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Cory Doctorow at 2:55 pm • 
• 
Here's a smashing recording of an commercial audio recording session with William Shatner. The director in the booth has lots of notes for Captain Kirk, and Kirk gives it to him, with astounding, passive-aggressive, brilliance.
Click through to hear (warning: autoplaying audio)
William Shatner Voice Session
(Thanks, Mary!)
Read the rest
Cory Doctorow at 12:45 pm • •
Last month, I blogged about Relatively Prime, a beautifully produced, crowdfunded free series of math podcasts. I just listened to the episode on Chinook (MP3), the program that became the world champion of checkers.
Chinook's story is a bittersweet and moving tale, a modern account of John Henry and the steam-drill, though this version is told from the point of view of the machine and its maker, Jonathan Schaeffer, a University of Alberta scientist who led the Chinook team. Schaeffer's quest begins with an obsessive drive to beat reigning checkers champ Marion Tinsley, but as the tale unfolds, Tinsley becomes more and more sympathetic, so that by the end, I was rooting for the human.
This is one of the best technical documentaries I've heard, and I heartily recommend it to you.
Xeni Jardin at 9:01 am • •
Schizovisionary cult radio ranter conspiracy theorist Francis E. Dec, Esquire (he insisted on the "esquire," even after having been disbarred from practicing law) was recorded by Los Angeles radio host "Doc on the ROQ" of KROQ-FM. The weirdo audio made its way around the world on cassette tape; later, fans digitized them and shared for all Kosher-Bosher mankind. The Wikipedia article on Dec is really good. WFMU appreciates his work. Here's a fan club website. Here's a Flickr set of his flyers.
Dec died in 1996. He was mentally ill. While we don't know for sure, his material suggests that he was a "machine-influencing-delusional" schizophrenic. The recordings include much racist and misogynist material: the n-word, and explicit racial hate and sexual stuff. This disclaimer applies here, too.
PS: I'm fairly certain that Gangster Computer God Worldwide Secret Containment Policy is shorthand for "Google."
(thanks for the reminder, @rabite)
Cory Doctorow at 9:11 am • •
Peter sez, "Samuel Hansen completed a successful Kickstarter project and as a result has created eight high-quality audio documentaries featuring in-depth stories about the world of mathematics. Samuel describes them: 'While each episode revolves around a single theme, the themes themselves vary widely and include a checkers playing computer, new tools for your mathematical toolbox, and things that were flat out unexpected. The guests range widely too, from a Fields Medalist to a composer to a stand-up mathematician.' Samuel also discusses the benefits of telling stories about mathematics."
I'm in the middle of the game theory episode and loving it!
The Toolbox « Relatively Prime (Thanks, Peter!)
Cory Doctorow at 3:16 pm • •
Hurrah! Spider Robinson's put up another installment of his podcast (it's been understandably erratic for the past few years, as Spider and his family were doubly afflicted by cancer). As always, it features some great blues, jazz, roots and eclectic music (including some great tracks by Jeff Healey and Mose Scarlett as well as a Folk Uke's delightful tribute to poop) and a wonderful excerpt from his The Free Lunch.
The Free Lunch is Spider's 2001 contribution to the themepunk canon, a smashing novel about the greatest theme park ever made:
What if the world was so terrible that your only hope for a happy life would be to hide away in the world's greatest amusement park...Dreamworld? In The Free Lunch, Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Spider Robinson transports us to Dreamworld, a place where everybody has fun, dreams can come true, and the only sadness is when they close for the night.
With his perceptive grasp of human emotions and his deft hand at humor, Robinson masterfully tells the take of Mike, a young teen who escapes our own dark, tormented near future into a dream--into Dreamworld. There he meets Annie, another refugee who has built a life in the underworld of this fantastic amusement park, perhaps the last vestige of innocence left in the world. But it is tainted by a dark secret--a ruthless competitor, who can't possibly create an attraction that's as much fun as Dreamworld, has decided that if he can't beat Dreamworld, he might as well destroy it. There's another threat to Dreamworld. Suddenly there are more trolls at the end of the day than were there in the morning...and nobody, not even Mike or Annie, knows where they're from. But it's up to them and their passion for preserving this last haven of joy in a world of horrors to save Dreamworld...and Earth's future.
