Core Dump

ABC's new series, Masters of Science Fiction premieres this Saturday, August 4th. The first episode is "A Clean Escape", based on a story by John Kessel. I'm especially looking forward to "Jerry Was a Man" (Robert A. Heinlein) and "The Discarded" (Harlan Ellison). I hope the series does well - there are a lot of SF short stories that would translate well to TV.

Labels: movies and television, SF

Cyberheritage is a site that links to scads and scads of historical photographs. It's not very organized - in fact it's one of the ugliest, most disorganized sites I've come across in a long time, but don't let that discourage you from browsing it. There's a treasure trove of material here. A lot of it is about British subjects, especially Plymouth where the author of the site lives, but there's quite a mix of other stuff, if you can find it.

Labels: history, photography

Max Mayfield, former director of the National Hurricane Center, now has a blog. If you live anywhere on the East or Gulf coasts, this should be a must read. And if you can find an RSS feed link for it, please let me know where it is.

Labels: environment

eWeek has put together a web-based slide show that runs through using Sun's ODF plug-in for Microsoft Office. It looks like there are some issues with the conversions. If you're working in an environment that mixes MS Office and OpenOffice.org, you'll definitely want to look at this.

Labels: Office 2007

Last week, while I was on holidays, we went to the Ontario Science Centre and took in Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition, which as it's title suggests, is an exhibition of over 200 artifacts recovered from the ill=fated Titanic. It's rather more than just a collection of stuff in glass cases though, as they do a really good job of providing historical context, showing what life would have been like for the passengers on board the ship, and providing capsule biographies of some of the people who sailed on her.

Along with the exhibit, you can go to the OmniMax theatre and see Titanica, which takes you under the sea to the ship itself. I prefer the straight IMAX format to the domed OmniMax theatre - I find that the dome introduces too many visual distortions - but the film is still worth seeing.

I'd definitely recommended this exhibition. It's well done and very interesting.

Labels: history

John Scalzi (author of Old Man's War and The Ghost Brigade) has an interesting post on his blog about some of the conspiracy theories that have been making the rounds of the Internet recently. Well worth reading, including the readers' comments following the post.

There seems to be an uptick these days in the concern that the Bush administration, sometime before November 2008 will cancel the elections, institute martial law, and implode the democracy we spent 221 years working on solely to remain in power. And this concern isn't just coming from the usual nutbag corners; people who I know are sane are vexed with themselves because they see the various executive orders and policies the Bushies have pushed and can logically see how they're positioned for a coup of the Constitution of the United States, and they can't convince themselves that the Bushies won't try it. The Bush administration has caused even the sane people to get all tin-foil-y.

Okay.

First: Deep breath, everyone. Seriously, find your happy place inside before we go any further. Yes, pat that imaginary pony and feed it a sugar lump. Imaginary pony loves you. Feel better? Excellent.

Second: The coup ain't gonna happen. It's just not.

Labels: politics

These days, I do most of my music listening on my PC or MP3 player. I have a decent 5.1 music system hooked up to the TV downstairs, but it's pretty rare for me to get the chance to listen to music on it. For the last few years my PC speakers have been a set of Creative Soundworks speakers that I bought sometime around 2000. They were a very good set of speakers for the price ($75) and quite a bit better than some of the newer speakers I've heard. But recently, the subwoofer has been getting "sick", with intermittent episodes where the bass would pretty much disappear. It was time to replace them.

After looking at a series of reviews on the Internet, I decided on a set of Altec-Lansing 4121s. These are a 2.1 system and what decided me on them was the bass and treble controls on the right speaker. But it turned out they sounded a lot better in the store than they did at home. While the bass was good, solid and tight, they were seriously deficient in the midrange. Vocals sounded distant - tinny and thin. After spending a day trying various EQ settings in my software, I gave up and returned them to Future Shop.

