False Positives

Via CBC we have the sad news that visionary Arthur C. Clarke has passed away at age 90. Best known as a Science fiction writer for the novel of the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey”, he wrote many, many, other fact and fiction novels.  I am most thankful for his short stories, (in particular :The Nine Billion Names of God) He also conceptualized geostationary satellites (known as Clarke Orbits) for use in telecommunications.

Also much quoted are his “Clarke’s three laws”:

Here is the BBC Obituary: Sir Arthur C Clarke, and this last message from Arthur C. Clarke- A Voice from Beyond.

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This is what is Weird Wonderful Web for January 26th through January 27th:

• Still, or even more, relevant today: The Heavenly Jukebox from The Atlantic Monthly article on digital music from 2000. (no longer locked behind the paywall)

- business economics internet MusicBiz music mp3

• In E-mail and the Problem (blackrimglasses.com Ethan Kaplan), Ethan makes a lazy web request : “a bayesian clustering algorithm .. auto-group threads of messages and group those threads according to implicit thematics.” Preferably with going all SkyNet. Ethan see “AideRss.com” for the RSS part of the problem.

- email RSS Startup

• TheFunded is Creating Database of VC Term Sheets - users to upload term sheets so that people can compare and contrast individual terms from each VC. The transparency is great for Entrepreneurs. VC’s? Not so much.

- Startup business

• WebMynd Could Change the Way You Bookmark Websites - a Firefox add-on that records every website you visit and saves a virtual copy on your hard drive. not just an image of the page or the URL, but the full text site!

- tagging del.icio.us firefox Firefox+extensions Extensions

• How to Communicate (Part II) | Mark Evans - Communications 101updated for early 2008 : Twitter, Facebook, email, phone Video-Conferencing, meat

- facebook email comunication im

• Best of Independent Toronto - David Crow, Mark Kuznicki, Will Pate, Joey deVilla, Amber Mac. Toronto is a better place for having these people (and some other equally kind and generous souls) around. (vote early/late/often)

- Toronto demoCamp technology Startup

• The Sledge-maker’s Daughter by Alastair Reynolds - This story, from Interzone issue 209, has been shortlisted for the 2007 BSFA Award (as noted a few days ago)

- SciFi

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Via Greg “Beatiful Code” Wilson :

The Friends of the Merril are having a Flea Market on Saturday September 8th, from 10-4, at the Toronto Reference Library (just north of Bloor on Yonge). Second-hand, collectible, or one-of-a-kind: all sorts of SF and Anime merchandise will be available.

The Friends of the Merril Flea Market is going to be in the Beeton Auditorium at the Toronto Reference Library, 789 Yonge St. Toronto. That’s 2 blocks north of Yonge. (Gmap link)

The Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy is a Huge collection of over 63,000 items(!!!) started when pioneering science fiction author/editor/goddess Judith Merril donated her personal collection to the Toronto Public Library.

Note: the collection is housed on College Street near Spadina; not near Yonge and Bloor, and the flea market is not at the collection.

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Flikr 1 Flikr2 Flikr3

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Amazon :

• Introduction to AWS (Amazon Web Services ) for Ruby Developers
• New Alexa Web Search API and Pricing Plan Annoucement : Bunch-o new functionality and at least some new code samples

Railing :

• Ruby on Rails For Linux - LinRails : a binary package that includes Ruby-1.8.6, Rubygems-0.9.4, Rails 1.2.3, Mongrel 1.0.1, MySQL-5.0.41, ncurses-5.6, OpenSSL-0.9.8e, and zlib-1.2.3. making it easy to get a Ruby on Rails development environment running in no time.

• really DRY (don’t repeat yourself) : generating models, migrations and tests off of one meta-model.

Web Stuff

• Kijiji (local and free classified) eBays answer to Craigslist (eBay also owns 20% of Craigslist). Huh?
• All the News That’s Fit to Wiki : The New York Times on the Wikipedia, a neutral point of view article about the Wikipedia, how a page evolves and the people behind it.
• How to spot the dreaded non-coding architect - Not IT strategists but does apply to project leads and third party consultants. Scarier then Cthulhi.
• Ajax Rain, a collection of Javascript, DHTML, Ajax Inspiration - about 200 scripts! Use the tag cloud to search/filter for particular libraries.

