Wednesday, 31st of March, 2004

This is awesome. Pictures of (and description of) things that are just broken - they just don’t work, and should be fixed… A lot of them are signs and computer error pop-ups with instructions that are just terribly unhelpful. Go look at this one, taken near Bermagui in NSW. The contributor’s comment is priceless.

Monday, 29th of March, 2004

Just mentioned over in the book reviews (see sidebar), The Fortean Bureau calls itself a Magazine of Speculative Fiction. Other than the redoutable Cory Doctorow I’d heard of few of the contributors, but Jay Lake is a name that’s been coming up a lot in things like Locus Mag (compulsory monthly reading)… His The Set Of All Even Primes is a beautiful experimental story with a lovely not-very-hidden message.

Thursday, 25th of March, 2004

Warning! New book reviews going up right now! Starting with Linda Nagata’s brilliant first novel The Bohr Maker and going up from there, check ‘em out!

Saturday, 20th of March, 2004

Speaking of gadgets (see Charlie Stross-related post below), Gizmodo asked Cory Doctorow:
What’s in Your Gadget Bag, Cory?
and the answers are rather fun! And speaking of the Doctorow man, Boing Boing has finally moved over to Movable Type, meaning separate pages for permalinked entries, and eventually a nice CSS design.

Courtesy of Cosma, here’s an old talk by Steven Weinberg on the topic of science and religion: A Designer Universe?
Last two sentences:
One of the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for intelligent people to be religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious. We should not retreat from this accomplishment.

Wednesday, 17th of March, 2004

Nice. Somebody posted in the FBi forums an inquiry about Japanese electronica, and since I know a fair bit about it, I put up a long and detailed reply - read the thread here. The original poster wrote: *kisses raven wetly*… *heh*

Once upon a time, when he was writing enough science fiction for such things to be said, Greg Egan was known as the ideas man of sf. Currently Greg seems tied up in fighting for refugees’ rights and doing theoretical physics (which is all great, but I wish he’d channel some of that into writing some human-rights-activist sf maybe, hm?); he’s still my all-time favourite author, but these days Charlie Stross holds a good claim for being sf’s new “ideas man”. And I must say I’m pretty inspired by his latest idea: his “One gadget I’d like to buy” describes a gadget I’d rather like too.
He describes a relatively cheap tablet iBook - with the processing power and hard-drive of an iBook, but no keyboard; input via stylus using Graffiti… He suggests no optical drive, but I think, despite the added weight & possible increase in dimensions, that for me a DVD/CDRW drive would be desirable - after all, I’d like to use it for listening to music, editing music, and even watching movies while off travelling.
But apart from that, what a wonderful idea. I’d jump at it, and I’d adapt to MacOS X in no time… Although I’d miss such lovely things as AudioMulch, so I don’t think I’d leave my PC behind.

The attraction of course, apart from its portability and lightness, is that at home it could be docked, or otherwise one could use a wireless keyboard and mouse, but it could just as easily be taken to bed, or taken on a train or plane. As Charlie says, “the desk is for writing. Editing a manuscript is something you do with a pen, sitting on the sofa or in bed with the material on your lap or spread around you.”
I do edit on the desktop, and as a budding editor I think my on-screen editing skills are quite superior (to whom? No, just “superior”!) But imagine editing on-screen, but in bed! Or on the floor, or whatever… With a pen, but maybe with a keyboard handy just in case… Still connected to the net via WiFi… Wondrous! A toy and half, and trust Charlie to dream it - a much less extreme extrapolation (accessible now, if only they’d do it) than his wondrous extrapolations into Singularity-space and beyond, after all.

UPDATE: I should mention, as it’s been niggling on my mind since I made this post, that of course Charlie’s point about his little dream gadget is that it’s affordable, pitched somewhere in between a PDA and a laptop rather than Microsoft’s Tablet PCs, which were priced as substitute laptop, which makes no sense.

Paul McAuley’s new novel White Devils is genius. I’m only 1/3 of the way through, but it’s just great. Marketed as a thriller, it is that, and thus it’s fast-paced, present-tense, and doesn’t leave a lot of room for characters you grow to know and love, but it’s also pure near-future hard-sf, with incisive scientific and political extrapolation, a very deep moral sensibility, and some fun ideas about cognitive science.