I had originally intended to buy a set of Logitech Z-4is, which BestBuy had on sale recently, but missed the sale by a day. But checking the most recent BestBuy ads online, I saw they had Logitech's Z-2300s on sale, again for about half price, which brought them into my price range. I went to the store hoping to hear them, but of course they didn't have a set hooked up. Seeing that they were THX certified, I decided to take a chance on them, and I'm glad I did.

I had to rearrange my office furniture a bit to accommodate the subwoofer, which has an 8" driver and is correspondingly large and heavy. The satellites are about the same size as those on my Sony 5.1 system, though not as hefty. They sound fine, much better than the Altec's, nicely balanced and with pinpoint stereo imaging. The bass is plentiful, perhaps not quite as tight as the Altec's, but they go a full octave deeper. I listened to Guinnevre from the Crosby Stills and Nash box set, which has Jack Cassady playing bass, and the sound was rich, full, and solid. Right now I'm listening to Pharoah Sanders braying away at the end of The Creator Has a Master Plan, and it feels like I'm in the studio.

They're a really good set of speakers, especially at BestBuy's sale price ($120 CDN), and if you have room under your desk for the subwoofer.

Labels: technology

Funny.

Labels: funny

Reboot, the classic CG-animated cartoon series from the 1990s is coming back as a trilogy of movies. The producers will be setting up a social-networking site where fans can provide input on the content of the movies.

I'm looking forward to this. My kids loved the show and Nancy and I got quite hooked on it as well. The computer animation was good for the time and the show was full of IT-related in jokes.

Labels: movies and television, SF

Here's another tribute to SF writer Robert A. Heinlein, who was born 100 years ago this month.

In another hundred years, it will be interesting to see if the nuclear-powered spaceships and other technological marvels he predicted are with us. But nothing in his legacy will be more important than the spirit of liberty he championed and his belief that "this hairless embryo with the aching oversized brain case and the opposable thumb, this animal barely up from the apes will endure. Will endure and spread out to the stars and beyond, carrying with him his honesty and his insatiable curiosity, his unlimited courage and his noble essential decency."

Labels: SF

If you use Word 2007 and have to exchange documents with users who have an earlier verison of Word, you're probably familiar with Word's compatibility mode, which lets you save documents in Word 2003 and doesn't include any of Word's new features in the document. Word doesn't default to this mode and there doesn't seem to be any way to toggle it on permanently in the interface. However, you can force it by setting a registry key, as detailed in this post from the Word 2007 Bible blog.

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007

SF Signal has an overview of some upcoming science fiction and fantasy films. Unfortunately, most appear to be sequels. The Batman movie might be good.

Labels: movies and television, SF

Amazon has just published a long interview with William Gibson, whose new novel, Spook Country, is just out. (I have my copy on reserve at the library, yipee!) It's a pretty interesting interview (in three parts) and you can also read the whole unedited transcript.

Amazon.com: How do you research? If you want to write about, say, GPS, like you do in your new book, do you actively research it and seek out experts, or do you just perceive what's out there and make it your own?

Gibson: Well, I google it and get it wrong [laughter]. Or if I'm lucky, Cory Doctorow tells me I'm wrong but gives me a good fix for it. One of the things I discovered while I was writing Pattern Recognition is that I now think that any contemporary novel today has a kind of Google novel aura around it, where somebody's going to google everything in the text. So people--and this happened to me with Pattern Recognition--would find my footprints so to speak: well, he got this from here, and this information is on this site.

Labels: books

The New York Times has a long article about the competition between Fermilab in the US and CERN in Europe to find the Higgs Boson. It goes into more detail about some of the results coming out of Fermilab that were reported on earlier this year.

Earlier this summer, the physics world was jolted by a rumor that a team of scientists from the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, in Batavia, Ill., had found a bump in their data that might be a legendary particle that has haunted physicists for a generation. It is known colloquially as the Higgs boson and sometimes grandly as the “God particle.” According to the Standard Model that has ruled physics for 30 years, the Higgs endows elementary particles in the universe with mass.

