Last night, Locus Magazine held its annual Locus Awards Ceremony in Seattle, the winners include several of my favorite books of the year -- and my novella, "After the Siege" -- which was collected in my short story collection Overclocked and adapted for comics in my new collection Cory Doctorow's Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now". (The story's first publication was in the Russian magazine Esli, and the translation is also downloadable). This marks my fourth consecutive Locus Award win!

Many thanks to all who voted for this story, to Eileen Gunn for publishing the story and accepting the award on my behalf, and especially to my grandmother, Valentina Rachman, for sharing her stories of life as a child-soldier in the civil defense corps during the Siege of Leningrad.

SF NOVEL The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Michael Chabon (HarperCollins)
FANTASY NOVEL Making Money, Terry Pratchett (Doubleday UK; HarperCollins)
YOUNG ADULT BOOK Un Lun Dun, China Miéville (Ballantine Del Rey; Macmillan UK)
FIRST NOVEL Heart-Shaped Box, Joe Hill (Morrow; Gollancz)
NOVELLA "After the Siege", Cory Doctorow (The Infinite Matrix Jan 2007)
NOVELETTE "The Witch's Headstone", Neil Gaiman (Wizards)
SHORT STORY "A Small Room in Koboldtown", Michael Swanwick (Asimov's Apr/May 2007)
COLLECTION The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories, Connie Willis (Subterranean)
ANTHOLOGY The New Space Opera, Gardner Dozois & Jonathan Strahan, eds. (Eos)
NON-FICTION Breakfast in the Ruins, Barry N. Malzberg (Baen)
ART BOOK The Arrival, Shaun Tan (Lothian 2006; Scholastic)
EDITOR Ellen Datlow
MAGAZINE F&SF
PUBLISHER Tor
ARTIST Charles Vess

Link

Findings presented to ENDO 2008, the Endocrine Society's annual meeting in San Francisco this week, show that a spice found in curries has remarkable properties when administered to obese and diabetic mice:

"It's too early to tell whether increasing dietary curcumin [through turmeric] intake in obese people with diabetes will show a similar benefit," Dr. Tortoriello said. "Although the daily intake of curcumin one might have to consume as a primary diabetes treatment is likely impractical, it is entirely possible that lower dosages of curcumin could nicely complement our traditional therapies as a natural and safe treatment."

For now, the conclusion that Dr. Tortoriello and his colleagues have reached is that turmeric – and its active anti-oxidant ingredient, curcumin – reverses many of the inflammatory and metabolic problems associated with obesity and improves blood-sugar control in mouse models of Type 2 diabetes.

Link (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Gerard Brion's garden in the south France town of Vaissac contains a replica of Paris built from junk, trash, glue and paint.

The Frenchman, 29, has spent 15 years crafting landmarks including the Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe and Sacré Coeur out of old concrete blocks, baby food jars and soup tins.

Link (via Craft!)

Z sez, "LonelyCylon15 (an ongoing YouTube project edited by ChurchHatesTucker) explains why DRM is a bad idea." Link (Thanks, Z!)

Here's a fine little dance remix of Canadian Industry Minister Jim Prentice ducking questions about his terrible new copyright proposal, Bill C61 (AKA the Canadian DMCA), on the CBC Radio show Search Engine. Link (Thanks, Rick!)

See also: Canadian Industry Minister lies about his Canadian DMCA on national radio, then hangs up

Spotted on Joi Ito's blog: quick and dirty directions on how to "hack" Firefox 3 into delivering richer, brighter colors more faithful to the original photograph (or graphic).

Snip:

I think that the esoteric discussions about color are interesting, but for most people, the bottom line is, if you turn color profile support "on" on Firefox 3, many images will end up appearing much closer to the color of the original and less washed out. You do this by typing "about:config" in the address bar of Firefox 3. Click thru confirmation page and find: gfx.color_management.enabled. Double click that until it says "true". Then restart Firefox 3.

There are a number of monitor color calibration gadgets and software packages like Eye One Match which will allow you to calibrate your monitor (and camera and printer). If everyone actually did this, we'd all be seeing the same colors.

Downside: you void your warranty (browsers have warranties? who cares) and apparently this tweak causes a non-insignificant performance hit.

Whatever, I'm just thrilled that favorite snaps I shot, caressed lovingly in Photoshop, then uploaded to Flickr don't look so anemic anymore. Like "Daniela," above, an aging camioneta cooling her heels on a beach along the Pacific coast of Guatemala. Or these women from the Gaddi tribe in Northern India, at bottom, climbing a mountain to reach a shrine.

Source: DRIA. Gina at Lifehacker just blogged about it, too.

Here's a fine instructable for making a YipYipYip Martian costume from Sesame Street, consisting primarily of lots of fabric, a couple styrofoam balls, sponge and pipecleaners. Link (Thanks, Kevin!)

Scott sez, "I hosted director Greg Maletic and screened his excellent 60-min documentary, "Tilt," last week. In 1998, Williams saw pinball sales going down and their slot machines going up. Pinball was losing ground in the arcades to the new video machines. In a valiant effort to save their livelihoods, a team of great designers from the video and pinball world decide to combine the technologies into Pinball 2000, a platform the seemed like a great new gaming experience. (I've never played it.) Maletic made a film that is part game history, part product design, and part tragic business story. Well worth watching, and the clip on the website gives a good sense of its quality. " Link (Thanks, Scott!)

(If you can't view the veoh video above, try the YouTube version)

Photographer Clayton Cubitt (disclosure, he's a personal pal) recently returned to NYC after a few weeks in New Zealand on an editorial assignment. During that trip, he also took a series of beautiful (and formal) portraits of interesting people there, including Maori people whose bodies and faces are embellished with traditional tattoos.

He also took one short, informal little video interview (Clayton, what'd you shoot this with?) with a man named Vic Taurewa Biddle, shot with a Sigma DP1 digital snappy cam "as an afterthought during a portrait session." Mr. Biddle speaks about his face tats, known as moko in the Maori language, and shares some insight on how homo/bi/trans-sexuality are viewed among his people -- both historically and now. I wish Clayton had shot more of these, this is short, simple, really interesting stuff.

I've embedded the Veoh video above, here's Clayton's tumblr post with a YouTube version. Incidentally, when Clayton first sent me this link I was in Guatemala, and couldn't view that Veoh item at all. I learned that this is because Veoh is blocked in like 37 countries around the world. WTF, what's up with that?