From The Register:
the US Department of Defense (DOD) may already be creating a copy of you in an alternate reality to see how long you can go without food or water, or how you will respond to televised propaganda.
The DOD is developing a parallel to Planet Earth, with billions of individual “nodes” to reflect every man, woman, and child this side of the dividing line between reality and AR.
Jake Nemesis is in ur Overworld, cloning ur d00dz…
[via my elves are different]
The Carrington Event was an awesome solar flare that is the starting point for Stuart Clark’s book The Sun Kings
In September of 1859, the entire Earth was engulfed in a gigantic cloud of seething gas, and a blood-red aurora erupted across the planet from the poles to the tropics. Around the world, telegraph systems crashed, machines burst into flames, and electric shocks rendered operators unconscious. Compasses and other sensitive instruments reeled as if struck by a massive magnetic fist. For the first time, people began to suspect that the Earth was not isolated from the rest of the universe. However, nobody knew what could have released such strange forces upon the Earth–nobody, that is, except the amateur English astronomer Richard Carrington.
Color scheme picking widgets, as far as the eye can see:
Planetocopia, the World dream bank:
Planetocopia is a group of model worlds supporting intelligent life. Some of these worlds are set in our future, some are alternate Earths, some are purely imaginary experiments in planetology, biology, sociology. They fall into four series: Tilt!, Futures, the Biosphere Variations, and Caprices.
[via Kenneth Hite]
The geology and the maps are lovely; the biology not as much.
KinderForest – Growing a Playground is an animated short made by my brother to promote our friend Ezekiel’s ficus start-up. There’s a better version (Quicktime) of the video on that site.