For a take on the Hugos from a Biology perspective, you might enjoy these three from Peggy… Shoggoths in Bloom by Elizabeth Bear, Exhalation by Ted Chiang, and Erdmann Nexus by Nancy Kress. Three more stories I need to hunt down and read.
Discover Magazine has an excellent interview with Jaime Paglia about the inspiration for a show he produces called Eureka; much of it comes from MIT. The NY Times has a review of Sunday’s ABC SF pilot Defying Gravity that makes it sound even more interesting than I previously suspected. Also in the NY Times, GUILLERMO del TORO and CHUCK HOGAN have an Op-Ed piece on Why Vampires Never Die. Finally, io9 has collected up some of the best last lines from science fiction novels in one place for us.
Graphing real-world data in real time in a 3D virtual world… that is what Glasshouse is all about, and it is pretty amazing. It works in environments like Second Life, or as a stand-alone using the Sun Java JRE6 or JDK6. You can read a good interview and watch some video demo’s over at Maxping, and if you have Java installed try out the Applet environment. This is an excellent tool for making complex arrays of data visually comprehensible, such as genomic progressions, biochemical reactions, or N-body gravity interactions.
Duncan Jones will be interviewed on Sci-Friday on NPR tomorrow, talking about his movie Moon. They will also be looking into an inexpensive microscope made out of a cell phone and some inexpensive parts; if you want to build your own, you can find details here.
No, it’s not the name of a band; you can actually listen to the human genome, streamed as live audio, over at DNA Radio. They are currently broadcasting Chromosome 1, and at their present rate of data rendering they figure they will have played it all in 23 years or so. Comic-Con, started as a fan-organized event, has turned into a major marketing event with serious money at stake. While I think everyone already realizes this, nothing brings it home like an article in Bloomberg, the financial news organization. They do touch on a few of the movies to be premiered at the event as well.
That’s right, today is Nicola Tesla’s 153rd Birthday. The man who invented AC power, the electric motor, the florescent light (years before Edison came up with the incandescent light bulb), the field of RC and the first Remote Control vehicle (a boat), the audio speaker, and Radio (no, it wasn’t Marconi; his patents were invalidated in 1943). He also invented the Tesla Coil and Broadcast Power (never deployed because no one could figure out how to put a meter on it for billing purposes), and there was a rumor that he built a book-sized vibrator that could topple buildings and caused an earthquake. He contributed to a lot of other fields, including Robotics and Radar, he has a ton of published articles and patents, and my favorite bit: he was the guy for whom the phrase Mad Scientist was coined! Happy Birthday, Nicky!