Viridian Note 00474: Climate and Civilization from the Viridian mailing list raises an interesting question first asked by Nick Brooks: why did what we call “civilization” seem to arise during periods of increased aridity? Maybe the emergence of an urban, specialized civilization wasn’t a product of a world of plenty, but instead, a desperate attempt to cling to survival? Check out Brook’s paper on the subject.
Tag: Science & Technology
Low Earth Orbit Here We Come… Well, Someone Will, Eventually, Maybe…
Adam posted a link to an article about new tech developments that will facilitate the building of a space elevator. I have to admit, I’ve always been kind of scared of the idea of a kilometers-long superstrong cable tethered between the earth and something lit a satellite out in space. I mean, what if the cables snap? And yes, they could. The tidal waves, the damage to the Earth, the effects in the short term at least, would be devastating. It sounds like something a bit too risky to just, you know, try on Earth. I’d rather we tried it …
Like Totaly wanna be a Top Bloggar!!1
I’ve, like, decided that my way is to b TOP. So I’m gunna spell things wrong and like, refer to people in my life as letters L can be Lime and like the people I work with can be H an L and S and J, and I’m gonna post like a totally long thing about stuff that’s goin on. heee. No, I’m not directing this at anyone in particular, but my god. It just makes me imagine what the slush piles of old looked like, before people cold get their “writing” illusions served by instantaneous self-publishing. I imagine it …
ChemoBioMessy
NPR’s got an interview up with the guy who had his blood tested for over 300 different nasty chemicals from the environment on National Geographic’s tab. I actually couldn’t get the interview to load, because RealPlayer sucks for the version of Ubuntu I’m running — I gotta upgrade, and soon! — but from the excerpt I skimmed, which NPR linked to from this page, it looked pretty interesting, in a shuddery kind of way. I don’t even wanna think about it, actually. But… it does look like something worth throwing into a story somewhere, although, as bloody usual, Bruce Sterling …
Logic, AI, and Instinct
Originally this post was going to be a lot longer, but I forgot where I was going to go with it, and it’s mouldered in teh Drafts box for many, many moons, so I’ve tied up the knots and I’m dumping it out on the porch for the neighbours to giggle at. I’ve met a few Dr. Spocks in my time, and this whole thing about being purely logical, it’s just an exaggeration. Nobody’s purely logical. Logic cannot function without intuition, which is the whole lesson of syllogistic logic: Every man is mortal. I am a man. Therefore I am …
Another Story Idea, Perhaps?
So, YouTube’s Lonelygirl15 was a fake. Well, I can’t say, “I told you so,” because though I did view a clip and shake my head about how this was not a 16-year-old or a regular blogger, I didn’t post about it. (I don’t remember doing so, anyway.) But you know, the news that it’s fake (here too!) includes all kinds of speculations about whether the makers of this sham project are going to quit or not. After all, if it were me, I’d be turning the project on its head, making a film about this girl who’s hired to make …
I was gonna do some writing…
But my hard drive filled up. It filled up to the point my word processor was crashing, but of course I didn’t know that was what happened, so I logged out, rebooted, and then, after the reboot, it wouldn’t let me log in. The hard drive was so damned full that I couldn’t even log in, there was no room for the logs to run and log my logging in. And I don’t know the command line in Linux quite well enough to deal with that unaided. Happily, I had Lime’s old laptop here, and I connected to the net …
Bruce Sterling. Creation Science
I very much enjoyed this piece by Bruce Sterling, titled Creation Science. Especially the bit on how scientists might react if AIs started doing better science than humans. One of those quirky Singularity-type moments where, if you think about it, sounds interesting.
Junk DNA Bet! (Expiration Date: 24 August 2016.)
So, there was this story that my esteemed Clarion classmate Guy Immega (of Vancouver, B.C.) wrote, and he asked for crits. I won’t go into the story in detail since (a) it’s his and (b) I’d rather just footnote this post when the story gets published in an SF magazine, so you can all run out and read it yourselves. But anyway, during crits, a disagreement arose between Guy and myself about the purposiveness of junk DNA. I expressed concern that certain uses of junk DNA might be problematic (especially over the long term), whereas Guy took the opinion it …
Nature!
Earlier in the summer, my classmate Guy sent out a couple of links (the first, the second) to webpages hosting stories that have been published in Nature‘s “Futures” column, a short story section at the back of the magazine. Well, today I didn’t get much time in the library today, but just enough to discover that the Uni does indeed have a subscription to Nature. I suppose I’ll be in the library half a day tomorrow just checking out the Futures stories… and maybe thumbing through the odd article that catches my interest. It’s just across campus, so it’s convenient …