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Rudy Rucker

Rudy Rucker is a writer, a mathematician and a computer scientist. Born in Kentucky in 1946, Rucker moved to Silicon Valley when he turned 40. Rucker has published twenty-five books, primarily science-fiction and popular science. He was an early cyberpunk and an editor at Mondo 2000. He often writes SF in a style is characterized as transreal. His most recent novels were Frek and the Elixir, a far-future epic about a boy's galactic quest to restore Earth's ecology and As Above So Below, a historical novel based on the life of the sixteenth century painter Peter Bruegel.  Rucker is a professor emeritus of computer science at San Jose State University, where he created a number of freeware programs relating to chaos, artificial life, cellular automata, higher dimensions, and computer games. He is presently working on The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, a nonfiction book about computers and the nature of reality. Rucker's website can be found at www.cs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker or at www.rudyrucker.com.

literary history, remaindered

what do you call the most influential books, the ones that we will never forget- well, what do you call them when we do forget? when the classics that built the ideas of the people who wrote the books that helped build your ideas simply go out of print, they become ex-classics. now ex-classics.org is on the ambitious track of trying to bring these books back into the light. titles you've never heard of, but that William Blake, Henry Thoreau, H.G. Wells and George Orwell had, are available as etexts. it's not a huge library, but what's there is excellent already. i have particularly been enjoying the newgate calendar, a sort of rolling case history (done as a calendar) of why people got hanged in london.

posted by quinn norton at 10:10:39 PM | permalink

the news in icons

Map Report scans the newswires, and creates a icon-pockmarked, clickable globe of mayhem, natural disaster and sports. They also do localised maps - like this San Francisco overview and, rather more broadly, a look at Europe. Very clever, and fantastically ugly - the colour scheme is reminiscent of old-skool strategy games, which may be why it feels like a Civilisation status screen. Although I suppose that's what it is, at that.


posted by Danny O'Brien at 1:25:58 PM | permalink

more under the radar copyright legislation

on oct 3 congress passed the TEACH act (technology education and copyright harmonization) regarding mainly the use of copyright materials in distance education. (ala's summary) at first this looked like really good news, since the the ala described it as "[expanding] face-to-face teaching exemptions in the copyright law, allowing teachers and faculty to use copyrighted works in the 'digital classroom' without prior permission from the copyright holder." but more reading seems to indicate that it ain't so nice, since among other things it seems to require institutions to create some sort of drm-ish thing themselves for class materials and impose it on their enrolled students. plus they can't store or make available these materials past a class session, whatever that means. there are a number of details that seem helpful for class settings but difficult to implement, but (inserting standard i am not a lawyer disclaimers) i hesitate to try and interpret them. apparently it's better than what was there before, but to me it seems only if you are a public school (for profit institutions need not apply) with a lot of IT resources to spare. my perception is there was a gap in the law regarding distance learning, and this act moves to fill that gap... but with another bad copyright law. if that's not the case, i'd really like to understand it better.

posted by quinn norton at 2:40:15 PM | permalink

Don't look down

In case you missed it, here's archive footage from the little videocam they stapled to the side of the space shuttle's main booster on Monday. It's a real-life enactment of the Powers of Ten movie. (from More Like This)


posted by Danny O'Brien at 2:33:10 PM | permalink

the pain of dating, frum style

as i have come to understand it, as an orthodox jewish woman you have to get married, have kids, and generally do the domestic thing. it's in the contract somewhere. what you don't have to do is take the first man that comes along- that's where things get complex. unbroken glass is the saga of one interesting, funky woman's quest to Do Right By G-d in the world of the jewish matchmaker. a little clarification for us goys reading the site: a shidduch is a date set up by the matchmaker between two orthodox singles. they aren't to so much as touch, and for many 3ish successful dates is enough to establish marriage material. others are still struggling to find the lightening rod of love in an environment of somewhat hurried desperation. our lovely and anonymous blogger is clearly one of these. (if i've gotten any of this wrong, forgive me and correct me and i'll post it here. and remember, i am a simple goy who did her own mate selection through more a bulk processing approach. i'm certainly no enemy of the jewish people.)

posted by quinn norton at 4:07:12 AM | permalink

Marine biologists have all the coolest toys

Seagliders are cute pink autonomous sea-robots who dive for data by altering their internal buoyancy. They can follow fixed courses for months without human intervention. They surface regularly for GPS satellite fixes, telemetry to coastal stations, and other tasty robot treats.


posted by Danny O'Brien at 2:05:16 PM | permalink

Stat Your MP

Back in 1998, British Members of Parliament had e-mail addresses, but they hardly ever read their mail. So some friends of mine set up FaxYourMP.com. It's a site that asks for your zipcode, lets you type in a message, and forwards it to the fax machine of your MP. Faxes are low-tech, but MPs understand them, and it's hard to ignore a warm piece of paper from one of your constituents.

Then we noticed that some MPs weren't replying to their voter's faxes either. So we began mailing everyone who used FaxYourMP, asking them if they'd received a response after two weeks. We got the fourteen-day limit from Parliament's own recommendations for civil service reply times.

We just published the first batch of stats. The best-responding MP has just defected from one UK party to another. The worst-responding MP is (drumroll) Iain Duncan Smith, current leader of the Conservative party, currently fighting for his survival at the annual party conference this week.

Instant news story! Just add Internet!


posted by Danny O'Brien at 4:35:08 PM | permalink

The even more annotated Alan Moore

You know what Alan Moore needs? More exhaustive detail. To the rescue, Jeff Nevins has annotated Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen to an incredible degree. These will make you break out the comics and read them again, following along... and if you haven't read them, go out and get them- they are Alan Moore at his spooky best.

Since you can never ever get there via Geocities, the league notes are graciously mirrored by enjolrasworld, who has oodles and oodles of other fantastic content as well. (Including Jess Nevin's annotation of Top Ten.)

posted by quinn norton at 11:19:07 AM | permalink

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