Cory Doctorow at 4:00 pm • •
The IETF has finished its standardization effort for Opus, a new free/open audio codec that reportedly outperforms all other codecs on all axes. The codec was jointly created by IETF, Mozilla, Microsoft (through Skype), Xiph.Org (maintainers of Ogg), Octasic, Broadcom, and Google and Mozilla promises that a comparable video codec will come next.
One of the pernicious areas for free codecs is patents. The Opus FAQ says, "Opus is also covered by some patents, for which royalty-free usage rights are granted, under conditions that the authors believe are compatible with most (all?) open source licenses, including the GPL (v2 and v3)."
Unlike previous audio codecs, which have typically focused on a narrow set of applications (either voice or music, in a narrow range of bitrates, for either real-time or storage applications), Opus is highly flexible. It can adaptively switch among:
* Bitrates from 6 kb/s to 512 kb/s
* Voice and music
* Mono and stereo
* Narrowband (8 kHz) to Fullband (48 kHz)
* Frame sizes from 2.5 ms to 60 msMost importantly, it can adapt seamlessly within these operating points. Doing all of this with proprietary codecs would require at least six different codecs. Opus replaces all of them, with better quality.
It’s Opus, it rocks and now it’s an audio codec standard! (via /.)
Maggie Koerth-Baker at 1:14 pm • •
The Joides Resolution is a large boat—more than 450 feet long and almost 70 feet wide. That's small compared to a lot of cruise ships, but big enough to house and feed and provide work space for 126 people. It's a floating city, with a movie theater, helipad, hospital, cafeteria, laboratories, and a giant drilling rig. But even a big boat can start to feel small when you have nowhere else to go, and no land in sight, for two whole months.
Some science can't be done on shore, and the Joides Resolution is one of the tools researchers use to learn more about the world beneath the waves. The ship travels the globe, serving as a mobile research station for scientists who want to study the bottom of the sea.
Between June 2 and August 1, 2012, a team of researchers, technicians, and support staff took the Joides Resolution north, to the cold waters off Newfoundland. Their goal: Collect samples of mud, clay, and muck from the ocean floor. Using a deep-sea drilling system, they lowered thousands of feet of pipe through the water, and forced it into the sea floor below. When the pipes were pulled back up on deck, they contained core samples—cylindrical logs that allowed the scientists to see layer after layer of sediment. By looking at what those cores are made of, the chemistry they contain, and the physical fossils buried deep inside them, researchers can begin to reconstruct what Earth's climate must have been like tens of millions of years ago.
On July 11th, while the Joides Resolution was still at sea, I got to interview several of the scientists on board. Paleontologist Richard Norris, geochemist Jessica Whiteside, and sedimentologist Chris Junium (along with communications officer Caitlin Scully) talked to me about their research, what they hoped to learn, and what it was like to live in a laboratory far from home.
Read the rest
Cory Doctorow at 5:28 pm • •
Rick Kleffel sez,
Tim Powers is one the founding fathers of steampunk, and a writer whose every book is superb. I drove down to San Bernardino City College to talk to him about his latest work, Hide Me Among the Graves, a secret supernatural history of the Pre-Raphaelite poets and painters.
He has a rather unique perspective on writing, history and fantasy that involves identifying events that seem as if they might have some supernatural aspect and then creating a backstory that ties them together. The Rossettis; Dante Gabriel Rossetti (poet and painter), Christina (poet), William and Maria are a perfect set of subjects.
We had a great time talking about how he put it all together.
Mark Frauenfelder at 3:05 pm • •
I really like the Phoenix, a small bluetooth speaker from Beacon Audio. They sent me an evaluation unit a couple of weeks ago. It paired very easily to my iPhone (unlike a lot of bluetooth devices, which are pains-in-the-neck to pair) and the sounds is loud and clear, given its size. It's a vast improvement over the iPhone's built-in speakers. Because it's so small, I find myself using it quite a bit when I'm doing work outside. It's also great for playing games and watching videos. Not sure about the lithium battery life yet, but you can recharge it with the included USB cable. I find that I use it a lot more than the Jambox, which feels too precious to take out. It's available directly from Beacon for $99. UPDATE: A couple of folks in the comments have said that the Satechi ST-66BTA ($39.99 on Amazon) is very similar, if not nearly identical.
