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The Chronulator
ShareBrained Technology offers this wonderful and ridiculous open-source clock…thingie. You can buy it fully assembled, as a kit, or as a raw circuit board. If you’re really brave and/or have too much time on your hands, they even offer the circuit board layout so you can print your own. The Chronulator starts life as a…
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Happy Mutant Spawn
Cory Doctorow welcomed Poesy Emmeline Fibonacci Nautilus Taylor Doctorow yesterday morning. I like the baby photo on Wonderland better than the one on BoingBoing. (Also…Fibonacci?)
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Um…No.
Discover Magazine has a list entitled “20 Things You Didn’t Know About Science Fiction.” I believe a more accurate title would be, “20 Things You Didn’t Know About Science Fiction if You Weren’t a Fan and Maybe Didn’t Care About Even if You Were,” but perhaps that was too long. Not only is it the…
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The Alliance to Rescue Civilization
The grandly-named Alliance to Rescue Civilization is dedicated to creating continuously-staffed facilities on the Moon and other off-planet locations, in an effort to get all of humanity’s eggs out of one basket. The facilities would preserve backups of scientific and cultural achievements, and of “the species important to our civilization.” So I guess cows are…
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More Than You Ever Wanted to Know About Retconning
A retcon is retroactive continuity, the deliberate changing of previously established facts in a work of serial fiction. (Like Bobby Ewing showing up in the shower after being “dead” for a whole season, or Sherlock Holmes surviving the waterfall.) It’s popular in comic books, much to the dismay of long-time fans. Websnark has posted a…
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io9: New SF Blog
The Gawker Media juggernaut has seen fit to visit a new blog upon our little niche. io9 has the drink-from-the-firehose posting frequency seen on many of the other blogs in their stable, and the staff is well-versed in the subject matter. Here’s part of their manifesto: Earth is full of people who want to sell…
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Goodbye Holocene, Hello Anthropocene
A movement to declare the 10,000-year-old Holocene Epoch as finished is gaining steam amongst scientists. Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen suggested in 2000 that human activity was altering the planet sufficiently to rate a new epoch, and a couple of recent papers are giving the idea momentum. Among the major changes heralding this two-century-old man-made…
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Coraline Movie Footage
Neil Gaiman’s Hugo-award winning novella Coraline (beware, spoilers) is currently being made into an animated movie due out next January. Gaiman recently released some not-quite-final footage of the film. It looks suitably atmospheric. Weird voice credits, though: Dakota Fanning, Teri Hatcher, and that guy who plays PC in the Apple commercials. (via Neatorama)
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This Should be Entertaining
The Church of Scientology’s recent attempt to censor the Internet by trying to force sites to take down a creepy Tom Cruise Scientology video has roused the ire of a group of hackers, who are responding with extreme prejudice. A wiki set up for the project directs Anonymous members to download and use denial of…
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Remember This?
For those of you who had better things to do in 1983 than watch execrably bad SFTV, Automan was a short-lived series inspired (unofficially) by TRON. Produced by Glen A. Larson*, starring a perpetually-bewildered Desi Arnaz Jr. and Chuck Wagner’s hair, it did nothing to enhance the reputation of computer programmers. I’d completely forgotten about…