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Comment A short list of some I would choose (Score 1) 1021

by lanthar (#29650117) Attached to: What Belongs In a High School Sci-Fi/Fantasy Lit Class?
Short stories:
Unfortunately, you'll find it is hard to get many short stories together that you want to use without picking a random anthology. Otherwise you'll be hunting all over for books. Instead I would really suggest that you get "The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One" a short story collection used by many SF classes. It actually includes several of the stories and authors I've already listed. See it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Science_Fiction_Hall_of_Fame_Volume_One,_1929-1964

Classic Novels:
- Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination : IMHO the best book ever. I reread it every year or so. Read the wikipedia page about it.
- Walter Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz : an excellent example nuclear apocalypse leading into cyclical history. (also refer to The Mote in God's Eye for the same theme and it's impact on an alien race after hundreds of repeats of nuclear war)
- A.E. Van Vogt, The Weapon Shops of Isher : a large conglomeration of gun rights supporters vs an empire. One quote was "The right to own weapons is the right to be free". Interestingly Van Vogt's writings later led to what became scientology. [note, I've just looked at the sf hall of fame book I mentioned and the short story version of this is included]
- Pohl / Kornbluth, The Space Merchants : an excellent treatment of the possibilities of capitalism + advertising taken to their extreme in an overpopulated world.
- Asimov, The Caves of Steel : A detective story featuring an overpopulated Earth, fear of robots replacing human jobs, and agoraphobia on the new planets that are minimally settled.
- The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two : this includes several other still applicable novellas such as "The Marching Morons" (surely used as the basis for the movie "Idiocracy" where advertising is used to direct the now moronic populace).
I'd pick more, but you only have one semester. I'm trying to think of some good environmental destruction stories, but nothing excellent is coming to mind that isn't a multi-book set. Anyone want to cover that topic?

Comment Packrats, and digital inheritances (Score 1) 450

by lanthar (#28941113) Attached to: Why Do Hard Drives Keep Getting Bigger?
So, when I had to be executor of my mom's estate, I already knew there would be a lot of work in organizing everything, and deciding who got what, but I also encountered realized I was going to have to go through her gigs of digital pictures and figure out who was in them, who would want copies, and then somehow distribute them. She didn't use online software or any of that for her taxes, and we had some time before she passed (from cancer) to discuss online bill accounts and such things. Without having that time, it would have been even worse trying to sort through all of her digital life to figure out what needed keeping and what was important for financial purposes, etc. She only had about 10 gigs of pictures, even though she had a digital camera since the 90s, so eventually, I made it through the images... but it gave my wife and myself a realization. All of those digital pictures of our family were going to be "digital pictures no one looks at." So, she started making shutterfly books of our pictures. It's a little comforting to know that there are now printed copies of our favorite pictures, and if we need the originals we do still have them... the downside is that we're still leaving a huge collection of digital data for our children to someday have to slog through. Far more so than my 68 year old mother. In three years we've generated over 20 gigs because we photograph so much. Plus, we just bought a hi-def video camera... So, think of the children... keep those photos and songs organized, and if you keep tax and financial info on your computer, make sure your kids or estate lawyer have passwords for anything you lock down. I'm kind of wondering how inheritances will address the issue of drm media...

Comment Re:High-Handed Concept (Score 1) 592

by lanthar (#28002255) Attached to: What Did You Think Of The New Star Trek Movie?
I would agree to the significance of Fate as a concept here used in the new movie... or possibly something like shall we say, historical inertia? A common feature of time travel paradox fiction has been that some events (or people) carry too much inertia to change without going way back before they occur. The amount of established impact of the Enterprise crew upon the galaxy by Nero's time would make them somewhat of historical juggernauts.
Let's assume such historical inertia can be placed upon someone, and assuming we're in a single reality universe without alternate universes for all possible scenarios of everything. Now try to change the timeline of your own past. Certain eventual corrections will occur to lead back to a similar enough timeline to what was present before Nero's interruptions. Okay, he nailed Vulcan itself, so that's a pretty big deal... but the eventual establishment of a colony may provide for the important individuals with galaxy affecting descendants up to Nero's time, to have survived as part of the 10,000.

