For the curious reader of science fiction (scifi) and fantasy
Flap those wings! On some airline flights, I’ve felt that it might be necessary to help by doing that. So does Pearls Before Swine:
But here’s something real. A team of University of Toronto students kept a human-powered ornithopter (wing-flapping aircraft) aloft for a short flight after being towed up to takeoff speed by a car. Just a first step, but a beautiful first step!
I sometimes ponder what I would like my personal library to look like, in my future dream house. Lots of books, of course, and a few easy chairs. Nice woodwork. But a growing part of my library is ebooks, and how do you put ebooks where you can browse the spines, or pull books out at random to look at their covers? One of the things I like to do in my SF collection is to once in a while just look at the covers, and build a kind of gestalt feeling of all those wonderful stories gathered in one place.
So here’s my plan. Along with all those paper books, I’ll have a digital frame displaying a slideshow of the covers for all my ebooks. Understand, that’s a stopgap measure, until the technology catches up with what I really want—a holographic display of the book images, arrayed sort of the way iTunes displays album covers when you’re running a playlist. You’d be able to flip through the display with your fingertips, and if you find one you want to read right then, just pull it out of the holo. Sort of like this display at coverpop.com, only in full-sized full-holo. That action will cause the book to download, if necessary, into whatever magnificent reading device is current then, and open for reading. Sans dust mites.
The best of both worlds.
I can’t decide whether I’d rather have a flying car or a flying submarine. Both seem right up my alley. Last week’s New Scientist has another article about progress toward a flying sub. (I know I’ve written about this before, but I can’t find my own post on the subject!) Some of the possibilities being considered: use of jet turbines both for air and underwater propulsion (the underwater use being powered by electric motors, rather than jet combustion), the use of air/hydrofoils for both flight and forced submersion. Of course, the work at this point is being pursued on behalf of the military, but I’m rooting for a civilian version, too. I’d link to the article, but most of it is behind a paywall for subscribers, unfortunately.
All this puts me in mind of Tom Swift, Jr.’s diving seacopter, from the juvenile novel of 1956. That handy invention used an atomic-powered central rotor in the middle of a flying saucer. To fly, it spun to force air downward. To submerge, it reversed to force water upward. I wonder if the folks at DARPA have given any thought to hiring Tom. Here’s what the Ocean Arrow looked like…
What better way to start the holiday weekend (or end it, since I forgot to post this after I wrote it) than to see a flying car fly! This I-TEC Maverick Sport Model is different from the Transition and the Switchblade that I’ve written about before. It’s more like a car/ultralight. Drive it like an open jeep, then pop a chute, start up the propeller, and take off in just 250 feet. Awesome.
Read about it and see the video here. (Warning–the video starts with a lot of superfluous racing around like a dune buggy, so you might want to fast-forward to the flying part.)
Okay, I haven’t posted in at least three weeks. Bad dog! I have no excuse, except for the fact that I just didn’t feel like posting, and so I didn’t. But now I repent, and to atone, I have three great videos. They might not all be new to all of you, but I just saw them for the first time. Not only do I love ’em, I didn’t have to do a thing to make them! Kudos to those who did!
Now, I’m not a huge Dr. Horrible fan in the same the way that my daughter is, but when I saw “Dr. Horrible Takes Over the Emmys,” I knew I had to post it here:
Dr. Horrible isn’t the only mad scientist around. Pay attention to these researchers from CERN, giving us the Large Hadron Rap! You’ll not only get your limbs going, you’ll learn something…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50ZssEojtM
and Alpinekat’s page, with more rap:
http://www.katemcalpine.com/lhr.html
And finally, just for a little political controversy, here’s Will Ferrell, et al., for Moveon.org, explaining just why the proposed U.S. health care reform is a really bad idea!
It’s been fascinating to watch the parade of commentary by SF authors on tor.com today, as we communally celebrate the 40th anniversary of our arrival on the Moon. (The servers there were getting pretty maxed out for a while, so loading was slow, but they seem to have it under control now.) My own contribution appeared during the early hours and has scrolled onto the second page by now, but I’m in good company, coming between Joe Haldeman and Charlie Stross. (Here’s a permalink to the Moon Landing Day celebration. More of a directory, though. If you’re reading this on July 20, better to go to the main page.)
At first there was no cool picture to accompany my post, but they’ve now added one, and I’m happy!
Also, whether by coincidence or design, Ereads.com picked today to do a nice writeup on my books. They couldn’t have picked a better day for it!
It’s been forty years since we went to the Moon! Hard to believe, isn’t it? I was mentioning memories of the lunar landing to some people the other day, and they looked at me like, What is this ancient history of which you speak? This is what I spoke of:
That’s Neil Armstrong, taking one small step for a man (which I watched on live TV, with breath sucked in and a pounding heart); and on the right, Buzz Aldrin getting his chance in the lens. And don’t miss this stunning panorama of the Lunar Module and the surrounding area, taken by Armstrong. (It’s too wide to put on this page.)
Check tor.com throughout the day for commentary from various writers (including me!) on their recollections of the historic event. Adding a somber note to the memory is the passing the other day of Walter Cronkite, with whom I watched much of the manned space program in the early years.
The one thing I never dreamed as I watched the lunar landing and exploration was that we’d go to the Moon and then not go back for at least forty years. I have guarded hope for the future.
