All Thoughts Being Equal

Here's some of the stuff I've read about this week that's worth a comment or two. Television used to have a lot more "dark background, leather chair foreground, casual highbrow discussion prefaced by classical music" shows than I thought. See, for example, the format of William F. Buckley's Firing Line . But also this show, Nightcap: Conversations on the Arts and Letters , on the Alpha Repertory Television Service (ARTS) . (It shared a channel with Nickelodeon!) This episode, moderated by Studs Terkel and Calvin Trillin , is a discussion between Isaac "reigning SF grandmaster" Asimov, Gene "just having finished the Book of the New Sun" Wolfe, and Harlan "the original grumpy cat" Ellison, on what science fiction really means. For thirty minutes. Holy shit. More than just hoarding (though there's a bit of a hoarding tendency; why own two copies in the same format of Rat Fink and Boo-Boo ? Though it does look incredible ...

Speculation time is over, friends. The future has jumped us like a ninja in the night. There's been talk of eventually and gradually transitioning to autonomous automobiles, but of course the going has been slow since one flaw in a driving algorithm could needlessly cause a bunch of collisions. Well, surprise surprise: Google has outfitted a fleet of seven cars with self-driving software . Yep, these cars have been driving without human hands for the past 140,000 miles . To be fair, there were still people in the cars, so they weren't entirely unmanned, but that was just in case of emergency. You might have heard about the discovery of Gliese 581 g, the best candidate so far for an Earth-like planet within a habitable range of its star (the "Goldilocks zone"). Maybe you heard it from me. Well, as it turns out, alien life might be much more close to home. The Japanese Hayabusa probe, that was sent to collect dust from the asteroid Itokawa, might have recovered s...

Oh, it's been so long. As it turns out, summer wasn't actually the optimal time to keep updating this space with musings and especially links to things (although I managed to plurk a few). Now I feel like there's a very good reason for me to keep up, namely, my almost certain lack of literature classes this quarter. So while it's not November (a.k.a. National Novel Writing Month) I will be jonesing to write creatively and think with the right side of my brain. But to quickly catch up on an amazing development: Astronomers have found a planet in the 'Goldilocks' zone of its parent star . What's more, this planet is somewhere between 3.1 and 4.3 times the mass of Earth, meaning that it's probably of a rocky composition and the absolute most Earth-like planet discovered so far... other than Earth, naturally. The 'Goldilocks' zone, by the way, is an area around a star at which water will exist as a liquid, and is therefore assumed to have the best ...