BBC Radio 4 is airing the first ever dramatization of Ursula Le Guin’s award winning and groundbreaking The Left Hand of Darkness beginning today at 15:00 UT. That’s right around 11AM EST, or 8AM Pacific, and besides airing in real time it will be available in their Listen Again mode for the next week or three. The one hour program is the first part of two, so make sure to catch them both so you can enjoy the whole story. It won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards as 1969’s best novel (one voted on by fans, one voted on by authors), and I can’t wait to hear it as a radio play. Another of her works is being aired beginning on the 27th of this month on BBC Radio 4Extra; Earthsea will be airing at 18:00 UT, and is a series of 6 episodes, 30 minutes long each. I’m not even going to try to tell you how many awards it won.
Terrestrial Human
While I am not generally a major Trance/Electronica/Synthpop fan, there are a few bands who always catch my attention and have me listening for anything they put out there. One of them is Perfume, a Japanese band who also co-hosts one of the top 3 music shows out of that country (at least in my opinion), Music Japan. The first track is their latest, Pick Me Up from earlier this year, the second is Dream Fighter from 2013 (posted online) or 2008 (album released). Listening to them now it is hard to believe they started life playing Shibuya-kei, but even that jazz-based art form with influences from Samba, Wall Of Noise, and Ye-Ye, had enough of the House and Synth flavor to foreshadow where they could end up.
Of all the Greatest Rap Battles in History entries, this one has to be the shortest in terms of actual unique word count, but it still cracked me up. And then they did the Rap Battle of the Five Armies; Enjoy!
A completely unsolicited Age of Ultron featurette in which we get a glimpse of the fun and hijinks behind the scenes.
This came out a while ago, but I had a chance to post it finally and thought that I should do so. It will be on the big screen in only a couple of weeks at this point, and I am quite excited to see how well they do with this one.
I swear this concept is based on the Rudy Rucker thought experiment turned into the novel The Hacker and the Ants, in which a programmer models virtual ants to work out a system of robotics driven by emergent behavior and mesh networking. That was in the early 1990s, when Rucker was a programmer at Autodesk, Inc., writing 3D CAD/CAM modeling software as his day job. With the state of the technology at that point, that story was officially science fiction; he could have copyrighted the concept, but there was no way to actually build any of it in the real world, therefore no patent. Pretty much the same way Aurthur C. Clarke lost a billion dollars in his spare time when he invented the geosynchronous satellite during WWII; it would be almost 20 years before anything could actually launch into terrestrial orbit, and more years after that before any of it could reach the geosynchronous sweet spot 23,400 miles up.
But now, decades later, the folks at Festo in Germany have done it; using a combination of 3D Printing, Piezoelectrics, Mesh Networking, Neural Networking, Heuristic Extrapolation, and just damn good programming, they have created Rucker’s Ants. And yes, it does look like they have hit on a system that supports Emergent Behavior as well. Mind, these ant-like androids are the size of your hand, but that is useful for a lot of tasks, and as they continue to develop the project, they will no doubt be able to miniaturize them more each year (scaling them up was never a problem). I have to wonder if Rucker’s new ant story, Attack Of The Giant Ants, was created once he learned of this project. Thanks to New Scientist for the heads up on this one!