worry. Very little will ever be all right again. Not when he lives in a world where a genetically-engineered virus, designed to cure cancer, has mutated into the most deadly plague in history, killing off over six billion people. Not when only one percent of humankind possesses a natural immunity to the disease. Not when those survivors are massively outnumbered by the half-billion infected who have reverted to a savage, feral state and kill normals on sight.

Neville is the last normal in New York City. He thinks he may be the last normal on Earth. As a military virologist, he may be the only person left with the skills to cure the disease, if only he can keep his sanity about him. I don’t think it’s giving away much of a spoiler to say that it won’t be easy.

This is where I Am Legend deviates from most apocalyptic zombie-motif movies. It doesn’t bring the violence of 28 Days Later, or the gut-wrenching gore of the Dawn of the Dead remake—or Romero’s original Night of the Living Dead for that matter. Instead it relies more on the psychological story of a man against himself, fitting more comfortably into the same catagory of endurance movies as Cast Away, or Touching the Void. Except with zombies.

Okay, technically not zombies—as in 28 Days Later, the infected aren’t dead, just sick—but they behave like zombies, and thus fit the zombie archetype, so I’m calling them zombies. The only characteristics they share with the vampires in Richard Matheson’s classic novel is their vulnerability to light, which blinds them due to eye dilation being a symptom of the disease, and in the form of UV light, provokes severe burning of their skin.

That keeps them indoors, and out of the way, for most of the movie, giving us a chance to get to know Neville in his quieter moments—hunting dear from a Ford Mustang in lower Manhattan, knocking golf balls off the wing of a Lockheed A-12 sitting on the deck of the U.S.S. Intrepid, fishing in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He’s got one friend he can talk to, and that’s Sam, his German Shepherd, and his only anchor to the world. It’s a stunningly good portrayal by Smith, by turns humorous, then deeply moving, then horrifying, when the monsters finally do come out.

And don’t worry. They do. That part’s inevitable.

I’m a frequent critic of novel-based movies that deviate from their source material, but only because the results of that deviation are usually markedly inferior to the source material. I Am Legend the movie barely uses anything more than the name of the main character, and a rough similarity in concept, from Matheson’s novel, but it turns out to be that rare thing, an adaptation that is as good as its original despite the deviations. The only things really wrong with the movie were some sub-par CGI used to depict the monsters—what sold the creatures was not their slightly video-gamish complexions, but the fluid and inhuman way they moved—and Neville’s penchant for taking long, hard falls onto concrete without taking much damage from the impact, but then Will Smith is an action star, so I suppose we have to expect things like that.

So, according to a study reported by Ars Technica, the Reality Distortion Field^TM , is real:

The focus of the study was the process of priming, in which subtle exposure to stereotypical items elicits behaviors associated with those items. For example, the authors cite results showing that young people primed with exposure to the elderly walked more slowly and displayed poorer memory than their peers. In cases like this, it appears that priming simply activates existing mental constructs that influence behavior, but there is evidence that priming can also be motivational. Students primed with images of a parent can perform better on tests, possibly through the motivation to please the parent.

The new study focused on how brands fit into this. Previous work had shown that people tend to assign personalities to brands, but it was far from clear that brands could be motivational; after all, unlike your parent, a brand is not going to congratulate you for your good test score. To test this, the authors compared the role of two brands in motivating student performances: Apple and IBM. Both were rated equally positively by the students, but they had distinct brand personalities, with only Apple being assigned the quality of “creativity.”

Students were given tasks that either subliminally or overtly exposed them to the corporate logos. Afterwards, they were given an “unusual use test,” in which they were given the opportunity to come up with creative uses for a brick. Both total number of uses, and a panels’ subjective rating of their creativity were scored. Using either measure, the exposure to the Apple brand, even subliminally, primed the students to greater creativity.

The authors argue that this effect was motivational. If an unrelated test was inserted before the brick test, it should clear out any mental constructs arising from the priming; instead, the irrelevant task seemed to enhance performances in the later brick test. In addition, surveys revealed that those who desire to be more creative scored higher when exposed to the Apple logo, while those who had no such motivation were indifferent to the exposure.

Yet another reason to switch.

Via John Scalzi, who got it Via Charles Stross, who got it via AP, Arthur C. Clarke has died.

The experience of reading 2001: A Space Odyssey and 2010: Odyssey Two when I was thirteen was one of the things that made me want to become an SF writer in the first place.

