Probability Angels sequel due out in Spring 2010

Joseph Devon writes:

• First and foremost, fans of of my last book, Probability Angels, will be happy to know that there is a sequel in the works which should hopefully be released next Spring. There will be more info as that date approaches.

Here is my review of Devon's Probability Angels in Feb. 2009 ***review***


Check out Joseph Devon's web site here

Paper Batteries a very real possibility

Consider this: Paper cell-phones or paper lap-top computers. Electronic paper that doesn't require any batteries or solar cells. Or batteries a mere fraction the weight and size of current technology, but still able to produce enough power to meet the needs of an electric vehicle but have far greater range.

Scientists at Stanford University in California report that regular paper could easily be turned into a super battery.

From the Yahoo news article sent in by Tim Sayill (click link for complete story)

• ...they have successfully turned paper coated with ink made of silver and carbon nanomaterials into a "paper battery" that holds promise for new types of lightweight, high-performance energy storage.

First Commercial Spacecraft Another Step Closer

Tim Sayell sends in this article from Yahoo News concerning Branson's Virgin Galactic - SpaceshipTwo.

Since Branson won the $10 million Ansari X Prize, we have been getting tantalizing hints as to what Branson and aviation designer Burt Rutan plan for commercial spaceflight.

Virgin unveiled White Knight Two a little over a year ago but only mockups and the shell of SpaceshipTwo has been seen. Now the first public appearance of the commercial passenger spacecraft has been held.

Virgin says that testing of SpaceshipTwo will begin next year with flights to the crafts maximum altitude sometime in 2011.

The first passengers of course will be the families of Branson and Rutan.

For more information - read the complete article here

***update*** here is a series of photos from Boing Boing that are exclusive! Very cool!

DVD Review: G I Joe

GI Joe

The premise of this movie is that there are secret military organizations and then there is an ultra secret outfit call GI Joe.

Being top top secret -- Joes have access to the coolest hardware and weapons. And since they are so secret, they fight the most ruthless ulta evil villains on the planet.

That is pretty much the movie - two regular field operatives from NATO are thrust into conflict between ultra villains of COBRA and the GI Joes. Cobra is bent on destroying the world's infrastructure by spreading nano-tech that eats any metal. Joes, employing equally cool tech is set on finding and destroying cobra's super secret lair.

So that is the basics for the movie...lets look at the dvd

First despite what the writer and director would have you believe, GI Joe is a film for Joe fans. I count it as science fiction loosely because of the tech and that it is supposed to be set in the "not too distant future". But marketing this movie as a film for the general audience is plain disingenuous. Even in the director's commentaries after they had gone to great pains to try and convince us that its a movie for everyone they go into great detail how this or that would upset the joe fans or this was different or that was. Not being a Joe fan, I couldn't call them on any of that, so who were those comments aimed at? Yep, Joe fans.

Then like the complaints from the fantastic four directors complaining about bad cgi, they bust on their own CGI
Now, first off, there are some damn good action sequences. Plus the tech is techie goodness, but the end effect is ehhhhhhhhhhh. It is a by the numbers action flick dealt to the lowest common denominator right down to that abysmal everyone in a line walking and talking. And what is the director most proud of? Writing the movie on the fly and shooting it all in 82 days! They are proud of making a bad movie!!! And they brag about it! And then complain when some of the movie is junk!!! Is someone really going to hire these geniuses to make a part 2? I mean really, why bother to tell us that it SHOULD had taken the best part of 2 years to write and maybe EIGHT months to shoot properly and brag about how to do it in 82. This is truly one of those times when I wish I had not listened to the special commentary.

So, overall, GI Joe is pretty mindless action written and shot on the fly, mostly green screen cgi. No matter what they say, its a movie for Joe fans. Non fans might get wowed by the action sequences but the plot is so comic book that it will leave the general audience cold. The only dvd special extra is the director's comments that will leave you stunned as to the level of bad movie making and proud of the fact.

Now I will suspect that I will get the well how many Hollywood movies have you made...and I say don't bother. If you are convinced that this is a great movie, we don't have anything to talk about and second I don't have to be a structural engineer to know that eventually the Leaning tower of Pisa is going to fall over some day.

I would give this a 5, for making a good FAN movie

Happy in Paraguay: ST-TNG voice over....

Ok, first off this short contains some some fairly strong language. Nuff said.

Now I think we have all, in a weak moment, supplied somewhat colorful, ummm alternative dialogue. Trekmovie.com hosted this funny and demented if masterful voice over. The words match the lip movement, but it has to be one of the most warped version of elephant foot I have ever seen!



