Cool SF artist site

Just found the web site of an interesting science fiction and fantasy artist, Stefan Martiniere. Never heard of him before, despite having a long-time interest in SF/F artists such as Michael Whelan, and it turns out I have been seeing his work a lot. He's worked on books, animation, films (such as the recent I, Robot and The Fifth Element, theme parks and rides, and more. Busy fellow, according to his résumé

Feeling overstressed? I resemble this remark

If you feel overstressed, overworked, and wonder why the wonders of modern technology haven't made the world a utopia, you're not alone.

Technology is good....but can be used badly.

Examples are everywhere (and no, i don't just mean Mac vs Windows ;-)

One big reason why I use MacOS and PalmOS

An article in the BBC points out today one big reason why I prefer Macintosh computers and PalmOS PDAs to Windows PCs and WindowsMobile/PocketPC PDAs:

The number of viruses. Which doubled in 2004, and exceed 100,000.

"The last 12 months have seen a dramatic growth in almost every security threat that plague Windows PCs.

The count of known viruses broke the 100,000 barrier and the number of new viruses grew by more than 50%. "

The current virus tally for the MacOS? Zero (OS X, that is. OS 9 and before had a few wimpy-ass virii that never did much.) Sure, the Mac has only a few % of the market (installed base is far larger though) but with 4 million new Macs sold every year, and older ones kept running and passed on to friends and family instead of being pitched like most Wintel PCs seem to be, there's a LOT f Macs out there (50 million maybe, I'd estimate) and that's GOT to be a big enough target for the virii writers. THere have been proof of concept works and virii for the Mac...but it's still next to impossible for them to spread, due to the inherent security of the OS compared to Windows....which has always been and still is a sieve, despite Microsoft's so-called best efforts.

And the success of the iPod is encouraging more switchers than Apple's "Switch" ads ever did. Not to mention constant, repeated press coverage of such switchers and articles by PC pundits who've tried the Mac...and liked it, some even staying switched or at least going cross-platform (often with a Mac-laptop, widely knows as among the best along with the IBM Thinkpads)

Here's to a kick-ass 2005, Apple. (Palm, you'd better start doing some ass-kicking yourself...or just rename yourself to "Treo"...or Microsoft's going to do to you what they did to Apple in the 80's and 90's.)

John Young retires

Just read that astronaut John Young is retiring from NASA. The amazing thing is that he's been an astronaut as long as I have been alive (he joined in 1962), and flew six missions in four different spacecraft (the article in the link doesn't explicitly state it, but from the fact that he flew two Gemini missions (including the first), two Apollo missions, and two shuttle missions (including the first), I make that the Gemini, Apollo, LEM, and Shuttle. He's 74 this year.

Hats off to such a pioneer spirit. Would that the world, the USA, and NASA had many, many more like him.

I'm not a big reader of biographies, but if he has written one I'd like to. I'll have to check out the Biography channel to see if they do a bio program of him. They should.

UPDATE: Here's the NASA biography of John W. Young.

Maybe there really WERE Hobbits!

Interesting story about the discovery of a group of hobbit-sized hominids down in the South Pacific (ironically the The Lord Of The Rings movies were filmed in New Zealand, also in the South Pascific).

And apparently (Komodo) dragons and oliphaunts (although dwarf ones) were present too.

When someone tells you it's impossible...ignore them and do it!

A group of high school students with a shoestring budget have made a totally self-sustaining hydrogen powered car (truck, actually). It uses sunlight and water to produce it's own fuel. It's a bit ungainly, but it works. Hey, they weren't concentrating on pretty, they were concentrating on functional. All the "experts" figured it'd take 20 years.

Looks to me like all it needs now is a little polish and miniaturization. We can dang sure do that (and if we can't, the Japanese or the Taiwanese can). Heck, the PDA in my pocket is so far in advance of the first room-size digital computers it's not funny. (Say, does that make PDAs "bonsai computers". You know what bonsai trees are; trees that are miniaturized and trained and shaped to be tiny versions of real trees many hundreds of times larger.)

Anyway...If I were the oil industry, or the Arabs, I'd be quaking in my boots right now. Sell your oil stocks now!