I’d tried watching Kubrick’s movie, which I’d been told was some kind of masterpiece, but I could never make sense of the “dawn of man” sequence, and Heywood Floyd’s trip to the moon was so devoid of conflict and action that my Star Wars-addled brain just couldn’t stay with it until after I picked up the book, which grabbed me from page one and explained everything as it went. It was a bit disconcerting to start 2010 and find out that the Discovery had stopped at Jupiter—hey, what happened to Saturn, and Japetus?—but the plot was gripping nonetheless, and it all made sense once I went back and watched 2001 again, and discovered a brilliant and poetic and astonishing movie that I hadn’t been able to perceive before.

After that, Childhood’s End, Rendezvous With Rama, Songs of Distant Earth… I was hooked. Clarke is second only to Stephen King as an influence on my early writing efforts.

Thanks for every word, Arthur. You will be missed.

See Also: The NY Times obit by Gerald Jonas.

Ooh! Free fiction (via SF Signal):

FREE WRITTEN FICTION

• “The Nine Billion Names of God“
• “Rescue Party“
• “The Star“

FREE AUDIO FICTION

• “A Walk In The Dark“
• “Summertime On Icarus“
• “The Haunted Spacesuit“
• “The Nine Billion Names Of God“
• “The Sentinel” (basis for 2001: A Space Odyssey)
• “The Star“

The writing world is in crisis!  First, turmoil in short fiction:

Jay Lake Dogfighting Scandal: We are all responsible

Today, Jay Lake (jaylake) sits behind bars, indicted for allegedly running a dogfighting ring from his Oregon home. The reaction from the fiction world is mixed. Some want him banned from writing for life. Others see his private crimes as completely separate from his public accomplishments. And others, like me, are torn.

Lake came from a poor background, and has said at public events that writing was a way for him to stay away from gangs. It also got him out of the low-end side of town, as he led his high-school Academic Decathalon to an undefeated season and landed a scholarship at USC, where he shattered word-count and university-press story records. From there, it was a sure bet that Lake was going to enter the high-rolling world of professional short fiction, and in 2003, Lake was unable to resist the promise of $.06 to $.08 per word offered by editors at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Other pro short story writers have talked about the temptations of the market. “You go from tossing around the said-bookisms in the library with your friends to making $150, even $200 a month on a short story,” says Yoon Ha Lee (yhlee), “and these markets have hundreds, even thousands of readers. You tell kids to stay in school, but who’s going to take the extra year to get that MFA when they could be making five cents a word on every story they sell? It’s hard for anyone to keep their ego in check. If you’re lucky, you just get gold-plated RSI wrist braces or a pimped-out ergonomic keyboard. But some people, like Lake, go all the way.” (Lee is no stranger to controversy herself; she took the fifth rather than testify about her involvement in a 2001 shooting at a Pasadena poetry bar, in which one of her writing group members was charged with assault and illegal possession of adverbs. The case was ultimately dismissed, and Lee has since become a born-again Pastafarian and renounced the hard-partying short-fiction lifestyle.)

And Lake did indeed go all the way. The $300 check from Realms of Fantasy went into a palatial mansion outside Portland. Another $280 from Asimov’s let Lake upgrade his collection of vintage Corvettes. And apparently, some of that money was used to fund Wheatland Wars, the high-stakes dogfighting kennel that Lake, along with Portland writer David Levine (davidlevine), owned and managed.

But the novel market has problems too:

Novelists Strike Fails To Affect Nation Whatsoever

LOS ANGELES—The Novelists Guild of America strike, now entering its fourth month, has had no impact on the nation at all, sources reported Tuesday.

The strike, which scholars say could be the longest since 1951, when American novelists may or may not have voluntarily committed to a six-month work stoppage, has brought an immediate halt to all new novels, novellas, and novelettes from coast to coast, affecting no one.

Bookstores across the country saw nomeasurable change in anything. Nor has America’s economy seen any adverse effects whatsoever, as consumers easily adjust to the sudden cessation of any bold new sprawling works of fiction or taut psychological character studies.

“There’s a novelists strike?” Ames, IA consumer Carl Hailes said. “That’s terrible. When is it scheduled to begin?”

The strike kicked off last fall when the NGA announced it had hit a roadblock in negotiations with the Alliance of Printed Fiction and Literature Producers, failing to resolve certain key issues concerning online distribution, digital media rights, and readers just not getting what writers were trying to do with a number of important allegorical devices.

After a press conference at the Massachusetts home of NGA president John Updike—who called the strike an attempt by novelists “to give both the sublime and mundane alike their beautiful due”—members of the guild began picketing their studies, desks, and libraries and refusing to work on any further novels until the APFLP and the American reading public agreed to their demands.