The history of physics is full of bumps that could have been revolutionary but have disappeared like ghosts in the night, and this rumor of a possible Higgs sighting was not even the first this year. Most physicists who have heard this rumor think that this bump is likely to be another of those disappearing anomalies, like the trimuons that frustrated Dr. Weinberg. But then these same physicists point out that you never know.

The team, known as the D Zero collaboration and numbering some 600 physicists from 19 countries and 88 institutions, will not even say whether there is a bump in its data until the scientists have decided for sure that it is nature calling and not just a random statistical fluctuation.

Labels: science

Adobe has officially announced FrameMaker 8. I say "announced" and not "released" because you can only preorder it, and I didn't see a ship date on the site. New features appear to be pretty much in line with what's been shown at conferences earlier this year: better undo tracking, enhanced conditional features (including attribute-based conditions in structured FrameMaker), and Unicode support. DITA support is now part of the product and not a separate download, although the DITA functionality looks to be pretty much the same as what was in the DITA Application Pack.

I've been part of the beta program and overall I like this release. Although it's not earthshaking, it does add genuinely useful functionality. The enhanced revision tracking and boolean conditional expressions will make my life much easier on some projects.

Labels: FrameMaker

A couple of years ago I blogged about 14 characteristics that define a fascist regime. Now we have the mainstream (at least in the UK) press questioning whether the U.S. is on the road to becoming a fascist state, in the form of an article by Naomi Wolff in the Guardian. There's definitely some food for thought here.

t is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable - as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise.

Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.

And, of course, just in case some of you think I'm U.S. bashing here, we Canadians have elected our own version of George Bush, who seems intent on taking Canada down the same road.

Labels: politics

William Gibson's new novel, Spook Country, is out. It's not SF, but a mainstream novel using the same present setting as his last novel, Pattern Recognition. I couldn't finish Pattern Recognition - the book never grabbed me, but this one looks quite a bit more interesting. Here's what the Washington Post had to say about it:

Despite a full complement of thieves, pushers and pirates, Spook Country is less a conventional thriller than a devastatingly precise reflection of the American zeitgeist, and it bears comparison to the best work of Don DeLillo. Although he is a very different sort of writer, Gibson, like DeLillo, writes fiction that is powerfully attuned to the currents of dread, dismay and baffled fury that permeate our culture. Spook Country-- which is a beautifully multi-leveled title -- takes an unflinching look at that culture. With a clear eye and a minimum of editorial comment, Gibson shows us a country that has drifted dangerously from its governing principles, evoking a kind of ironic nostalgia for a time when, as one character puts it, "grown-ups still ran things." In Spook Country, Gibson takes another large step forward and reaffirms his position as one of the most astute and entertaining commentators on our astonishing, chaotic present. ·

Labels: books, SF

The Heavens Call is a Soviet film from 1959 about a mission to Mars. I've never heard of it (no surprise there), but it's hitting rep cinemas as part of a touring series of Soviet space and SF films. It looks like it's well worth seeing and the stills posted in the review are striking. I'll have to keep an eye out to see it shows up in Toronto sometime.

Labels: movies and television

And you thought you had a storage problem. Well, maybe you do, but not compared to the scientists at CERN, where one of the instruments in the Large Hadron Collider will generate 1 GB/second of data -- every second for a whole month. There's more on their storage issues and how they solved them in CIO.

Labels: science, technology

Peter F. Hamilton writes sprawling, hugely entertaining space opera. Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained were impossible to put down. Now his new book, The Dreaming Void, is out, at least in the UK, and is reviewed by Rick Kleffel. I'll be ordering a UK copy through Amazon as the Canadian edition won't be out until March 2008 and I'm not waiting!

But this is the first novel in a Peter F. Hamilton space opera trilogy. "Wait, there's more," is not just a motto, it's a religion, and probably one with millions of adherents spread throughout the known universe. Hamilton heads fearlessly where other science fiction writers have gone before, addressing notions of the Singularity as regards human civilization, then takes one Hamiltonian step beyond to put aliens in mix. It doesn't have the sort of cutting-edge effect as when either Charles Stross or Cory Doctorow talks about the concept. Hamilton's not up to that sort of thing. No, it just makes his ridiculously complex universe even more complex and correspondingly more fun.