Attack of the Show
Trekmovie.com

Man controls Robot Hand with his mind

Tim Sayell sends in an article from Yahoo news that concerns advancements being made in the field of interfacing the human nervous system with robotic hardware.

In an experiment, that set a record for the longest time electrodes had remained connected to a human nervous system, 26-year-old Pierpaolo Petruzziello, for a month, learned to control a robotic arm with thoughts alone, achieving a here-to-fore unheard of accuracy of 95%.

Electrodes were implanted in Petruzziello's stump that not only picked up control signals, but also feedback / sensation inputs, which Petruzziello stated made it much easier to imagine the arm as his own, connected to his body.

From the Article:

• During the month he had the electrodes connected, he learned to wiggle the robotic fingers independently, make a fist, grab objects and make other movements.
  

Read more here

Short Film "The Passenger" by Chris Jones

I can safely say that there are damn few things, at this stage of my life, that make me laugh out loud. And for a film to do that inside of 5 minutes is just a wee bit short of an event. So trust me when I say, you are going to find this short film, from the fertile mind of Chris Jones, "The Passenger", most likely one of the funniest shorts you have seen this year - maybe ever. I want to thank the blog SF Signal for bringing this to my attention.

And so it ends...

2009, that is. Almost to the end and I swear the year just got started!

There's a whole raft of cool stuff for free sitting on the Abandoned Towers website, just waiting for you to come explore

And 4 print issues now!

What are you waiting for? I've got the sale's records, you know. And it pains me to say that there are very few sales of each print issue.

Everyone wants to be IN print, but no one seems to want to BUY the print issues once they're created.

It's not easy, putting a print issue together, you know. It takes a lot of work. A lot of time. A lot of blood, sweat, and tears! (stop humming, I don't mean the old rock band).

So, how about putting your money where your mouth is?

Wander over to the AT website at http://cyberwizardproductions.com/AbandonedTowers and pick up one (or more) of the print issues today. Show the authors that being in print truly isn't a guarantee that their stories won't be read.

Man-Machine Book 2 is online

Royce Lee sends in a note that he is still enjoying the blog and passes on the great news that Man-Machine book two is now online !

I have read through the second installment. Again the graphics are minimalistic almost jarring but if anything, they add to the surreal aspect of the storyline, which I think you will agree is very engaging.

Check book 2 out here

Could Jupiter's Europa harbor fish-sized life?

According to the latest National Geographic,  the Jovian moon Europa -hundreds of millions of miles from the sun- may host something fishy. Something alive—right now. Below its icy crust Jupiter's moon Europa is believed to host a global ocean up to a hundred miles (160 kilometers) deep...an ocean currently being fed more than a hundred times more oxygen than previous models had suggested, according to provocative new research.

That amount of oxygen would be enough to support more than just microscopic life-forms: At least three million tons of fishlike creatures could theoretically live and breathe on Europa, said study author Richard Greenberg of the University of Arizona in Tucson. 

""There's nothing saying there is life there now," said Greenberg, who presented his work last month at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society's   Division for Planetary Sciences. "But we do know there are the physical conditions to support it."  Full Article Here.
Photo: NASA/JPL/UArizona/UColorado

We Are All Connected music video by Symphony of Science

Here is a neat site. It's called the Symphony of Science. It's a musical project by John Boswell designed to deliver scientific knowledge and philosophy in musical form. Here is one that really grabbed me. It is called "We Are All Connected" It contains quotes featuring Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye sampled and mixed in with a musical score. Before you go off saying Nye singing? That's not it...click play, it really is worth it.

AntipodeanSF issue #138 sneak peak!

******UPDATE*****
I didn't realize that issue 138 was having a problem, until Ion wrote and gave us the low down.
Here is the gist of his letter:

• Hi all,
• Just a short note to remind you that AntipodeanSF Issue 138 is now finally (after some extensive delays getting our broadband functional after a move) online. You'll find AntipodeanSF at the usual URL: www.antisf.com.au
  

Nuke, Editor of the really entertaining Antipodean online flash fiction magazine has given us a heads up on the upcoming issue 138 and I can just look at this TOC and see this is going to be a great issue, how? well Suzanne Sykora? Shaun Saunders? Jamie Richter?! Yep Nuke... has a winner this issue!

