SF/F Links: February Roundup Part Two
(My apologies to anyone who was trying to get to the post via the “Read More”. It wasn’t working for some reason. Now it should be. Thanks for your patience.) Alright, time for part two of this month’s link roundup (click the read more): La Gringa over at The Swivet is officially a literary agent. Read the announcing post here. Remember that air car I talked about a while back? Well it’s probably being released this year or early next year! It’s a compressed air car that can go 125 miles at 68 MPH. Guess how much it costs. $2 USD per fill-up. That’s better than your gas engine by a long shot. 10 SF movies every SF fan should watch. Including the SF staple food group Blade Runner. Space junk. Want to know what our immediate space looks like in terms of what’s left behind up there? Now you can know. It’s really crowded. The maps are rather cool too. Reaction Engines Limited is another company trying to help push space flight into the commercial scene. Of course by the time this stuff happens it will only be for rich folks and chimps, so, yeah. How common are Earth-like solar systems? Well they might be more common than we once though since we’ve found one that is similar to our own. The digital tattoo display. Basically a Bluetooth device you shove under your skin that displays imagery (like a touch screen) that you can poke at and make do things. Well, it’s more complicated than that, but you get the idea. Futurismic also has an article on it here. Dark Party Review doesn’t like Blade Runner and here’s why. They also have a list of notable gunslingers, thieves, etc. from the old west. Awesome list! Nancy Kress found the following YouTube video which is rather bizarre. People just froze in the middle of Grand Central (New York)!! The Stargate is real. Okay, no it’s not, but CERN really looks like the Stargate This is what the world looks like at night. Big Belly Solar. A trash disposable that uses solar energy to reduce waste. Really interesting. How does it work? I haven’t the foggiest. Neuromancer concept art! Really cool! The solar flare. Dangerous, destructive, and beautiful. The power of the sun in nobodies hands. Futurismic: Gravitational Lensing is pretty, and really useful. We can find golden pieces of candy with it (yes, that part was a joke because the lensing makes it look like there is a little ball of golden, glowing candy in the middle). Haagen Dazs wants to help with the honey bee problem (you know, that they’re dying out due to things like Colony Collapse Disorder). How are they going to help? Make a bee-themed honey ice cream and give the profits to bee research. The first video of an electron! This is so cool! Nokia is making a flexible phone that can be worn as a bracelet. Tis cool. Needless to say, nanotechnology is involved. The next big thing in energy might be these energy islands that use ocean waves to produce power. The list of alternatives to nuclear and fossil fuels gets bigger. io9: Georgia Tech students are building a fossil fuel car that has no emissions. Good luck with that. Post-apocalyptic concept art: More post-apocalyptic are here. Disney’s House of the Future is getting an upgrade. See Mickey Mouse as a cybernetic killing machine. Well, not really, but that would be cool. Nuclear power plants that are almost waste free. I’m in, let’s do it. While we’re at it let’s build a plant that runs on old banana peels, since I’m sure there is an overabundance of those anyway. Well, we might not need to go to another star system to find another Earth. Apparently scientists believe there are loads of Earth-ish bodies out in the Oort Cloud just waiting to be pushed into a new, warm orbit and defrosted. Sort of like a mini-pizza, only more valuable and without the freezer burn. Apparently New York had something called a Pneumatic Subway that pulled a little car back and forth via air pressure. Really cool and totally retro. Self-healing rubber. Self-explanatory. Journey to the Center of the Earth, a remake for the twelfth and a half time with Brendan Fraser, looks like crap. Slapstick idiocy. See the trailer here. How many internal organs can you live without? Well, quite a few it seems. Technology has come a long, long, long way. 5 Ways to Hack the Surface of the Earth. Granted, stupid ways, but interesting nonetheless. It’s not meant to be taken as serious things to do, but more like a way of looking at what we can do. Akira, one of the greatest anime films ever made, is being turned into a live action flick! I’m stoked! A-ki-ra! This disease map gives an idea where we can expect the next epidemic to hit. Somewhat scary, but the Chinese should be a bit more worried than us. I mentioned it before, but we’ll be able to manipulate a single protein in your brain to turn you autistic, like an on/off switch. Scary, but strangely intriguing. Remember that satellite us Americans were planning to shoot down just to show that we could? Well, watch it happen for real! We did it! Kaboom! Eat that China! This chart is fascinating. It shows that when the economy is doing well, then there are more dystopian novels, but when it’s doing bad, there are less! Really cool! Patrick Stewart is to be in a new show called The Eleventh Hour. I’ll watch it because it’s Patrick Stewart and he is possibly the coolest actor ever. He makes fun of himself in American Dad! A LOT! Massive radio telescope project in Chile due for completion in 2012. Yay for space exploration and discovery! Proof that the Internet won’t bring us together. Pakistan, in all their ever so free glory, have banned YouTube. Yup, because that’s progress. The