Labels: SF

Elliot Kimber (aka Dr. Macro) has an interesting post on XML authoring with InDesign CS3. It kind of makes me wonder if Adobe is planning to try to eventually switch FrameMaker users to InDesign. Certainly, no FrameMaker user I can think of would have made that switch five years ago, but I see posts by people who are seriously contemplating it now. My own take on it is that it might be easier to graft InDesign's excellent type-rendering engine into FrameMaker, but there isn't any indication that Adobe is moving in this direction.

Labels: FrameMaker, XML

I saw The Transformers earlier this week. It was about what I expected: loud, flashy, and excruciatingly stupid. But the special effects were outstanding, which is the only reason I went to see it. Popular Mechanics has an in-depth article about the movie's effects.

Labels: movies and television

The Microsoft Word team blog has a post on how they use the new features of Word to manage their own specifications.

1. We write specs using a common template and then to save/upload them to a SharePoint site.
2. A application we created called 'the spec solution' extracts and manipulates information from the specs such as name of the program manager, their team, how close the spec is to being competed, when we expect the spec to be complete, etc.
3. Finally, the spec solution uses this data that it 'reads' from all of the specs to generate a new Word document for management to let them know how all the specs across Office are coming along.

In other words, we write documents that this 'solution' reads. The solution then uses data from those documents to write summary documents.

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007

Just in case you're wondering why posts have been spotty the last few days, I'm on vacation. We're not doing any major travelling though we do have some day trips planned, including a visit to the Ontario Science Centre to see the Titanic exhibition. So I'm taking it easy.

Labels: Core Dump

Here's yet another guide to English punctuation. It's part of WikiHow, which has several other language-related articles.

Labels: language

SF reviewer extraordinaire, Rich Horton, has posted his commentary and picks for the 2007 Hugo novel award. His first choice is Peter Watts Blindsight, which I've not yet read, but will eventually. Watts has released Blindsight under a Creative Commons license and you can download it freely.

Out of the two books I've read (Charles Stross' Glasshouse and Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End, I'd pick Glasshouse. This year's list is fairly strong, with only one novel that I'd consider not belonging on the list.

Labels: SF

If you thought you couldn't do much to spruce up your average bookcart, then you'd be wrong, and you'd be seriously underestimating both the imagination and the sense of humour of the library community. Here are the results of the Pimp My Bookcart contest.

Labels: funny

Bunnies Blog, written by Bunnie Huang, has been running a series on manufacturing in China, starting here. I strongly recommend reading this -- not only is it absolutely fascinating, but it'll give you a real understanding of just what North American manufacturers are up against.

Labels: technology

BoingBoing has posted links to some QuickTime VR panoramas of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. The scale and complexity of this device is amazing.

Labels: science

Eye Magazine has run a couple of articles on the woeful state of the signage in Toronto's TTC system. Generally it's not very functional and almost never elegant. About the only exception is the St. George subway station, which was used as a pilot to improve the networks signage in 1992, but it was never expanded to the other stations. There are a couple of online supplements to the printed article: part one and part two.

This is not about aesthetics, Clark points out. “It's not centrally about selecting a font you like. It may not even be about selecting one font... a rational system might have many fonts. It might have at least two, you never know. Because it's not about, ‘I really don't like Helvetica.' No, no, no – it has nothing to do with that. It's all about rational choices based on performance, which an intelligent person can assess upfront, then you make prototypes, then you test the hell out of them. And it's all about function, right?”

Indeed, wayfinding signs are not decorations, as you'd realize in an emergency if you needed the sign directing you to the exit, or if you had poor vision and needed to figure out which train goes eastbound. Right now, signage is a responsibility of the marketing department. “That means that the sign you need to get out of Donlands station when it's on fire is equivalent to the station domination [advertising] campaign for Bud Light,” Clark says.

