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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.


asimov may get his battery yet

asimov thought atomics were going to be great, rather than scary as all hell. it's one of the funny things about reading things like foundation that everyone is walking around with these tiny atomic generators fueling their flashlights and not dying of horrible cancers. now cornell is working on nan-ish batteries that go for 50+ years... based on atomic decay. there's no danger to humans and an entire cell can fit in a cubic millimeter. no word on whether this is predicted by psychohistory yet.

posted by quinn norton at 2:28:30 PM | permalink


for the overclocker who has everything

love watching out for strange peripherals for the hyper-prosumer. Here's a commendably German review of the Active Alarm Kit, a small black box that sits on your motherboard and rings out "music alarm"[sic] the moment your computer's fan burns out. Everybody i've mentioned this to so far marvels at the silliness of it. Then their eyes mist and they say "you know, that would have been really useful that day I melted my graphics card into slag".


posted by Danny O'Brien at 8:00:42 AM | permalink


a day in the life

when i was young i wanted to be a photojournalist. of course, i wanted to be a rock singer, president, rich, a model, a violinist, and a fantasy writer too. but i held onto photojournalist longer than most of them. looking at the photos from a day in the life of africa reminds me why. it's haunting, beautiful, dangerous, shaming work, in a continent's worth of dense intensity. and ditl of africa gives me something to give cory for xmas that isn't his own book.

posted by quinn norton at 1:11:15 AM | permalink


comics as seen through commentary

how do you know when a medium has really made it? if it's when there's women's perspective zines, and deconstructions of deconstructions being written about it, then comics has arrived. sequential tart- which is kinda hard to top in and of itself- boasts a lot of comics info and encouragement to fans and artist without nearly as much gender bias as you'd suspect. inventing comics is dylan horrocks getting really meta on meta-boy scott mccloud's ass. (which is enough to give a humble fan of teenage muntant ninja turtles and chick tracks a bit of heebeejeebees.)

posted by quinn norton at 1:10:41 AM | permalink


when shall we 40,000 meet again?

University students have many difficult decisions. For instance, when is the best day to celebrate Halloween by getting drunk with your friends? The day itself - which is on a hangover-unfriendly midweek Thursday? Or the Saturday after? Or the Saturday before, even? Given that what you really want to do is have all your friends celebrate on the same day, John Bethencourt set out to model the maths behind making a distributed decision like this. From a brief glance, it looks like the same proto-bistromathics that online friends go through when organising a party. And in the end, just as chaotic. (From Missing Matter)


posted by Danny O'Brien at 9:55:51 PM | permalink


you can never be too rich or too Finn

The great thing about being rich is never having to wonder "hey, did I just get ripped off?". Vertu is a Nokia spin off that makes luxury mobile phones for the jet-set. Now, I'm damned if I can penetrate their Flash-ridden site, but Vertu are happy to hint to press folk that their platinum-bedecked handsets sell for $20,000 each. Big selling points: a special "concierge" button that puts you inc ontact with the call-center equivalent of a personal assistant; and hi-fi audio that provides ringtones with a "full-bodied" sound. Also included: a a huge klaxon siren that blares "I AM GULLIBLE AND RICH, PLEASE SELL ME OVERPRICED TRINKETS" when you take this doozie out in public.


posted by Danny O'Brien at 12:03:41 AM | permalink


nothing is unknown

So: the scariest goddamn insect just blundered into our house, kicking over furniture and demanding beer and cash crops. We put a bowl over it, cowered for a bit, and did what anyone would do - googled for our lives. One visit to e-nature's nice little "insects, sorted by their terrifying silhouette" section later, and we know it's a Jerusalem Cricket, that it's perfectly harmless, that some people keep them as pets, and that their front-end "resembles [a] bald human head". Yeah, if the enature editorial staff's bald members also have huge freaking mandibles and about a dozen beady black eyes. We scooped it out and dumped it into its natural habitat - the outside. Never going there again.


posted by Danny O'Brien at 12:23:11 AM | permalink


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