I've always thought that with the research I saw on solar cells that are much more flexible and conformable (almost like plastic) that you could use it as some or all of the car body (hell, make the sunroof be a solar cell!). Your car sits outside 8-10 hours a day at least....use that time to crack water into hydrogen and oxygen. Use the solar cell to power a condenser to get pure water out of the air, and a compressor to store the hydrogen. It doesn't have to TOTALLY fill your car yet....we have to let the oil industry down easy, so let them switch to selling hydrogen. Oh, and use a bit of that electricity to put a blasted low power fan in your car to exhaust the hot air that builds up, so that you don't have to fry in the summer when you get in your car to to go lunch. And perhaps use the heat/cool differential to condense water. There are electrical devices that COOL (Pilzer effect or something like that). What happens with cool surfaces in an otherwise hot humid environment (like Iowa in summer?) Condensation! Water (and nice clean water too). And the rest of the year? Shovel some of that good old Iowa snow into a hopper and let the sun melt it. Make hay (or hydrogen) while the sun shines. Hell, design the car right and you could have the snow melt into channels to fill up your water tank for cracking. Take a look at the neat little heating elements on your rear window sometime. Get the idea? Put those on your roof, trunk, whatever, and let them drain into the water tank.

Hell, with a little good ol American ingenuity, we could even make an engine that works on either gas or ethanol or hydrogen. Don't tell me it can't be done. You're wrong. As someone will prove presently, if you're silly enough to say ANYTHING can't be done.

Ain't science wunnerful?

Necessity is the mother of invention, and people are starting to ANTICIPATE necessity now. Hot damn, the world's not entirely going down the crapper (despite Bush and Cheney Inc.'s attempts) now is it?

I wonder if the GOP (Greed Oil Power) will change their acronym to GHP?

Dang, maybe those rumors of a car that ran on water WERE true.

Now maybe that space drive (the Dean Drive) that was rumored, or those anti-grav devices that you hear about from time to time will turn out to be true, too. Or cold fusion? (Hot fusion sure isn't going anywhere...fa$t!)

Oh well, if they aren't, true, I'm sure we'll invent them presently.

And private companies like Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites are making private spaceplanes and winning the $10million X-Prize, and Bigelow is working private space stations and funding a $50 Million prize for the first private orbital craft (the next step for Mr. Rutan, I hope.....he's certainly someone who can get the job done right and without gorging at the public trough, too). And Johns Hopkins Univeristy appears to be creating the first private deep space probe, with a mission to Pluto, Charon and the Kuiper Belt. And about time too...NASA seems to have lost the Right Stuff. (Even more so this week, as "Gordo" Cooper passed away...on the same day that Spaceship One won the X-Prize no less. I think Gordo's spirit might be looking after SpaceShip One!)

Ad astra per aspera! Illegitimi non carborundum!

My, Robot?

Lots of what appear to be practical developments in consumer robotics these days. And now, I'm not talking about the Sony Aibo robotic cat and dog, or the Honda Asimo (named for robotic-fiction writer Isaac Asimov, one of whose famous works was the (apparently very loose) basic for the current Will Smith flick "I,Robot".

These are robotic lawnmowers and floor sweepers. Things more in line with what Robert Heinlein's character Dan Davis came up with in "The Door into Summer".

• Electrolux's Automower lawnmower


• Electrolux's Trilobite floor sweeper (cute name)


• Roomba's floor sweeper.
  

And on the not-quite-"practical"-but-a-hell-of-a-lot-of-fun front, check out the movie of this Korean humanoid kit robot. It dances, it does karate, it does calisthenics. Nifty.

Personally, I'm kind of fond of the toy R2-D2 robot from Hasbro I've got that can respond to voice command, etc. (Especially the "easter eggs" it has - if you have one, tell it to "follow me"!)

The X-Prize starts to pay off

As noted on Slashdot, it looks like the folks competing for the X-Prize to develop private, commerical space travel and launch vehicles are starting to have an effect. Now someone's starting to take the NASA project for inflatable space stations (which were surprisingly safe and cheap...even better than metal ones, as I recall) and apply it to low-cost space stations.

Reminds me of the novel Waldo, by Robert Heinlein, where the eponymous character lived in his own space station due to suffering from myasthenia gravis.

Of course, we'll have to have some standards on docking, etc. Affordable ones. I know the US and Russians have some standards on this (at least I hope so, otherwise how could the Soyuz and Progress capsules and the Shuttle all dock at the International Space Station? I think work on this started with the Apollo-Soyuz mission in the 1970's).