Labels: places

Microsoft's Brian Jones has written a fairly long post about the document model behind WordprocessingML and the reasoning behind some of the design decisions.

The WordprocessingML format represents a stream of content (the data), and the formatting associated with it. Word does not work on this data in a hierarchical manner, nor does it infer a hierarchy when working with it. As such, there is no hierarchy stored in the file format. The way that you impose any type of hierarchy or semantics is through the use of structured document tags (SDTs) like content controls, custom XML, etc.. That hierarchy will then be reflected in the document content and in the file format.

If you intend to use wordprocessingML as a pure data interchange format, and you want the data to be hierarchical in nature, then you will want to use the SDTs in your document for this hierarchy. We actually do this today in our workflows in Microsoft, such as our spec library where we leverage the SDTs to structure the specs for easy interrogation of the spec collection.

Other approaches folks have used to get semantics out of the document would be through the use of styles. Remember though that the Styles are flat since they are just a property of the paragraph or run of text.

The vital thing to understand is formatting itself should not be viewed as structure. The "view" of the data is not PART of the data. The "view" is separate. The fact that you have Heading 2 after heading 1 does not imply a structural relationship between the 2 headings – merely that they LOOK different. In a world that espouses the separation of data and view, this is a great model. There is no attempt to try to invent some hierarchical representation based on the view of the data.

This is well worth a good, close read if you plan on using any of the XML features of Word.

Labels: Microsoft Word, XML

Madcap Software has announced the release of Flare 3. New features include:
- Source control integration
- Enhancements to the WebHelp format
- Advanced FrameMaker import and support
- Improvements to the Flare interface

You can find out more on the MadCap web site.

The Toronto STC chapter newsletter recently published my review of Flare 2.5.

Labels: software, technical communication

Merriam Webster has added some 100 new words to the 2007 edition of the Collegiate dictionary, and some of them are listed on the M-W web site. I knew most of them, but a few, like crunk and chaebol had me baffled.

Labels: language

Today is the 40th anniversary of Telstar, which was the first satellite to broadcast live television. I can remember the first trans-Atlantic telecast, in very grainy black-and-white. The world shrunk a lot that day. It's pretty amazing that only 40 years later we have Live Earth.

And Telstar became, of course, one of the coolest surf-rock instrumentals of all time.

Labels: history, technology

Sometimes, to really see what's going on around you, you have to step back a bit. SF author and futurist, Bruce Sterling, tries to describe the present environment to someone from 1977.

I'm trying to work out how I'd go about explaining this news item from WOWinsider to someone thirty years ago, in 1977, and it is making my head hurt because there are too many prior assumptions nested recursively inside it to unpack easily. (Unless the person in 1977 who I'm trying to explain it to is John Brunner, who I think would get it first time.)

Okay, let's take it from the top:

There exists a vast, global data network for exchanging information between computers. It's called the internet. It's used by corporations and governments and other groups such as people who like to dress up as furry animals to keep tabs on us.

These computers aren't just big mainframes; most of them are small brightly coloured consumer items. Some of them are disguised as pocket radio telephones that play music and double as television cameras. (Yes, TV cameras the size of a pocket calculator.)

People use their personal computers for playing games. (Some people have more than one computer.) Many of the games run over this "internet" and let people play against, or with, each other in teams in imaginary cartoonish worlds where they can take on the character of mighty-thewed barbarian heroes or dress up as furry animals. (Yes, the personal computers have flat colour television screens to display data. Why do you ask?) They can also chat to each other by typing on their computer keyboards.

Labels: technology

As flash drives become bigger, people are using them for more than just file storage and transfer. Many software applications are being designed to be portable, so that they can be run from a flash drive without writing anything to the host PC. Research Buzz has a post about PortableFreeware.com, a site that lists and describes such applications.

The front page has the last 100 entries that you can browse through, or you can browse through all the available apps (over 1100 of ‘em.) Be sure to read the about page for an explanation of what’s considered portable and what’s considered freeware.