"Apocalypse Hotel" by Marcelo Rinesi
"It Was A Monster" by Giovanni Piccolo
"Let Us Prey" by Suzanne Sykora
"A Matter of Perspective" by Shaun A Saunders
"Taken" by Christopher Elston
"Zombie Picnic" by Scott Wilson
"Forever War" by Timothy Miller
"Dog-E" by Jamie Richter
"A Quarter to Oblivion" by Adi Gibb
"Mirrors" by Kevin J. Phyland

Check it out this weekend on Antipodean SF

Review: "The Fountain" DVD movie

The Fountain
Hugh Jackman Rachel Weisz
Directed by Darren Aronofsky

Talk about a total departure from the films I have been watching as of late! The Fountain is as far away as you can get from the high octane action science fiction movie as you can get I think. The Fountain is a thoughtful, emotional image laden treat for the senses.

I have heard the film described as one man's trip throughout the ages on a quest to save his true love. And you might be able to get though the film with just that mind set and be fully entertained. But what the Fountain really is, becomes apparent as the film moves along.

Hugh Jackman plays the lead in three distinct story lines. First as a conquistador on a quest to "New Spain" for his queen to find the "tree of life" said to grant the drinker of it's sap, life everlasting. In the second a research scientist bent on finding a cure for his wife's cancer before she dies, stumbles upon an extract from an old growth tree from central America and third a Dalli inspired trip through the universe with a monk and a life giving tree to a dying star called by the ancient Myan's Xibalba, or the Mayan underworld of the dead.

Each story line at some point will reference the other two, giving it a very intertwined feeling and you can see where the feeling of an ongoing tale through time.

The first two story lines (I say first two, but all three story lines are running at the same time) are easy enough to follow, but the third is every bit the last 20 minutes of 2001. What is the bubble that the tree and the monk are traveling in, is the tree THE tree, why does the monk show up in the first two story lines as the main character from time to time? The Wiki describes the third character as an "astronaut" in an "echospheric spacecraft" (whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat? Were they watching the same movie I was?) But when you watch the movie, I dare anyone to get that from the third storyline. It's mystical, almost hallucinogenic in the images that are shown.

The intertwining of the three storylines becomes almost frenetic. The Myan priest see the "astronaut" of the future, the conquistador finds the tree, dies seeing Xibalba and drops the ring his queen gave him, The doctor loses the ring too and reads a story written by his wife telling about the conquistador and the fire of Xibalba. Her book is called the Fountain...what fountain....fountain of youth? Tree of life? same thing? and then continues his research using the material from the central American "tree" and ends by planting said tree on his wife's grave, just as Xibalba novas - and now the astronaut/monk flies through the cosmos with a tree...the tree? undying because he is eating the bark of the tree, then we see that he has on the queen's ring as the star goes nova.

ok, but if the star novas in the future hundreds of light-years away....how did the two other time lines see it in the past? huh? Oh yeah, if you have seen the ending of 2001 you know my analogy is apt. only I kept thinking that the music from the Disney movie "The Black Hole".

Don't get me wrong, the movie is good. But if you're looking for lots of action...ain't happening. The film is thoughtful, introspective and often visually stunning.

And the DVD is a treat as well! The special features included on the disk show the abortive first try at making the film earlier, the locals. sets, rushes, outakes, makeup....all kinds of short snippets that give you insight into how the film was conceived and executed. Which in my book makes it an excellent addition to your dvd library. I would give it a solid 9

Mainer wins NASA glove competition - Again!

NASA has awarded Peter Homer of Southwest Harbor, Maine,  $250,000 for coming up with the winning design concept for more flexible space gloves intended to make it easier for astronauts to perform tasks.

It's the second time Peter Homer has won the so-called "Astronaut Glove Challenge" -- Homer bested the competition in the same contest in 2007.

Homer's design won first place in this year's competition, held yesterday at the Astronaut Hall of Fame in Titusville, Florida. The second place prize of $100,000 went to Ted Southern of Brooklyn, N.Y.NASA officials say the competitors demonstrated their glove designs by trying out a range of tasks in a pressurized chamber. "It is remarkable that two designers working on their own could create gloves that meet the requirements for spaceflight -- a task that normally requires a large team of experts," says NASA engineer Kate Mitchell in a statement.

In order to qualify for a prize, the gloves had to meet all of the basic requirements of NASA's current spacesuit gloves and exceed their flexibility. The gloves also were tested to ensure they would not leak.
Competitors had to develop a complete glove, including the outer, thermal-micrometeoroid-protection layer and the inner, pressure-restraining layer. In the 2007 competition, only the pressure-restraining layer was required.

Skhizein by Jérémy Clapin

Hey, you have got to check out this short film. It's called Skhizein by Jérémy Clapin. It is about a meteor strike and it's effect on one man. I love the animation. Thanks to SF Signals for the original post.

Skhizein (Jérémy Clapin,2008) from Behemoth on Vimeo.