Category: Science Fiction and Fantasy

Charles Stross reports that Gardner Dozois stepped down as editor of Asimov’s SF Magazine and that David Pringle announced he is stepping down as editor of Interzone. He is definately justified in calling it an End of an Era.

Yahoo! News – NASA hears words not yet spoken:

WASHINGTON (AFP) – NASA has developed a computer program that comes close to reading thoughts not yet spoken, by analyzing nerve commands to the throat.

It says the breakthrough holds promise for astronauts and the handicapped.

"A person using the subvocal system thinks of phrases and talks to himself so quietly it cannot be heard, but the tongue and vocal cords do receive speech signals from the brain," said developer Chuck Jorgensen, of NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California.

Jorgensen’s team found that sensors under the chin and one each side of the Adam’s apple pick up the brain’s commands to the speech organs, allowing the subauditory, or "silent speech" to be captured.

Link from boingboing.

Really פלצני question posted on a Q&A session with Ursula Le Guin (her reply is in this post’s title):

As opposed to the standard model of time travellers projected into previously lived cultural patterns, what do you make of the concept "collective experrience of temporal variation," such as stallled, recursive or redundant sequences of year sets. I am thinking of collective dellusion or the social construction of reality, wherein mere participation in humanity’s elaborated schedules makes distance between avowed temporal judgments and an undercurrent of more objective time. For instance, what would happen if global culture lost track of the passage of the years due to the complexity of information elaborating its rote performance? I am thinking of this not so much from a narrative science fiction perspective as an anthropological dissonance between (world) culture and context.

[ link from Rogers Cadenhead, who got it from Ansible ]

The Website at the End of the Universe is a Science Fiction news site (slashdot type thing). Link via Dave Langford’s Ansible, who pointed out their free SF calender.