The Early Days of a Better Nation

Thursday, November 27, 2008



Considerations on the description of Odontochelys semitestacea, Li C, Wu X-C, Rieppel O, Wang L-T, Zhao L-J (2008)

Two more gaps in the fossil record,
Two more beasts in Noah's Ark.
Science marches, ever upward.
Comment threads are rife with snark.

What'll they say at AiG?
What'll we hear from the ICR?
What'er it is, we know it will be
some fleer to show how miffed they are.

'An artifact of preservation.'
'Not on the "ancestral" line.'
'That's only your interpretation!'
'It's still the same created kind.'

To certain wonders of creation
an eye of certain faith is blind.
But we can raise a generation
that wonders at the shuttered mind.

Science marches, ever upward.
Comment threads are rife with snark.
Two more gaps in the fossil record.
Two more beasts in Noah's Ark.

[Last four verses added later.]
4 comments | Permanent link to this post

Wednesday, November 26, 2008



Why Do They Slander Airstrip One?



Oceania, and all its constituent republics including Airstrip One, are strong and free. This undeniable fact is admitted by all progressive and objectively-thinking mankind.

A recent work by the homosexual-linked, 'public'-schooled, former colonial-police-agent emigre Blair published in the provisional capital of Eastasia Eurasia grotesquely slanders the state and social system of Oceania, in evident covert sympathy with the long-established aggressive designs and absurd ideological contortions of Neo-Confucianism National Bolshevism.

In Mr. Blair's pornographic depiction, from the contamination of whose foul and depraved fantasies the Ministry of Truth has quite rightly protected the citizens of Oceania, the ludicrous impression is given that freedom of speech does not exist in our country! In Airstrip One - the land of Milton, of Shakespeare, of Paine, of Shaw! Our workers in the Prolefeed factories have unanimously repudiated this slander with indignation and disgust. They have, after wide-ranging discussion, refused to have any part in propagating such evident lies. Precisely because true freedom of speech exists and is proudly upheld in Oceania, the workers in the relevant industries - who are, obviously, those most directly concerned - have freely voted not to print or otherwise circulate the unhinged rantings of our 'liberal' and 'socialist' critic - who, it should be noted, chose to have his 'satire' published not in the land for whose liberty he supposedly sighs, but in that temporarily dominated by Eastasia its deadly opponent. Their refusal to connive in manifest treason is, of course, the Prolefeed workers' constitutional unquestionable right. Let the deranged or tragically suborned theoreticians of Neo-Confucianism National Bolshevism rant and rave - but let them demonstrate one instance of such freedom in their equivalent institutions so-called 'free' media!

Of particular depravity is 'our' 'free-thinking' author's insinuation that the Ministry of Truth endorses and even practices heinous forms of torture. This allegation, as is well known, directly echoes the propaganda of the Eastasian Eurasian Mandarinate of Popular Education Commissariat of Enlightenment, whose unspeakable perversions have outraged the entire civilised world - but not, apparently, Mr. Blair. Some 'humanism'!

Finally, the objective reader cannot fail to note the revolting racially divisive intent of 'our' author's naming of his dubious 'hero': Winston Smith. As is well known, people whose ancestry can be traced to the former slave populations of the former colonial territories of the now-liberated and fully-integrated 'West Indies' enjoy complete and unrestricted equality in rights and privileges with all other citizens of Airstrip One.
28 comments | Permanent link to this post

Monday, November 24, 2008



Hitler finds his name on BNP membership list, chews rug

Yet another Downfall mashup. 'Now people will think I am some kind of Nazi.' Priceless. The perpetrator of this outrage has his own thoughtful reflections on the Downfall mashup meme and links to others.
3 comments | Permanent link to this post

Sunday, November 23, 2008



Worlds of Yesterday's Tomorrow

Star Wars: A New Heap, or, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Death Star is an intriguing web-essay on connections between SF film, modern architecture, and other odd angles.

Altogether elsewhere, but not unconnected: the architecture of occupied Kabul.
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Worlds of Tomorrow

I have a (commissioned and expert-advised) short story about what it might be like to be a space tourist in 2103 in the January 2009 issue of Focus, the BBC's glossy magazine of science, technology and the future. I've seen a PDF version of the pages with the colour pictures and sidebar boxes and everything and they look great. It's a big thrill to see the space cruise liner as envisaged by Duncan Steel (the expert) and described by me depicted in all its clunky glory - not to mention seeing the very same photo of Earth from low orbit that I had on my desktop and from which I described the view used as an illustration.

Some weeks ago Katherine Mangu-Ward, associate editor of Reason, the mainstream-user-friendly libertarian magazine, spoke to me on the phone about libertarianism in SF. She has quoted me and many others in her now-published article, which is about that great analytical engine of subversion, my US publisher Tor Books. In the Reason blog discussion someone refers to me as 'crazy old socialist Ken MacLeod'. It's an honour just to be nominated.

