xkcd’s attempts to visualize the territory that is cyberspace:
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
It would be irresponsible to discuss weaponized animals without covering sharks with laser beams on their heads, so: On a slightly more serious/relevant note, a friend of mine pointed me to Boston Dynamics’ BigDog project (it’s even made wikipedia): Pretty wild.
As we dive into the ethics of cloning, it’s impossible not to tip our collective hat to Calvin and Hobbes and the transmogrifier:
Arriving at a rock-solid, comprehensive definition of what is and isn’t science fiction isn’t necessarily something we need to do, let alone in week 1. That said, obviously the question is present for us from the get-go. What counts as science fiction? What kind of a thing is science fiction? How can we recognize it? […]
The last line here aptly summarizes, I think, why science fiction is simultaneously so exhilarating and so frightening. On the other hand . . as we’re starting to see, the future kind of does care what you think, in the sense that a techno-utopian attitude would produce a very different future from a dystopian, anti-tech […]
With “The Gernsback Continuum” and its phantom futures in mind, it’s worth thinking about how other kinds of futures function rhetorically, how they bleed through into the present, how they set the terms for our experience of our own world. For instance, imagine if all stories were written like science fiction stories—imagine what it would […]