I really desparately need to review my backlog of books-read so I can get on with reviewing this! (Well I know, I gotta finish it first)
Let’s see… Linda Nagata’s extraordinary first novel The Bohr Maker, Alastair Reynolds‘ Absolution Gap, Steve Aylett’s Slaughtermatic (mind-blowing) and others… Richard Morgan’s very entertaining (and more than a little stomach-churning) Altered Carbon… And possibly more I’ve forgotten… The to-read pile is an entire bookshelf, overflowing, but among many many other things there’s the rest of Linda Nagata’s stuff, more Aylett, Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver (maybe I’ll wait till I have the whole Baroque Cycle to read… or maybe not!), Mary Gentle’s 1602: A Sundial on a Grave (looks fascinating), and an advance copy of Steph Swainston’s The Year Of Our War. The latter book is being touted as the Next Big Thing - “weird fiction” in the vein of M John Harrison or China Miéville… I have to admit that what I’ve read so far reads too much like fantasy for me. I loved what I read of China, but haven’t finished Perdido Street Station; I think for the moment, barring Terry Pratchett, I’m just not that interested in even weird contemporary fantasy; of course Charlie Stross’s big Merchant Princes series for Tor (of which I’ve read a little) will be a big exception… And so it goes. Oh! Let’s not forget Cory Doctorow’s Eastern Standard Tribe, which I have on my Palm but would rather like in paper form too - looks awesome, and I can’t wait for /usr/bin/god! And I also found Alexander Jablokov’s Nimbus, as recommended by Charlie Stross, at Parramatta’s wonderful Infinitas a couple of months ago… *sigh*

Tuesday, 16th of March, 2004

Well this little DJ isn’t very good at promoting himself, but anyway, as part of FBi’s collaboration with the Art Gallery of NSW’s art.afterhours program, I shall be DJing down at the Art Gallery’s Artbar tomorrow night (that’s Wednesday the 17th of March) from 7-8:30pm… The website says: “Enjoy a drink and the Man-Ray-inspired evening menu from 5pm.” You have to go simply to find out what the fuck a Man-Ray-inspired evening menu is!

You heard it here. Too late to come, maybe, but what the heck. Drop in, ok?

Friday, 5th of March, 2004

Being a bit of a city cyclist myself these days, I just have to point out the piece of art that is Graham’s cyclists’ metric for how likely one is to get killed on the roads.
I don’t agree with everything he says, but most of it, certainly! I have a feeling if Graham had ridden round Sydney (surely one of the world’s least bicycle-friendly cities?) he might be a little less severe about riding on the footpath, and being a Saab-driver as well I have to question their “+2″ status *heh* but anyway. Pure genius.

Wednesday, 3rd of March, 2004

Eileen Gunn, editor of online sf periodical The Infinite Matrix, asked a few SF writers, editors and the like for some pithy commentary on the election of Arnold Schwartzenegger as Gubernator… The responses are well worth reading, ranging from Cory Doctorow’s pithy summary to Michael Blumlein’s… interesting take.

Chris Lawson, Australia’s best hard-science-fiction-author-who-is-a-GP, has two excellent recent posts on his Frankenblog. Why general practice is choking should by all rights get you very angry with the government and the legal profession (and I should point out that my Dad’s a GP and I work once or twice a week in the office, so I know what it’s like); here’s a choice quote:

While the government refuses to increase Medicare payments to GPs in any significant way, it has increased the Medicare levy to pay for the Gulf War and the East Timor expedition; thus the Australian government has been willing to raise the health care tax for military adventures, but not for health care.

Orson Scott Dumpty falls off the wall is his point-by-point analysis of blockbuster sf author and Mormon Orson Scott Card’s recent diatribe against homosexual marriage. Card wrote the wonderful Ender’s Game, but his often hard-right politics, and his emphatic homophobia, has alienated many of his readers (this one included) - and his latest outburst (in response to recent happenings in San Francisco, of course) won’t win him any of them back.
Thanks Chris, for your continuing eloquence! Everyone should now go an find a copy of his collection Mirror Danse Press.

Via Chris (aka the estimable Kit Brasch, here’s a fascinating post about dealing with a lunatic. Basically Tasha Robinson wanted to interview Dave Sim (creator of Cerebus, whose last issue is about to come out, and who has gradually gone insane during his nearly-30-year stint doing the comic) for The Onion’s AV Club (the non-satirical arts/entertainment reviews section of The Onion). I can only recommend you read it to discover the intricacies of, well, any kind of conversation with the man…
However, it’s nice to see in her quick updates that the interview (by fax) is coming along very nicely, and it sounds like it’ll be a must read - as much for good comics reasons (Sim is, despite his, er, eccentricities, still one of the greatest comics craftsmen/artists there is) as for his weird politics and roundabout reasoning.