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10 comments | Permanent link to this post

Friday, November 21, 2008



Friday cat blogging takes on a whole new meaning



Darpa funds cognitive computing project:
IBM will join five US universities in an ambitious effort to integrate what is known from real biological systems with the results of supercomputer simulations of neurons. The team will then aim to produce for the first time an electronic system that behaves as the simulations do.

The longer-term goal is to create a system with the level of complexity of a cat's brain.
I for one welcome ... nah. We're doomed, I tell you. Doomed!
9 comments | Permanent link to this post

Saturday, November 15, 2008



A message from SFcrowsnest.com

Stephen Hunt, editor of SFcrowsnest.com, wants the world to know:
If you are a FaceBook user, please note, the SFcrowsnest.com Magazine FaceBook group has been hijacked. As of yesterday, any messages sent by it are NOT from SFcrowsnest.com staff or myself and should be treated as hostile – e.g. potentially containing or leading to scams, malware, compromised web pages and the like.

Please post news of this on your FaceBook profile and let all of your own FaceBook friends know as a matter of urgency.

Secondly, if you run a blog or zine, please spread news that the SFcrowsnest.com Magazine FaceBook group at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=21093694832 has been hijacked by hostiles and refer them to this warning which is now prominently linked from our own home page and can be found at http://www.SFcrowsnest.com/facebookhijack.php – I will keep this page updated with developments and any explanation/apology from FaceBook as and when (or if) I get it.

So far only the SFcrowsnest.com Magazine FaceBook group at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=21093694832 has been hijacked, but seeing it was myself that was singled out by FaceBook hackers, I would suggest also treating any messages from my Rule Jackelia FaceBook group at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=34257537930 and my personal Stephen Hunt FaceBook account at http://www.facebook.com/people/Stephen_Hunt/1321736585 as being fatally compromised, as I’m certainly not in control of these two accounts either anymore.
4 comments | Permanent link to this post

Thursday, November 13, 2008



Dot Communism

Cuba opts for Linux. (Via).
12 comments | Permanent link to this post

Tuesday, November 11, 2008



Dawn, stars, and frost

Breathtaking animation. Play around with the control buttons at the foot of the page. This must be from one of the places where even today the night sky is so dark and clear that you can see the lines joining up the stars in constellations, just like the ancients did. Via.
7 comments | Permanent link to this post



Coming attraction (local)

I'm giving a talk/reading at South Queensferry Library (on the 43 bus route - get off at Police Station stop then walk in the direction of travel to the next corner and cross the road at the foot of the hill carefully, children) tomorrow (Wednesday 12) at 7 p.m. The library is temptingly close to The Moorings, if anyone facies a drink afterwards.
5 comments | Permanent link to this post

Sunday, November 09, 2008



Traumatised, divided nation takes cautious step to the left

Well, that was one astonishing election victory. In other news: Edinburgh's City of Literature Trust has named a science fiction novel as next year's big read:
Thousands of free copies of Conan Doyle’s The Lost World will be distributed through libraries, schools and supporting partner organisations, together with a ‘quick read’ edition and a paperback comic biography on the life of Charles Darwin.

Meanwhile, Edinburgh publisher Canongate had already acquired the rights to two books by an American politician, and expects them to sell well.
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Monday, November 03, 2008



Obama




From over here it looks scarily close. I don't believe the polls for a second. There's the Bradley effect thing. There's the Nader-under-the-radar thing. There's the far-left anyone-but-Obama thing. (There must be some college students who are swayed by that.) There's the whole voter suppression and Diebold machines thing.

And then of course there's all the people who said they'd vote for Obama, see the polls showing him in the lead, and figure they don't need to vote. Young voters? I'd rely on young voters to hit the snooze button.

Most of all, though, there's the paradox that while nearly all the Americans I know personally are Obama supporters, and the sort of America Obama projects is very much the America I've seen when I've visited, I know that's only a fraction of America, and that the America I know from the outside is reflected perfectly in McCain-Palin. I can't help feeling it's out there, lurking. It's true that a reverse between opinion polls and actual votes on this scale would be unprecedented, but this is an unprecedented election.

Still, I'm not going to obsess about it. It's no skin off my nose. I don't live in the US, and I'm a science-fiction writer. If McCain-Palin win, I can look forward to a good decade or more of easy money from cheap gloom and cheap laughs. The rise of Nehemiah Scudder in a skirt and the devolution of the US into Gilead or some other dystopia would score me a fair few mainstream press pieces ('Can you do us 800 words on how you, as a science fiction writer, see ..?' Kaa-ching!) Sure, I have family in America, but by the same token they have family over here. We can put them up if necessary. Really, we can.

But if you live there and you want Obama to win, it might be a good idea to vote for him. That's all I'm saying.
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