So far, sources say, no one has attempted to cross the picket lines, most of which are located in private homes. However, unconfirmed reports indicate that at least one novelist may be breaking the strike by writing under the pseudonym “Richard Bachman.”

“We must, as a people, achieve a resolution to this strike soon,” novelist David Foster Wallace said at a rally Monday at Pomona College in Claremont, CA, where he is a professor. “The thought of this country being deprived of its only source of book-length fiction is enough to give one the howling fantods.”

“I thank you both for coming,” he added.

While the strike has been joined by an estimated 250,000 novelists—225,000 of whom have reportedly stopped in the middle of their first novel—it has done no damage to any measurable sector of the economy, including bookstore chains, newspapers, magazines, all major media, overseas markets, independent film studios, major film studios, actors, editors, animators, carpenters, those in finance or banking, the day-to-day lives of average Americans, or anything else anyone can think of as of press time.

Clapton is God:

Don’t worry, it’s fake:

Late last year a Finnish media artist named Santeri Ojala got a lot of attention for a series of hilarious YouTube videos in which he lifted concert footage of various guitar heroes and overdubbed his own intentionally awful playing. The bad musicianship was funny enough, but the verisimilitude made it even funnier: Ojala was great at matching each player’s hand movements and timing, and he sprinkled lukewarm applause and other sound effects throughout. The videos were like alternate-universe versions of rock-god cliches.

Here’s Metallica:

Ouch!

Ken Rand’s humorous fantasy novel is now available from Yard Dog Press. You can read the first chapter on his web page at www.sfwa.org/members/Rand/.

Ken’s an old friend of mine from Writers of the Future, and his Lucky Nickle Saloon stories are just hilarious. Highly recommended.

You can add my name to this open letter:

But I, speaking as a reader and a publisher, would really like to see Apple create a larger version of the iPod touch optimized not just for a better video experience, but also for a best-of-breed reading experience. Apple has the hardware design and user interface chops that Amazon lacked when creating the Kindle, plus the knowledge gleaned from the iPhone and the iPod touch in terms of underlying operating system, physical design, and wireless capabilities. Equally important is the iTunes Store, which offers an unparalleled browsing and shopping experience for digital media - it could be extended to support commercial ebooks, subscription-based periodicals, and free blogs in exactly the way it currently supports commercial audiobooks, TV show season passes, and free podcasts.

Such a device would make good business sense for Apple too. iPod sales posted their slowest ever year-over-year growth rate, at only 5 percent, causing some analysts to opine that Apple has saturated the market. Even committed iPod users will purchase replacement iPods only so often. Like the iPhone, a new “iPod reader” in a larger form factor would open up a new market for Apple, but unlike the iPhone, it would be purchased in addition to an iPod nano or iPod shuffle.

John Markoff has speculated that your dismissal of American reading habits is actually a calculated setting of the stage for just such a device. You didn’t have kind words for cell phones or the MP3 players that predated the iPod, with justification - they were (and for the most part remain) utterly awful.

So Steve, here’s hoping that an upcoming special event will feature an iPod reader, designed to do all the great things we’ve become accustomed to from an iPod, but with the addition of native support for downloading, managing, and displaying textual documents of all sorts, whether in plain text, PDF, Microsoft Word’s .doc, or XML format.

The iPod already gives us access to Beethoven and Bob Dylan, to snapshots of our children, and to The Incredibles and episodes of Lost. Let’s add to that The Hobbit and Harry Potter, 1984 and Catch-22, and the complete works of Dr. Seuss. Book publishers have been waiting for a mass-market ebook reader for years, the newspaper companies are dying for a new online business model, and normal people just want to read on the train to work. And of course, I’ll be happy to upload to the iTunes Store an entire library of Take Control ebooks that are already popular with tens of thousands of Mac users.

Runnin’ With The Beatles:

This sounds really good. Where’s the mp3?

Charles Stross analyzes American politics, D&D style:

John McCain (Demon Prince of Republicans.) (Lesser God.)