The listings contain an overview of the software, link to screenshot and Web site, how to extract it, where its settings are written, system requirements, applicable categories, etc. There’s also a space for comments in each listing, and the comments are unusually good. Comments may include pointers to more recent editions, some concerns about being truly portable (if the application writes to the registry, for example), requests for help (and help solutions), recommendations for other software, and so on. Be sure to read the comments before you make a decision on whether you’re going to download the software.

Of course, you don't need a flash drive for this software - it'll run on a PC and without cluttering up your registry or system directories.

Labels: software

A comic about what someone thinks should happen to the inventor of Comic Sans.

Labels: funny

In celebration of yesterday's Heinlein centennial, SF Signal has posted a large collection of Heinlein-related links.

Labels: SF

Being free of the munchkins for an evening last night, Nancy and I decided to hit the local eateries. We had supper at the Waterfront Bistro at the foot of Liverpool Road, overlooking the lake and Frenchman's Bay. We'd eaten there quite a while ago, not long after we moved to Pickering, and it was expensive and not very good. It's still expensive, but the quality is a lot better. It's not someplace I'll go often, but we might go back for special occasions.

After supper, we had dessert at a new cafe called the Creme Bruleé Dessert Cafe in the new townhouses on the west side of Liverpool. It was outstanding. Nancy had a "Chocolate Bombe" and I had a caramel apple pecan cheesecake. It was the best dessert we've had in years. We will be going back, probably not as often as we'd like, but more often than we should.

Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Robert A. Heinlein, arguably the most influential science fiction writer of the 20th century. It might be an overstatement to say that Heinlein invented modern science fiction, but it would certainly be very different without him. He raised the bar dramatically when he began publishing - his stories and novels were far ahead of anything that had been written before. In the 1950s, the series of juvenile novels that he wrote for Scribners were hugely influential on a new generation of scientists and engineers.

In my own case, I discovered Heinlein and science fiction due to a kind school librarian who, after I had read all the science books in the school library, handed me a copy of Heinlein's Red Planet with the fateful words, "Well if you like science books, you might like this". Truer words were never spoken - I read it through in one evening and went back for more. I can't imagine what my life would have been like had I not discovered science fiction - it's been one of the major influences on my character and intellectual development, and it all stems from that first Robert Heinlein novel.

There's a celebration of Heinlein's life and career being held in Kansas City this weekend, and much more about his work on the Heinlein Society web site.

Update: A post on Slashdot mentions this article in the Space Review, which discusses Heinlein's influence on the space program.

... it is worth looking at a rather amazing memo that Heinlein wrote in 1945 advocating a rigorous American missile and space program. Heinlein wrote it soon after the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Japan. He argued that the bomb had changed the world and he believed that intercontinental rockets would also have a major effect on warfare. He wanted the United States to get out in front of this new development like it had with the bomb.

There are many interesting aspects to the memo, but what is unique about it is that it occupies a point precisely in the middle of the overlap between science fiction and current reality. Although Heinlein thought that he was discussing the world as it was—or was about to be—his own interests in rockets and spaceflight were biasing his projections. He was advocating solutions to current problems that were far more fantastical than practical. Heinlein was certainly not alone in this. Many people looked at the atomic bomb and made dire predictions that fortunately proved false. But Heinlein believed in rocketry and spaceflight so fervently that it led him to conclusions that were not well-grounded in the actual technical realities of his day. That is worth considering today, six decades later, when Heinlein is still held in such high esteem as a prophet for the NewSpace movement.

Reason Magazine has another overview of Heinlein's life and his significance, but from a very different perspective.

California, and specifically Southern California, was key to Barry Goldwater's surprising 1964 GOP nomination victory. Goldwater's rough-hewn combination of a crusty, antigovernment attitude and extreme bellicosity against communism—which he saw as an unacceptable threat to American individualism—resonated deeply in Southern California at the time.

But the Goldwater surge was preceded by a mini-movement Heinlein tried to create in 1958 with the "Patrick Henry League," dedicated to the notion that the truest expression of U.S. liberty was preparing for a fight to the finish with international communism.