In space, exciting things are happening. Two expensive and high-profile space observatories from the European Space Agency (ESA)—Herschel (infrared) and Planck (cosmic microwave background, or Big Bang radiation), were launched together on a single Ariane 5 launcher. A lot of breaths were being held on that one, but they’re both in space now, bound for the L2 orbital point 1.5 million km from Earth, where they’ll be able to conduct their observations far from interference. Here’s the launch, from French Guiana:
In addition, Atlantis astronauts have been hard at work refurbishing the Hubble Space Telescope. I snipped this image from a much larger one on Astronomy Picture of the Day:
Photo by Thierry LegaultThat’s Atlantis and the Hubble, caught in silhouette against the sun, by a camera on the ground. Hats off to the photographer, astronomer Thierry Legault, who took the image—and to those astronauts, who have been called upon to whack and grunt at their wrenches, trying to loosen frozen bolts and praying they don’t break anything, just like the rest of us working on our cars in the driveway.
I just have one gripe about the mission, which includes attaching a docking ring so that at the end of the Hubble’s service life in five years they can hook up a propulsion unit and deorbit Hubble into reentry over the Pacific Ocean. I’d rather they boosted Hubble into a higher, longer lasting orbit, where one day we could retrieve it to bring it back safely to Earth and put it in the Air and Space Museum. Or, alternatively, we could establish it as a National Historic Site right there in orbit—to be visited by space-traveling tourists. Perhaps it could become the nucleus of the future (literal) space wing of the Smithsonian. Surely it has earned that right.
While we’re waiting for the “roadable” airplane, the Transition, to come down to our price range—not to mention fly (but they did get it off the ground, in the first short flight test!)—check out this baby: a flying motorcycle called the Switchblade:
That’s for me! You betcha! According to the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, “Samson Motorworks has been working on a flying motorcycle, the Switchblade, for two and a half years. The three-wheel motorcycle’s design features three lifting surfaces, like the Piaggio Avanti, and side-by-side seating for two people… The wings will fold beneath the motorcycle’s body… Cameras will provide visibility to the rear, and an optional ballistic parachute will be offered.”
Oh man, I can’t wait. (It hasn’t flown yet, either, but it will. It will.) Buy a lot of those books from me, people—okay? A lot of books!
While we’re waiting, here’s a picture of the Transition in its first leap into the air.
I wrote here earlier about my reaction to Authors Guild statements that Amazon’s new Kindle 2 may be infringing on rights with its real-aloud capability. (You can hear a demo of the Kindle 2 reading here. It’s way better than Microsoft Reader or Adobe Reader.) I said that having an electronic gizmo read text aloud is no threat to the performance quality of an audiobook. I still feel that way. But…
I emailed the Authors Guild to say I was worried they were picking the wrong fight, that they were only getting in the way of a technological development that could help make our ebooks more useful—and attractive—to consumers. I got a call back from Paul Aiken of the Guild, and we had a nice, long conversation.
Paul pointed out something that I hadn’t really thought of: No matter what we think about the audio experience, and whether it’s live or recorded, and whether or not it’s good for the customer and bad for the audiobook business, there’s something we need to consider—that text-to-speech function may violate existing contract terms. Which contracts? The ones writers and publishers sign with audiobook companies, which specify exactly what is meant by “audio.” Kindle might be infringing on rights, for example, that an audiobook company has paid for—such a contract, for example, defining “audio” by terms such as the use of technological means to produce a sound version of the book. These contracts already exist, by the thousands.
(None of this, by the way, has anything thing to do with the rights of the blind—which are secured by law, as they should be—or the rights of a person to read a book aloud. Those are entirely unrelated issues.)
So what does the Guild want? As I understood Paul, the Guild wants to ensure, before this whole thing goes too far, that contractual rights are honored, that parties who have reserved or purchased the right to use technology to produce audible versions of a work be paid for such a use. It doesn’t really matter whether we feel that a machine’s reading is equivalent to a professional recording. What matters is the definitions in the book contracts.
If the Guild isn’t trying to stop the technology, but simply to ensure proper compensation, how might this work? It could take the form of a small surcharge added to an ebook purchase, to enable read-aloud capability—with a royalty for having read-aloud enabled going directly to the audio rights-holder. Many ebooks already have enable/disable switches on their Microsoft Reader and Adobe editions. (My own ereads books, for reasons that escape me, have read-aloud enabled for Microsoft Reader and disabled for Adobe Reader.) If things go this way, I’d personally prefer to see the cost built right into the price of the ebook, and not make it something a buyer would have to think about at the point of purchase. But that’s a detail.
While my own gut feeling about synthetic text-to-speech hasn’t changed as a result of this conversation, my understanding of what the Guild wants to do has. There are a zillion book contracts out there that define what constitutes an audible presentation of a book. Those contracts can’t be wished away by Amazon or by the book buyer, or, for that matter, by me. Although I’ve previously compared this question to the entertainment industry’s attempts to stop the VCR, maybe a more apt comparison is the Hollywood writers trying to get fair royalties for the use of their work on DVDs and the net—not trying to stop the new technologies, but to make sure that structures are in place to guarantee them their fair share of the profit.
This, I’m sure, promises to be an ongoing story. As they say in the TV biz: To be continued…