FREQUENCY: Very rare
NO APPEARING: 1
ARMOUR CLASS: -7
MOVE: 3″ (72″ per flight sector on the campaign jet)
HIT DICE: 200 hit points (But first you have to defeat 4d8 Secret Service Agents)
% IN LAIR: 0%
TREASURE TYPE: All your NATO base are belong to us!
NO. OF ATTACKS: 1
DAMAGE/ATTACK: Invades Iran. Takes 100d20 casualties in first strike while inflicting 20 x 100d20 civilian casualties. Followed by war of attrition, economic collapse, recrimination.
SPECIAL ATTACKS: 5% chance of 30,000 Megaton nuclear first strike on Upper Volta.
SPECIAL DEFENSES: +3 or better weapon to hit. In event of combat, 20% chance of heart attack per round, followed by the swearing in of President Santorum. You wouldn’t want that, would you?)
MAGIC RESISTANCE: 80% (10% vs. mind control spells by Cheney.)
INTELLIGENCE: Normal.
CHARISMA: 12 (16 to neocons)
ALIGNMENT: Chaotic evil if under control of Cheney; otherwise Chaotic neutral.
SIZE: M
LEVEL/X.P. VALUE: X/29,950* (* for impeachment)

A huge, ancient, carnivorous dinosaur from the swamps at the heart of Republican country, not unlike Godzilla in appearance and wrinkled integument, McCain has seen better years. Nevertheless he can breathe fire and threaten to stomp flat the capital city of any country that Fox News disapproves of with the best of them.

The biggest danger in facing off against a McCain is that he might be under the mind control of the Svengali-like Cheney, Prince of Darkness. In this case, he is likely to be lethally aggressive and even more unpredictable than usual.

Teller, sans Penn, survives the Zombie uprising: & Teller

Where does this guy keep getting animated videos of my cat?

 Henry Markram and the blue brain:

In the basement of a university in Lausanne, Switzerland sit four black boxes, each about the size of a refrigerator, and filled with 2,000 IBM microchips stacked in repeating rows. Together they form the processing core of a machine that can handle 22.8 trillion operations per second. It contains no moving parts and is eerily silent. When the computer is turned on, the only thing you can hear is the continuous sigh of the massive air conditioner. This is Blue Brain.

The name of the supercomputer is literal: Each of its microchips has been programmed to act just like a real neuron in a real brain. The behavior of the computer replicates, with shocking precision, the cellular events unfolding inside a mind. “This is the first model of the brain that has been built from the bottom-up,” says Henry Markram, a neuroscientist at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and the director of the Blue Brain project. “There are lots of models out there, but this is the only one that is totally biologically accurate. We began with the most basic facts about the brain and just worked from there.”

This is fascinating.

I’ve long been of the opinion that creating actual artificial intelligence was irrelevant to any actual singularity-like scenario.  It just doesn’t matter if what we call A.I. is merely a sophisticated expert system with really good voice-recognition and O.C.R., or if it’s a genuinely self-aware mind, it’ll still do what we need it to do.  The expert system actually has quite a few advantages in that it won’t react negatively to condescension or mistreatment, and it won’t get bored doing the grunt work we shuffle off onto it.  Hell, who wants to pay for an A.I. that’s going to want a personal life, or might try to organize a union?  Better one that does what it’s told and doesn’t complain, even if it is a bit more limited.

But most prognosticators seem to believe that a genuine artificial intelligence is going to be a key part of the singularity, and the Blue Brain project would appear to bolster their case.  So far all they’ve managed to simulate is a single neocortical column—”a tiny slice of brain containing approximately 10,000 neurons, with about 30 million synaptic connections between them”—from a rat brain, but the project appears to scale well, and they expect to be able to simulate a complete rat brain in two years, complete with a robo-rat body, so they’ll be able to see how it behaves in the real world.

The biggest obstacles they face appear to be technological:

“What is holding us back now are the computers.” The numbers speak for themselves. Markram estimates that in order to accurately simulate the trillion synapses in the human brain, you’d need to be able to process about 500 petabytes of data (peta being a million billion, or 10 to the fifteenth power). That’s about 200 times more information than is stored on all of Google’s servers. (Given current technology, a machine capable of such power would be the size of several football fields.) Energy consumption is another huge problem. The human brain requires about 25 watts of electricity to operate. Markram estimates that simulating the brain on a supercomputer with existing microchips would generate an annual electrical bill of about $3 billion . But if computing speeds continue to develop at their current exponential pace, and energy efficiency improves, Markram believes that he’ll be able to model a complete human brain on a single machine in ten years or less.

Which roughly seems to jibe with Kurzweil’s predictions in The Age of Spiritual Machines.  Moore’s Law to the rescue.  This should be interesting to watch.

Well, if Sarah Connor doesn’t blow it up first.

Ouch!

Here’s one story of a Vista upgrade early last year that did not go well. Jon, let’s call him, (bear with me — I’ll reveal his full identity later) upgrades two XP machines to Vista. Then he discovers that his printer, regular scanner and film scanner lack Vista drivers. He has to stick with XP on one machine just so he can continue to use the peripherals.