On a side note, what happened to time dilation near black holes?
Also, is it just me, or was the sound a little out of whack? I mean, when kirk slapped spock on the shoulder, it sounded like he'd hit the microphone with a baseball bat...

Comment Re:Alfred Bester (Score 1) 117

by lanthar (#27972461) Attached to: Philip K. Dick's "Flow My Tears" To Be Filmed
Actually, The Stars My Destination (Tiger Tiger) has had the movie rights recently purchased. I'm frightened that it will almost certainly fail to live up to the book... but one can always hope for some goodness from it. http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117940125.html?categoryid=13&cs=1(variety.com)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0783588/Here's the imdb link but it's locked to Pro only... It used to say 2010... now it says 2012. Guess Jumper sort of messed up the jaunting storyline.

According to the Variety article, it's being produced by http://www.variety.com/profiles/people/main/47298/Lorenzo%20di%20Bonaventura.html?dataSet=1Lorenzo di Bonaventura (Variety) who brought us Doom, Transformers (1 and soon 2), and GI Joe... so it might have enough special effects to look cool at least.

Comment Re:Wonk flamefest (Score 1) 58

by lanthar (#27517671) Attached to: Cracking the Code of Bacterial Communication

Don't you know that many researchers are credit hogs, who eventually rise to the review level and heavily criticize and turn down proposals of those that might criticize their own work? It's the awful truth about scientific research and grant money. It's like a soap opera.
Google

Submission + - Become a Virgle Pioneer (worldoftalus.com)

Submitted by
lanthar
lanthar writes: "April Fools evening, Google posted the plans for "Project Virgle, the first permanent human colony on Mars." They invited everyone to apply by taking the survey, then submitting a 30 second Youtube video. From the site: "Sure, the work will be hard, the broadband rates low, the commodes decidedly open source, and yes, your life might be extinguished in a fiery instant of catastrophic technological malfunction. But your enriched descendants will appreciate your sacrifice, which should render worthwhile your choice to spend the rest of your (perhaps radically foreshortened) life in deprivation and uncertainty.""
Technology

Facial Recognition Vending Machine Debuts 172

Posted by samzenpus from the no-more-candy-for-you-chubby dept.
Peter Hanami writes "Yesterday in Japan, a facial recognition vending machine went on sale that can tell the age of the buyer based on a range of features including number of wrinkles, bone structure and how the skin sits on the face. It was developed as a way to stop minors from buying cigarettes from vending machines. In Japan, cigarette vending machines are a common feature on the street and presently few safeguards exist to stop younger users from purchasing them. This new machine is seen as a positive step to reduce under age smoking. If the machine doesnt deem the buyer to be of suitable age, 20 years old, the buyer must provide further identification such as a drivers licence."

Microsoft's XO Laptop Strategy 242

Posted by Zonk from the jigga-whaaa dept.
gbulmash writes "Microsoft is spending a 'non-trivial' amount of money to get Windows XP working on the OLPC project's XO laptop. But why? Despite the conjecture that the Linux-based XO could convince millions of people in the developing world that they don't need Windows and build a huge base of developers for Linux, there still remains the question of how Microsoft would convince owners of XO laptops to buy and install Windows XP over the functional Linux-based OS already on it. It's doubtful that Microsoft could encourage or coerce Negroponte to put XP on the machine, so whose arms will they twist?"
Music

Led Zeppelin Agrees To Digital Distribution 300

Posted by kdawson from the stairway-to-profit dept.
cphilo points out a NYTimes article on Led Zeppelin's decision to sell its music online. The group is one of the last superstar acts to hold out against the digital tide. There was a months-long, trans-Atlantic bidding war for the rights to license the band's catalog. In the US, the only digital holdouts that outsell Led Zeppelin are the Beatles and Garth Brooks.
Robotics