And we'll need some autonavigation/autodocking. 'Taint easy to dock with a big balloon in space! The Russians use autonav/autodock on their unmanned Progress resupply capsule to ISS and to their old Mir station (and perhaps older Salyuts?) So sounds like a way for the cash-strapped Russian economy to make some coin.

We may get the government pork barrel off the back of the space industry/program sooner than we think.

Why does Star Trek matter so much to some people?

Don't understand what we geeks see in Star Trek? Read this.

Because it, more than anything else I can think of (including the Bible), speaks to children and people of all ages about hope for the future. I've heard people (including an ex-President who died recently) say that without religion, there are no morals, etc.

To that I say - bull. I'm not a religious person, never have been. Oh, I attended Sunday School when I was small. But since then, not so much.

Although for some sad individuals, Star Trek (or the Bible, the Koran, or whatever) is the be-all and end-all and answer to every question (usually for folks incapable or afraid to use their minds and think), the rest of us see it as fiction, have fun with it, and recognize that it, too, speaks to us of important truths....without being nearly as divisive as religions have been in past centuries and millenium. Because it speaks to the FUTURE instead of the past, maybe.

Oh, the geeks "war" about whether Star Trek (or which particular Star Trek series), or Babylon 5 or Stargate or Farscape or whatever is the BETTER series, me I just enjoy 'em all. Farscape and Stargate don't get overly preachy about any sort of message (although they do show good moral tone). B5 and Star Treks are more overt about it. But these are wars of words. Of thought. Of Ideas and Ideals. Religion is examined by Stargate and B5 and Star Trek too, at times. Respectfully, but without bias. (I love the bit in a B5 episode where all the ambassadors of the various races are showing each other their religious or spiritual convictions.....the final scene is when the representative of Earth startrs to tell about ours...by introducing representatives of ALL the Earth religions he could find. The were all lined up in a row. It was a LONG line.)

Live long and prosper, y'all.

They Paved Paradise and Put In A Parking Lot, indeed

NASA and NOAA have determined that the amount of concrete-paved surface (and I assume this means asphalt and such too) in the USA is approximately the size of the state of Ohio.

That's more than the amount of wetlands in the USA. And still growing by 10,000 miles of road and one million new homes a year. And that's not counting other countries, either.

Wow. That's a lot of green plants lost. I wonder if they have information about the rate of growth.....because I'd kinda like to know how long it it going to be before the Earth looks like Coruscant from Star Wars, or Trantor from Isaac Asimov'e Foundation novels.

This brought to mind a new cover of Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi", I've recently been listening too, by Counting Crows and Vanessa Carlton. This is the song everyone probably remembers as "They Paved Paradise And Put In A Parking Lot"
Hey, the hippies and environmentalists warned us. We just haven't been listening...

The truth hurts, doesn't it?

Here's a good article about the problems Microsoft faces in continuing "business as usual" and why they may not continue to succeed

Mac fans have been pointing this out for years. Interesting to see that viewpoint in someone who worked for MS for a decade, and recently got so frustrated with Windows that he gave up and switched to a Mac (and has been living happily ever after).

The truth is out there!
The truth will set you free!

What goes around comes around

Well, the bean-counters and MBA-drones were quick to jump all over outsourcing USA programmer's jobs to India.

But like all (ahem) "good things", it can't last.

Just hope that people are willing to come back to fill the jobs you can no longer fill so cheaply in India.....and don't be surprised if you end up paying more when they do.

That'll teach 'em.

Standard, standards, who's got the standards

God knows I love new tech and new gadgets. But sometimes I wonder if things move too damn fast. Now they've developed PAPER DVD's and other new larger-capacity DVD formats.

Besides the above, I read today they're already looking to replace the DVD....and the DVD is supposedly going to replace the CD. It's moving towards replacing it for CD-R uses on computers.

Hell, I haven't finished replacing all my LP's and VHS tapes with DVD yet. Cut it out, guys!

Thanks heavens they are making DVD drives that are able to read and write the old formats. Oh yeah.....there's a ton of different DVD formats out there (DVD-ROM, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW and these new things.)

Unix and Linux have this problem too. There's eleventy-one different flavors of Unix and even of Linux. Hell, there's a half dozen Linuxii for the MACINTOSH for crissakes....And Mac OS X is a BSD Unix variant. I wonder if this hurts or help Unix/Linux. I'm betting it hurts.

