Futurismic Latest Blog Posts

Continuing the increasingly ubiquitous discussion of the future of bookstores (in the wake of Borders in the UK going into receivership ), two heavyweight thinkers have thrown their opinions out into the ring in the last few days. First of all, Clay Shirkey, who notes that there are three basic ...

Ah, December – time to crank out the ’silly season’ media stories to fill the gaps in between the “best of the decade” posts. So here’s a way-out weird news article for you: an LA-based company called My DNA Fragrance (there’s a clue in the name) has ...

You’ll notice there’s no new short story for the month of December here at Futurismic . The reason is quite simple: time has outraced our inventory. We just haven’t been able to find appropriate, high-quality stories faster than we’ve been publishing them. This is ...

The UK iteration of Wired is doing a themed issue entitled “Rebooting Britain” , kicking around ideas for changing the face of an already-changing nation for the better . Many of them could be more broadly applied to any Western/developed nation, but a few of them address issues ...

A computer scientist at the University of Pennsylvania has decided to mimic the way children learn to recognise faces and voices in order to speed up the artificial learning curve of intelligent systems : Using novel learning algorithms that combine audio, video, and text streams, Taskar and ...

Here’s a second piece of punditry for your Monday morning, this time from the inimitable Charlie Stross. He’s been poking the traditional sf mythology of the starship with a sharp stick over the last few months, and the end result is a suggestion that – as far as realistic ...

Y’know, I really like David Brin , even though I don’t always agree with what he says ; he’s got a contrary stripe a mile wide, and he’s one of the few self-identifying conservative thinkers in science fiction who’s willing to break ranks with populism and call out ...

Does Not Equal is a webcomic by Sarah Ennals – check out the pre- Futurismic archives , and the strips that have been published here previously . [ Be sure to check out the Does Not Equal Cafepress store for webcomic merchandise featuring Canadians with geometrically-shaped ...

Can you keep a secret? Despite being a total nerd, I somehow managed to grow up without playing a single full D&D adventure. It wasn’t because I was too cool for it or anything, I just didn’t have the right friends. But I wanted to, let me tell you. Desperately. So I bought ...

For various reasons, I’m too short of time to do any blogging today, but I have a new voice to introduce to the Futurismic choir instead. You may have noticed me linking to and mentioning one Tim Maly quite a few times in the last few months , most recently for his post on the demise of ...

With its ability to allow us to take on new forms, appearances and identities, the metaverse is opening up as a whole new arena for discussions about cultural perceptions. Here’s a fresh example: a Second Life avatar skin designer released a collection of skins named “Battle ...

Hey, writers – ever based a character on a friend, no matter how loosely? Well, you’d best be careful to stay friends with them if you get published, because there’s now a legal precedent for a character in a novel being considered as libel : A Georgia jury has ruled that ...

Despite continued growth as one of the most-visited sites on the web, Wikipedia has a problem – it’s losing editors faster than it’s gaining new ones . Cue lots of veiled “told you so” from the Wall Street Journal [via /message ] : … as it matures, ...

Here’s the agenda for this item: I distinctly remember that when I was a kid, sometimes–not always–the smell of gasoline would get me what one would today call high . It’s been a long time since it had that effect on me, but I also remember looking forward to those ...

I’m sure that almost everyone would rather live in a world that featured less cruelty and pain for living creatures… but what if it were possible to eradicate them completely? Via Accelerating Future comes a provocative essay by one David Pearce, who suggests that not only would it ...

Branding the work of other scientists as fraudulent scams seems to be the flavour of the week. Remember IBM’s cat-sized brain simulation as mentioned last week? Well, it was pointed out by calmer minds than my own that I overstated the significance of the announcement… but Henry ...

So many things can be said about the hacking of the East Anglia Climate Research Unit’s e-mails . If nothing else, it shows that the ground rules for scientific and scholarly communication are changing rapidly. The dubious ethics of hacking aside, should we expect science, especially on ...

I’ve mentioned Douglas Rushkoff here a few times before (both as a thinker and a writer of comics and fiction), and I’m also deeply interested in alternative economic structures, so the following video of Rushkoff’s swift fifteen-minute keynote speech to the O’Reilly Web ...

Did you catch the story at BoingBoing about the guy who went and married his computer game girlfriend ? The original link is all in Japanese , so details are scarce, but the young lady in question is a character from Love Plus , one of those “virtual girlfriend” games. [image by ...