Heinlein laid some of these concepts out in his 1959 "Starship Troopers," offering up the idea that American liberty and a relentless fight against the Soviets were inextricably linked—a science fiction version of Goldwater's subsequent message. It presented a world of low taxes and few laws in which only veterans of public service could vote (not only military veterans, contrary to some Heinlein detractors who saw something fascist in the novel) and where brave young men gave the last full measure of devotion to defeat an insectoid alien menace that was a clear metaphor for communism.

Labels: SF

eWeek has published a profile of Tim Berners-Lee and his Semantic Web project. If you've been living in a cave for the last 15 years, Berners-Lee is the original developer of HTML and the web browser. His Semantic Web project attempts to make the Web smarter by better use of metadata (indexing) and linking. Sounds a lot like what technical writers do, doesn't it?

For some reason, the cover story doesn't seem to be available on the eWeek web site, but you can listen to a podcast of the original interview with Berners-Lee. I saw Berners-Lee speak about ten years ago in Toronto -- he's an articulate and engaging speaker, and this is worth listening to.

Labels: Internet

Wired has an interview with SF author Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars) and a his current trilogy, 40 Days of Rain, 50 Degrees Below, and Sixty Days and Counting, which is about climate change and what we can do about it. I've read the first two books and enjoyed them, though I don't think they're his best work.

We only have one planet to experiment with, and unexpected side effects and the consequences of these actions on a massive scale are so hard to predict. In the new trilogy, the big projects they do -- particularly the release of the engineered lichen -- are incredibly dangerous and unadvisable. What I wanted to suggest is that if things got desperate enough, there are governments that could decide to do things on their own and not wait for the rest of the world to approve. That could get bad.

In terms of geo-engineering, there's hardly a single project I think would be advisable. But if we fail to decarbonize, and it's 5 or 7 degrees hotter in 2050, there will be scientists and engineers saying they can fix it all with a silver bullet. And then the idea will be on the table.

If you pour salt in the North Atlantic because it's gotten too fresh and stalled the Gulf Stream, as in my book, then you're doing something relatively benign and un-dangerous. Salt would quickly diffuse; it wouldn't change much in the environment. It would be an attempt at remediation.

Labels: environment, SF

CustomizeGoogle is a Firefox extension that lets you customize many features of Google and adds many Google-related features to Firefox, for example, using Google Suggest words while you're typing. You can remove ads, add a counter to search results, remove click tracking, use a fixed width font in Gmail email bodies, and much more. If you use Firefox, this is a must.

Labels: software

In an incident that reminded me immediately of the death of Kitty Genovese in 1964, shoppers in a Kansas convenience store stepped over the body of stabbing victim, LaShanda Calloway, as she lay dying on the floor.

"It was tragic to watch,” police spokesman Gordon Bassham said Tuesday. “The fact that people were more interested in taking a picture with a cell phone and shopping for snacks rather than helping this innocent young woman is, frankly, revolting.”

The woman was stabbed during an altercation that was not part of a robbery, Bassham said. It took about two minutes for someone to call 911, he said.

Somewhere, more whipped dogs are whimpering.

Labels: The Crazy Years

Tom Johnson has a post about switching from desktop to online tools. I've blogged about this quite a bit myself, and I use several online tools regularly, including Bloglines, Google Docs and Spreadsheets, and Google Notebook. I also have a GMail account, which I use mostly to archive techwr-l posts.

Labels: Internet, software

China recently destroyed one of its aging weather satellites by hitting it with a ground-launched missile. Popular Mechanics has an article examining some of the military implications.

At 5:28 PM EST on Jan. 11, 2007, a satellite arced over southern China. It was small — just 6 ft. long — a tiny object in the heavens, steadily bleeping its location to ground stations below, just as it had every day for the past seven years. And then it was gone, transformed into a cloud of debris hurtling at nearly 16,000 mph along the main thoroughfare used by orbiting spacecraft.