Glenn Fleishman at 9:46 am • •
Photo: Scott Snider
The phone system doesn't allow us to hear people at a distance in the same way they quite literally sound to us when up close. Alexander Graham Bell's accidental dehumanization has been redeemed in part by a technologically related godchild. And it only took about 150 years.
Cory Doctorow at 2:10 pm • •
Tony from the StarShipSofa podcast sez, "This week on StarShipSofa we play the short story Malak, by science fiction writer Peter Watts. Malak was originally published in the anthology Engineering Infinity edited by Jonathan Strahan and views the world of a semi-autonomous combat drone called Azrael and throws in some very powerful ethical questions. A brilliant story from a brilliant writer."
StarShipSofa No 244 Peter Watts/MP3 (Thanks, Tony!)
Cory Doctorow at 2:54 pm • •
Cory Doctorow at 9:14 am • •
Here's a 23-minute BBC World Service documentary about science fiction in Africa, hosted by Zoo City author Lauren Beukes, who speaks to various luminaries, writers and commentators, including District 9 creator Neill Blomkamp.
Beukes hears from film-makers Neill Blomkamp (South Africa - director of the international hit District 9), Wanuri Kahiu (Kenya), blogger Jonathan Dotse (Ghana), writer Nnedi Okorafor (Nigeria/USA) and others on how their particular experiences have influenced their work.
Science fiction often explores the interaction between people and technology. In Africa that theme plays out in surprising ways, from making an appointment with a traditional healer over email, to women in remote villages collecting water while chatting on their mobiles.
It’s this mix of magic and technology, challenge and innovation that shapes the science fiction coming out of the continent.
Leaving behind the traditional visions of a high-tech Tokyo, futuristic LA or dystopian New York, and challenging clichéd views of the entire African continent, this is a science fiction being told by the people who live there.
Cory Doctorow at 4:11 pm • •
The latest episode of the always-excellent Agony Column podcast features an interview with one of science fiction's greatest living writers, Kim Stanley Robinson, discussing his latest novel 2312, a mammoth, epic story of a future built upon realistic and attainable space exploration -- a kind of meditation on life within lightspeed, which is nevertheless extremely personal and close-felt and on human scale.
"...it's a somewhat Utopian situation in space, and still a somewhat grim and screwed up situation on Earth..."
—Kim Stanley Robinson
In the statement above, is Kim Stanley Robinson describing the present or the future? That's not an easy call until you hear it in context. In this case, the future as written in his latest novel '2312' is certainly an outgrowth of the present, and there is more than enough "funhouse mirror" material in the novel to let you know Robinson has a lot to say about how things are here in the present.
It has been almost a year since I last spoke with Robinson and it was ever so kind of him to battle apocalyptic traffic to make it to the Capitola Book Café for a live conversation about his latest novel, '2312.' For a book that is chock-a-block with ambition, it is a really a racing, bracing read; I read most of it in a single day. That should signal readers that Robinson is hitting the sweet spot with both content and pacing. This is big-idea science fiction that doubles as pacey thriller.
Cory Doctorow at 9:45 am • •
Tony Smith from StarShipSofa sez,
StarShipSofa No 242 Kate Wilhelm Part 1 (Thanks, Tony!)Today, StarShipSofa has two of the greats from the SF genre on its show. In July 2010 I carried out an interview with Ray Bradbury - being wet behind the ears at the time and pushing my luck... I asked the question "Are you a science fiction writer?" The speed with which he replied "No," was such a highlight to me.
We also have the amazing novelette by Kate Wilhelm called The Bird Cage, published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January-February 2011 edition. Kate Wilhelm is one of the true legends in the SF field. In 1976 she won the Hugo Award for Where Late The Sweet Bird's Sang, which is a truly great novel of the genre. Kate has now set up InfinityBox Press, her own publishing company, created by Kate and her sons Richard and Jon, and daughter-in-law Sue, as a way for Kate to become independent from egregious contracts instituted by the major six publishers - it's become untenable for authors, even those with sterling track records such as hers.
