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Google Books Promotes Banned Books for Banned Books Week
Google Book Search and the American Library Association have teamed up to offer searchable indices and library links to banned books, in celebration of Banned Books Week (Sept 23-30). Included in the catalog are 1984, Brave New World, Invisible Man, Cats Cradle, and many other titles.Link (via BoingBoing)
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Podcast of Doctorow’s “0wnz0red”
Part one of writer Cory Doctorow’s story about “trusted computing, geek culture, and getting root on your body” has been posted for your listening pleasure. The link below goes to his BoingBoing post on the story, along with links to the podcasts themselves.Link
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Earthlike Planets May be Common
Earthlike planets covered with deep oceans that could harbor life may be found in as many as a third of solar systems discovered outside of our own, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.Link
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New Hugo Award for 2007
The World Science Fiction Society business meetings conducted at LACon IV passed two WSFS constitutional amendments related to the Hugo Awards. The Best Editor Hugo Award has now been split into two categories: Best Editor Short Form and Best Editor Long Form. The short form award is for editors of magazines, anthologies and collections. The…
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“Chip Art” Wine Bottles
The Clos de la Tech winery offers bottles of wine with “chip art” embedded in the label. We have always liked the practice of Chateau Mouton Rothschild, which puts a new piece of modern art on its bottle each year. We decided to put “chip art” on our bottle–in the case of the 2000, two…
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Boldly going… nowhere!
Burn the land and boil the sea, but you can’t bring the sky to James T. In this amusing little nugget in the Daily Mail, William Shatner reveals he turned down an offer by Richard Branson to reach the final frontier aboard Virgin Galactic. His reason: Shatner is scared by the prospect of space travel.…
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Volunteer to be a Mars Explorer
The Mars Society is looking for a few good men (and women) to spend four months holed up in an artificial igloo or tromping around the Canadian Arctic in bulky faux spacesuits. This won’t be an extended vacation, or a reality-TV plotline. For rocket scientist Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society, next year’s exercise…
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Porn Films For Robosexuals
From Defective Yeti: Some Like It Bot Rebel Without A Program Output Anything Uncanny Valley of the Dolls The Old Man and the PC Anode What You Did Last Summer Cool Grasping Mechanism Luke Neural Network Cape Amphere Schindler’s Array The Cogfather ROMadeus A Roomba With A View In the Heat Of The Byte Unborgiven…
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A Mildly Creepy Use of Biometrics
Rome City Schools in Rome, GA is switching to a scanning system that lets students use their fingerprints to access their lunch money accounts. In the past, students had to punch in a PIN numbers.* Students like it because they don’t have to, y’know, remember a number or anything hard like that. Some parents are…
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Blogs: Why Bother?
When I mentioned that the O*W*C was about to launch a blog, one of the other hosts asked why; after all, we already had a message board. There’s a pretty good discussion of the differences between the two here at CommonCraft.As I see it, this blog will be a little like a daily version of…