Via jwz, here’s a film adaptation of Terry Bisson’s nifty short story They’re made out of meat. It was part of the First Annual Science Fiction Short Film Festival organized by the Seattle Science Fiction Museum.
Unrelated, but browsing synchronicity compells me to link to this little vegan rant: My husband Michael and I decided a long time ago that we would raise our young son Dragon as a vegan… The problem is my parents.
Why does HAL sing “Daisy, Daisy” in 2001: A Space Odyssey? (kottke.org)
In 1962, Arthur C. Clarke was touring Bell Labs when he heard a demonstration of a song sung by an IBM 704 computer programmed by physicist John L. Kelly. The song, the first ever performed by a computer, was called “Daisy Bell”, more commonly known as “Bicycle Built for Two” or “Daisy, Daisy”. When Clarke collaborated with Stanley Kubrick on 2001: A Space Odyssey, they had HAL sing it while Dave powered him down.
He links to a page with the relevant recording.
Two freaky tech stories I ran across: I posted a link to a story about a neural interface located on the tongue back in 2002; I found it interesting because in this embarassing Cyberpunk story I wrote eons ago, I’d figured this was a pretty kinky place to put a neural interface. But it turns out it’s not kinky, it’s very practical: according to a CNN story linked to by jwz, this device, called a Brain Port, is going to hit the market pretty soon, both to help people with disabilities get around and to enhance the sensory capabilities of divers and soliders in the battlefield.
What is kinky is this other story he links to, a Guardian article about PT-141, a fast-acting, odorless drug delivered by nasal inhaler that induces measurable sexual arousal within 15 minutes, by directly affecting the brain. Very creepy stuff.
Woah! Bli Panika, probably the best source of translated contemporary Science Fiction in Hebrew, has a new website! And it’s beautiful! And it works in Firefox! (finally!) And it has RSS (which means LJ syndication)!
[ via dorable].
Science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem has died, age 84 (USAToday).