Did Jon simply have bad luck? Apparently not. When another person, Steven, hears about Jon’s woes, he says drivers are missing in every category — “this is the same across the whole ecosystem.”

Then there’s Mike, who buys a laptop that has a reassuring “Windows Vista Capable” logo affixed. He thinks that he will be able to run Vista in all of its glory, as well as favorite Microsoft programs like Movie Maker. His report: “I personally got burned.” His new laptop — logo or no logo — lacks the necessary graphics chip and can run neither his favorite video-editing software nor anything but a hobbled version of Vista. “I now have a $2,100 e-mail machine,” he says.

It turns out that Mike is clearly not a naïf. He’s Mike Nash, a Microsoft vice president who oversees Windows product management. And Jon, who is dismayed to learn that the drivers he needs don’t exist? That’s Jon A. Shirley, a Microsoft board member and former president and chief operating officer. And Steven, who reports that missing drivers are anything but exceptional, is in a good position to know: he’s Steven Sinofsky, the company’s senior vice president responsible for Windows.

Their remarks come from a stream of internal communications at Microsoft in February 2007, after Vista had been released as a supposedly finished product and customers were paying full retail price. Between the nonexistent drivers and PCs mislabeled as being ready for Vista when they really were not, Vista instantly acquired a reputation at birth: Does Not Play Well With Others.

We usually do not have the opportunity to overhear Microsoft’s most senior executives vent their personal frustrations with Windows. But a lawsuit filed against Microsoft in March 2007 in United States District Court in Seattle has pried loose a packet of internal company documents. The plaintiffs, Dianne Kelley and Kenneth Hansen, bought PCs in late 2006, before Vista’s release, and contend that Microsoft’s “Windows Vista Capable” stickers were misleading when affixed to machines that turned out to be incapable of running the versions of Vista that offered the features Microsoft was marketing as distinctive Vista benefits.

And people wonder why I want a Mac.

Ars technica is just full of interesting stuff today.  Here’s another one:

If we take the analogy between copyright and property rights seriously, it has some implications that advocates of strong copyright may not like. The copyright system is currently undergoing rapid changes as technology undermines old business models and enforcement regimes. Some aspects of copyright law are widely ignored and evaded, and efforts to strictly enforce the law have sparked widespread outrage. If we want to take the property rights analogy seriously, it doesn’t make sense to compare today’s chaotic copyright regime to the stable, orderly, and universally accepted property rights system we have today. Rather, the right comparison is to the American property rights system at a time when it, too, faced rapid changes and serious challenges to its legitimacy.

As you might expect, the early days of the American property rights system were a mess too.  But there was a solution:

The property rights quandary was ultimately resolved not by harsher enforcement of existing laws, but by adjusting the property system to recognize the realities on the frontier. Politicians from Western states were more sympathetic to squatters, many of whom where their constituents, and they pressed for their claims to be recognized by the legal systems. Squatters had created informal mechanisms for delineating and enforcing their claims, and over the course of the 19th century, governments increasingly extended formal recognition to these arrangements.

Which leads to to the only sensible comclusion:

Getting users to stop sharing files and circumventing DRM is likely to prove just as hopeless as getting squatters to leave their homes. There are now millions of people who think nothing of evading the law, and there are simply not enough courts to try more than a tiny fraction of them. Sooner or later, Congress will have to do for the copyright system what it did for property rights in the 19th century: change the law to bring it back into line with peoples’ moral intuitions.

This subject deserves more than a few pull quotes, so go read the whole thing.

Ars Technica reports:

According to the research, sponsored by UK media lawyers Wiggin, survey data shows books have the highest “attachment” rating of any leisure media activity. People are more attached to their books than they are to their satellite television, radio stations, newspapers, magazines, social networks, video games, blogs, DVDs, and P2P file-swapping. And it’s not like this high rate of affection for the book occurs only among a small group; books came in second only to “listen to the radio” in terms of the number of people who engage in those activities.

That’s not great news for the e-book market, and follow-up questions only showed how entrenched paper books are in the public imagination. When the survey asked about people’s emotional attachment to paper books, 53 percent of respondents said that they would “never” or would “hate” to stop using them, and another 24 percent said they would be “uncomfortable.”

This sounds like good news for Cory Doctorow, and adherents of his view that people just don’t like reading long form works on computer screens.

On the other hand, if “books came in second only to “listen to the radio” in terms of the number of people who engage in those activities,” well, that’s not great news for the mp3-player market.  Oh wait…

What Jack Bauer was doing in 1994:

Original here.