COOL new tech makes for much more efficient motors and quieter fans

A Japanese inventor has come up with a new idea to make electric motors 80% more efficient. This will also help fans run more quietly and use less power.

Dandy!

Novel cell phone service helps you figger out what song that is on the radio!

John C. Dvorak posited in one of his columns a while back that killing Napster (the free version) was the worst thing the music industry ever did, because it killed the major way to sample new music. You can't do it on the radio anymore, because they play songs for 20 minutes and don't tell you who the heck played that song you liked. (I've never understood this.....you'd think they'd be doing MORE commercial breaks these days, not less. It's all about advertising after all...)

Well, AT&T has solved this problem with a new cell phone service.

Reminds me of a widget I saw some years back that you could buy and push a button on to "bookmark" music you were listening to at a particular time and then use it with your computer later to find out what the song was. Never heard about it again (not surprised, are you?)

So I dunno if this AT&T service will go anywhere either. I only sort of agree with Dvorak, too. After all, even though Napster has gone commercial, there's always KaZaa, Gneutella, OpenNap, Usenet newsgroups, etc, etc. But then, I've long since stopped paying attention to Mr. Duh Whore Hack. Him and Dennis Miller used to be great....but they've gone down the tubes the last few years.

First steps towards Replicators?

Hmmm....what with nanontech and such things as these small logic blocks, are we on the way to making "Replicator" robots, ala the TV show Stargate SG-1?

Anyone got the Asgard's address?

My next job may be in the auto industry....

Looks like cars are becoming so hight tech, computerized, and hard to repair that they are looking for people with IT and electronics backgrounds to diagnose and fix 'em

I've never been one to work on my own car.....but hmmmmmmmm....

Methinks it's time to rethink the auto industry AND the computer industry....

Oh my freaking god....JOHN CARTER OF MARS is being made into a movie

Man, I gotta read "SciFiWire" more often.

Someone is actually making a movie of one of the classic SF novels of all time, "A Princess of Mars"!

We may have the makings of a franchise here. On par with The Lord of the Rings, too.

"A Princess of Mars" is the first of 14 "John Carter of Mars" novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs (you know, the guy who also crreated Tarzan, Pellucidar, etc.) Not to be confused with that other thrice-named British author, Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes), or the quadruply-named John Ronald Reuel Tolkien...

I've actually got a 1910 edition of this novel in excellent shape. Looks like it was a Christmas gift from "Horace" to someone back then, too. I've read several of these books, but haven't finished the whole series. Gotta do that soon. (If you've never read it, I've got to tell you the style is NOT like current literature. It's rather breathless.....but oddly it's actually PERFECT for a modern Hollywood action/sci-fi movie. What goes around comes around, I guess.)

And my favorite artist, Michael Whelan, did the book covers for a reprint series a few years back. I've bought a number of his book covers for my walls.

And once they're done with the John Carter books, they could make a movie of one of my favorite Robert Heinlein books, "The Number of The Beast", whose main characters are (intentionally) named "Zebediah JOHN CARTER" and "Deety (short for DEJAH THORIS) BURROUGHS". This could be a franchise on par with Riverworld and John Carter of Mars, too. Either this book and it's related followups, or the whole Heinlein Future History or Lazarus Long cycles.

Pinch me, I must be dreaming - FARSCAPE returns!

Good heavens....I must be dreaming. The SciFi channel, who killed off one of the best and most innovative science fiction shows, Farscape, a few months back because they apparently couldn't have all the control they wanted, is actually bringing it back, at least as a miniseries.

THANK YOU, SCI FI.

And they picked up the excellent re-make of the campy old TV series Battlestar Galactica....and have kept Stargate going and are making a sequel series, Stargate Atlantis. And just picked up Andromeda. They had Earth: Final Conflict for a while too....but it mysteriously vanished. That series was ok for a while, but kind went downhill fast. Watchable, but not excellent.

Oh, and they tried to keep Babylon 5 going (but didn't have the guts to keep Legend of the Rangers going despite bad ratings due to the world's most horrible example of scheduling ever seen....opposite a major sporting event on another channel.)

How amazing that virtually everything ELSE they beyond the above mentioned items and the occasional movie or miniseries such as the two Dune ones show is utter trash! Some of it is HORRIBLY BAD (and I'm talking about new/exclusively-made-for-SciFi stuff, not ancient old stuff that's just campy/dated.) Even Spielberg's "Taken" minseries was pretty bad (not to mention about twice as long as it needed to be.)

