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I have posted several times on the Battlestar Galactica webisodes, with a storyline that bridges the gap between the two halves of the final season. There are some other webisodes worth a visit, including The Recruit. This one tells the story of the Marines who volunteered to be guinea pigs in hopes of gaining powers to make them better soldiers, and is running between the two story arcs in the current Heroes season. They are also running a lot of other quality related material, including another webisode series, Hard Knox. Another fun webisode set is from Chuck, with a series of Buy More Employee Tips. Not all great webisodes are from NBC/Universal; Lisa Kudrow has an excellent new series online called Web Therapy you should take a look at, with all the biting humor you have come to expect from her.

Not only has the Turing Test been passed, but it was the IEEE who accepted the computer as a human, publised its paper, and asked it to chair a session at the CSSE (Computer Science and Software Engineering) 2008 Conference held a few weeks ago. Alan Turing proposed a test of intelligence as a replacement for the question “Can machines think?” back in 1950, and there is even an award, the Loebner Prize, for whoever pulls it off. The test itself is simple: if a conversation with the computer was indistinguishable from that with a human,the computer could be said to be thinking. The machine that generated the paper accepted by the world’s leading professional association for the advancement of technology was SCIgen – An Automatic CS Paper Generator, and this is not the first time it passed for human. This MIT-built program was also accepted to the 2005 WMSCI conference and has been published elsewhere; you can get details on its blog.

Not much of a present, Universe! On Christmas Day we lost Leo Frankowski, a science fiction author best known for his Adventures of Conrad Stargard. IO9 has a good review (warning: with LOTS of spoilers) of this years Doctor Who Christmas Special. Of course, if you live in the UK, no spoilers at all, since it aired two days ago there. One last thought for today; do you know your place on the Geek Hierarchy? If not (or even if you think you do), you should really check that flowchart.

There are tons of places to watch science fiction online, with each site having its share. Sometimes it can be hard to find what you are looking for, but the Crotchety Old Fan’s Classic Science Fiction Channel makes it a bit easier. He doesn’t host the films or TV shows himself, but links to the content on Archive.org, Hulu, Veoh, Classic Cinema Online, and more, filtering it for the good stuff so you don’t have to hunt for it. There is a new issue of Antipodian SF online, with a new URL for the down-under site. They are still tweaking the new layout, but the content (excellent free flash-sf stories) is all in place for the December issue. If you are looking for back issues, they are archived at Pandora, the National Library of Australia’s online repository. Not to be confused with the Pandora Internet Radio service, and yes, that link is to my indi/anime/jrock oriented station.