Culture

• Hormiga Canyon - a SciFi short story by Rudy Rucker & Bruce Sterling
• Maelstrom II: an independent film of an Arthur C. Clarke SciFi short story - “Cliff Leyland, a down-on-his-luck worker who hitches a ride on a freight capsule from the moon to earth in order to save money. As the protagonist is catapulted homeward, power to the electromagnetic launcher fails — sending him into an unstable orbit around the moon. Thus begins a race against time to save him before he crashes into the lunar surface.” from “The Wind from the Sun” collection published in 1972.
• Kanye West Is Akira - The video for Kanye West’s new single takes major inspiration from Katsuhiro Otomo’s classic AKIRA film.
• Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s is doing Virtual Tokyo in Second Life - I thought Tokyo WAS a virtual world inside Second Life!
• The Misadventures of Hello Cthulhu - Cthulhu meets Hello Kitty : a HP Kawaii Horror?

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Via PhotoJunkie I came across Infest Wisely, a lo-fi sci-fi movie.

Shot in Toronto and made up of seven segments - each by a different director (Jon Sasaki, Kirby Ferguson, Craig Macnaughton,Chris McCawley, Jim Munroe, Rose Bianchini,Benny Zenga - I saw its special advance screening (for $5) at UoT’s Innis Town Hall last night (May 18th).

Wow! A great story, well told. So, What is it about? “There’s a new, chewable nanotechnology that lets you take photos with your eyes, cures cancer and eliminates body odour. But the early adopters are realizing they got extra “features” they didn’t count on. And no one told them once they spread through the bloodstream, it’s harder to uninstall than your average computer virus.” Thats the setup. They handle that and the consequences much better that anything out of the Hollywood film/television establishment.

Made for ~CAD$ 900, in 6 weeks of shooting and 9 months post production, with lots of donated labour and gear (not to mention Celtx, the open source per-production software for scripting and story boarding).

If you missed the advanced screening you can checkout the trailer, request a screening at our local neighbourhood film festival or starting May 22 watch each of the 7 episodes, one each week from the web site (or there is also a feed).

The film is under a creative commons licence : Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs.

I may never go to a public washroom again, or look at a Cat quite the same way. Can I interest you in a stick of gum?

Update : The first episode Obsolete is out!

Meet Digger, a hacker whose psychological aversion to the Internets is so strong he’s turned to mugging ATMs for money.

Digger is play by Sean Lerner of TTC Rider, and TTC Subway Rider Efficiency Guide fame.

Cory thinks its Killer : Chewable eyeball cameras: sf video podcast

All the episodes are out as is a BitTorrent version, a 700MB high-resolution .AVI file with XVID compression suitable for full screen viewing.

And Infest Wisely is going to have its world premiere in Las Vegas next month at Defcon 15 the underground hacker convention.

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Cory Doctorow is coming home to Toronto and Queen street’s Bakka Books (697 Queen Street West) to launch his latest short story collection : Overclocked, Tomorrow - February 1st (2007). Come for the Tribe stay for the Whuffie.

Cory was interviewed earlier by Amber MacArthur at CityTv. And there was a great turn out at Bakka.

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Via Reuters.com, new that A flock of pigeons fitted with mobile phone backpacks is to be used to monitor air pollution.

Sounds like Charles Stross has been writting press releases (again).

Despite what some people think, this blog is not written by a flock of pigeons. Pigeons probably spell better.

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Author Richard Morgan has returned to the world(s) of Takeshi Kovacs first imaged in “Altered Carbon” and then “Broken Angels” in “Worken Furies”. Kovacs started as an “Envoy” in the service of the multi planetary system UN Protectorate, being narrowcast across space and re-sleeved into - mostly - the best generically engineered and enhanced combat bodies available. Worken Furies continues the promise as Kovacs is back on his home world of Harlan’s World.

I though of “Altered Carbon” as anti-hero cyberpunk meet’s “A Bridge to Far”, and “Broken Angels” was defiantly the same doing “The Maltese Falcon” So it seemed to me that “Worken Furies” seems to be channeling “Doctor Zhivago” or something by Tolstoy/Dostoevsky into the mix. (but then I might be stretching my search for a theme too far?)

Anyway. Lots of action and neat Tech, lots of twists and turns. Very much in the same vein as the first two books. It made for a very enjoyable read. 2 thumbs way up!

(Note: I did not like his “Market Forces” novel, which is not set the same universe. )

Lets hope there is more to read in this lively setting. (soon please Mr Morgan)

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Cthulhu Antenna Ball
It’s cute. It’s an Antenna Ball. It’s an earthly representation of the ultimate evil from beyond the stars.

It’s the Cthulhu Antenna Ball™.

via SF Signal! see also Dear Cthulhu. Time to start a cthulhu category?

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