It was not the start of the world's first war in space, but it could have been. It was just a test: The satellite was a defunct Chinese weather spacecraft. And the country that destroyed it was China. According to reports, a mobile launcher at the Songlin test facility near Xichang, in Sichuan province, lofted a multistage solid-fuel missile topped with a kinetic kill vehicle. Traveling nearly 18,000 mph, the kill vehicle intercepted the sat and — boom — obliterated it. "It was almost just a dead-reckoning flight with little control over the intercept path," says Phillip S. Clark, an independent British authority who has written widely on the Chinese and Russian space programs.

Labels: military, space

There's been some news coverage about a sworn affidavit by the press officer at Roswell, released after his death.

Haut died last year but left a sworn affidavit to be opened only after his death.

Last week, the text was released and asserts that the weather balloon claim was a cover story and that the real object had been recovered by the military and stored in a hangar.

Jerry Pournelle, who was involved in defence planning in the 1960s has quite a bit to say about that in his site today.

cannot imagine that any SAC officers or former SAC officers knew of technologies hidden away at Wright Patterson AFB and did not betray one hint to their brother SAC officers who were intimately involved in Project 75. One of our officers, Colonel Hale (who later went to Vandenberg to direct Blue Scout) was a SAC navigator. He had served his tour on the KC=135 group that operated at our furthest northern bases; if the balloon went up it would have been his mission to rendezvous with the B-52's coming north, refill their tanks over the Pole, and pump his own airplane dry. The KC's would have 2 minutes fuel to break away clean from the 52's, after which they were dead stick over the Arctic. That was part of the price to be paid for war.

In the name of heaven, why would any USAF officer, SAC or Systems Command or Intelligence hide significant technology from the SAC officers involved in designing and structuring the force? Why would some SAC troop from Roswell have hidden technology information from his brother officers who were willing to fly the refueling mission (and from those willing to fly the B-52's on their death run into the USSR)?

Labels: technology

Our local STC newsletter has published my review of Madcap Software's Flare. In general, I liked it a lot, and I'd certainly move to it immediately if I was a RoboHelp user. However, my workflow demands a single-sourcing workflow, and while you can do single sourcing with Flare, I prefer WebWorks ePublisher for that. But if online help is your primary deliverable, Flare looks pretty hard to beat.

Labels: software, technical communication

I've made no secret of my admiration for Richard Thompson, who like Neil Young, has been around since the 1960s and is still in fine form, both live and on record. Thompson's latest CD, Sweet Warrior, is excellent, certainly his best work since 1999's Mock Tudor, and one of the stronger CDs of his career.

His live performances, based on the couple of audience recordings from his recent tour that I've heard, are of a similar high standard. If you want to hear for yourself, NPR's All Songs Considered program recorded Thompson and band on his current tour. You can download a podcast of the whole 2-hour concert. Trust me on this one - you won't be disappointed.

Labels: music

Here's a hands-on report about the Apple iPhone from Salon. (You'll have to put up with an ad to read it). Sounds like a great device hobbled by a crappy phone network and Apple's decision to lock out third-party applications.

You need to use this phone for just a couple of minutes to realize that what you have in your hand is not at all a phone -- it truly is a brand-new kind of machine, a fully functional general-purpose computer in your pocket. But because Apple has (so far) prohibited third-party development on the phone, it's a stunted general-purpose computer, one that depends on a single, specific company for its every innovation. I would like to see an iPhone version of Google Gears, the new app that stores Internet content offline, so that, while I'm connected to Wi-Fi, my phone could slurp up hundreds of blog posts for me to read when I'm on a plane. But I can't do that unless Apple allows it. I would like to see an iPhone version of Skype, and Quicken, and Pandora, and of course Firefox -- my kingdom for an iPhone Firefox and its bazillion plug-ins!

But the iPhone is locked down. And I can't help wondering if it will ever match its potential.

Labels: technology

The GTA (Greater Toronto Area) is notorious for urban sprawl -- development has run rampant over some of the best farmland in Canada. We're not the only ones with that problem though, as this Wunderground blog post about Florida shows.

Labels: environment