Amazing....especially from the channel that actually had the gus to make a movie/miniseries out of Phillip José Farmer's RIVERWORLD (which would make an excellent TV series. I think their Riverworld was a pilot for a series, but not sure.)

I think the SciFi channel staff must be collectively bipolar or schizo or something. Such extremes of trash and treasure give ME mood swings just thinking about it!

I guess this is an example of Sturgeon's Law in action: "90% of everything is crud."

Freaky number coinky-dinks

I was checking my cell phone timers today (I couldn't remember if I'd reset the resettable one last month when the billing cycle changed). Sure enough, I hadn't (gotta set up a reminder in my PDA to do that). The freaky thing was that all three timers started with "43". The last incremental (per-call) timer was 43:16. The Resettable (monthly total) timer was 432, and the Cumulative (lifetime) total was 4332. If the incremental timer was 43:2x, I'd have gotten worried....too many coincidences. (Actually, I'd have been worried about a bug in the cell phone software.....) And when was the last call I made on my cell phone? On Saturday, 4/3. AHHHHH!!!!!

Two other cell phone thoughts:

• The first cell phone call was made 31 years ago yesterday (1973).

  
  

• Here's a great joke, from the "Blue Collar Comedy Tour" DVD I watched last night, from comedian Jeff Foxworthy: "If your father's cell number doesn't have anything to do with his telephone number....you might be a redneck." Great comedy "concert", by the way. They only other two comedy shows that've had me laughing so hard I cried are Bill Cosby's "Himself" and anything by Robin Williams. Recommended (any of 'em).
  

The anniversary of another odd numerical coincidence is coming up, too. Next Tuesday, April 13th, is the 34th anniversary of the problem on the Apollo 13 moon flight. (Can't recall if that's the day it was launched or the day the actual problem occurred. Perhaps the same day, but I don't think so...I think they were more than a day along in the mission.) At least the problems wasn't on a FRIDAY the 13th (4/13/1970 was a Monday). Triskadekaphobes would've had a field day. As I recall, the launch time for the mission was 1:13 pm. Another 13! And of course, NASA uses 24-hour military time, and 1:13pm is "13:13". ANOTHER 13. Spooky. not sure if the seconds weren't :13 too. Hope not, that'd be too freaky for words.

Can you believe it's been 30+ years since we've walked on the moon? The last man walked on the moon on Dec. 14, 1972. 32 frickin' years ago.

Like Jerry Pournelle has said: I figured we'd go to the moon in my lifetime. I just didn't figure we'd go there then STOP.

Can you imagine where we'd be if NASA hadn't screwed the pooch for the last 30 years of manned spaceflight (pork, pork, pork!)

Oh well, at least JPL and a few other places are doing interesting things. Pity that all the really interesting (to non-science type) missions are being done by robotic probes.

Man, I hope the X-Prize is successful....and the winners and some of their competitors are commercially successful thereafter, because the space program is too important to leave to the government (pork, pork, pork).

Of course, they guv'mint is about the only one who seems to be able/willing to pay for it. Unless the X-Prize does for the space program what similar prizes did for aviation (can you say Charles Lindbergh?)

Hey, at NASA's $15 billion a year budget (a paltry figure for all NASA does)....maybe we should get Microsoft interested. They've got several years worth of NASA's budget in CASH lying around. So does Apple, for that matter. You can be darn sure that EITHER of 'em would be making a profit. They're about the only ones in the computer industry who ARE making profits these days.

Man, if we could get Microsoft to fund a Mars mission, I'd never say a bad word about 'em again. I'd buy a PC. (There's a nifty Gateway model that's a "media center" PC too....and beleagured Gateway could sure use the help right now....)

Better yet...maybe NASA needs to stop giving away all it's research and charge license fees instead. Our investment in NASA R&D pays us back many-fold each year in new technologies that "spin off" from NASA....commercial companies make beaucoup bucks from NASA R&D without paying a cent to the government to use it. No one remembers that, of course....they just piss and moan about all this money spent on "Buck Rogers and a buncha moon rocks". That ALWAYS comes up in the Letters to the Editors or other Opinion page articles in the newspapers each time NASA has a controversy or problem. Short sighted fools.

You know what I say? "No bucks, no Buck Rogers".