Trans-Atlantic Robots 203

Posted by samzenpus from the give-me-robot-planes dept.
An anonymous reader writes "In the summer of 2008, teams from a host of countries will compete in The Microtransat Challenge with the hope of gaining the honor of having built the first autonomous sailboat to cross the Atlantic. The results of Microtransat 2007, a smaller scale preliminary race, were recently announced. The winner was the team from Austria; team RoBoat, for having completed 24 hours of autonomous sailing. I am strongly considering joining this competition before the year is out, and would appreciate any insight from the Slashdot community. The boats can be up to 4 meters in length, and therefore capable of carrying a full-sized onboard computer (operating system of your choice). Time is limited however, so I would like to avoid as many hardware issues as possible and get straight to the difficult problem of writing the AI. So how would you design a seamless interface between sensors and actuators to the high-level code?"
Programming

The Hard Science of Making Videogames 194

Posted by Zonk from the dr-mario-i-presume dept.
twoblackeyes writes "PopSci delves into the 10 greatest technical challenges faced by game developers today, and the technology that will hopefully make them a thing of the past. At the top of every dev's wish list is increased realism: realisitic fire, water, enemy AI, material physics, etc. Here directly from the developers where the tech stands today, and where it will likely be tomorrow. '4. Artificial Intelligence - Problem: Once upon a time, the bad guys in videogames wandered around mindlessly, shooting at you while they waited to die. That doesn't cut it anymore. Players demand sophisticated enemies to fight and reliable in-game allies with which to fight them. Thing is, it's freaking complicated, and it eats up processor speed. "We're faking just enough smarts to make it work," says Mathieu Mazerole, lead engineer on Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed. Status: Imbuing characters in a game with lifelike decision-making ability involves employing the kind of high-level logic theories--learning decision trees, mobile navigation, finite-state machine models--used by top robotics engineers.'"
Space

Meteorite Causes Illness in Peru 357

Posted by Zonk from the i've-read-a-book-about-this dept.
eldavojohn writes "A meteorite struck in Peru on Saturday leaving cinders, rock & water boiling out of the ground. Villagers nearby reported headaches & vomiting and attributed it to the event. From the article, 'Seven policemen who went to check on the reports also became ill and had to be given oxygen before being hospitalized, Lopez said. Rescue teams and experts were dispatched to the scene, where the meteorite left a 100-foot-wide (30-meter-wide) and 20-foot-deep (six-meter-deep) crater, said local official Marco Limache.' It's not yet clear whether this is from the meteorite, gas trapped underground that was released or a chemical reaction between the two."
Space

Cassini's Iapetus Flyby 69

Posted by samzenpus from the to-the-moon dept.
cupofjoe writes "The Jet Propulsion Laboratory is reporting on the Cassini spacecraft's recent close flyby of the Saturnian moon Iapetus, highlighting images taken from distances 100 times closer than the Voyager 2 flyby in 1981. Near real-time images were shown to Cassini mission team members in a presentation at JPL yesterday, during which a pre-recorded message from Arthur C. Clarke was played to the audience. Clarke wished them luck on the flyby, reminding all present that he had included a pretty accurate description of Iapetus in the original 1968 text of "2001: A Space Odyssey", years before Voyager made its flyby."
Science

YouTube for Science? 96

Posted by CmdrTaco from the blinded-me-with dept.
Shipud writes "The National Science Foundation, Public Library of Science and the San Diego Supercomputing Center have partnered to set up what can best be described as a "YouTube for scientists", SciVee". Scientists can upload their research papers, accompanied by a video where they describe the work in the form of a short lecture, accompanied by a presentation. The formulaic, technical style of scientific writing, the heavy jargonization and the need for careful elaboration often renders reading papers a laborious effort. SciVee's creators hope that that the appeal of a video or audio explanation of paper will make it easier for others to more quickly grasp the concepts of a paper and make it more digestible both to colleagues and to the general public."

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