Month: May 2003

The NY Times
tells us about “a Swiss-designed robot about the size of a sport
utility vehicle was rapidly turning the pages of an old book and
scanning the text. The machine can turn the pages of both small and
large books as well as bound newspaper volumes and scan at speeds of
more than 1,000 pages an hour.”
This just might break the bottleneck…

http://www.startupshow.com/
is Kyle Shannon’s new blog, where he documents his latest startup from
as close to day one as he can. Since his last few included {{link
agency.com}} and the World Wide Web Artists Consortium,
it should be an interesting read.

ONLINE SCIENCE FICTION COURSE
June 30-August 8, 2003
University of Connecticut
Instructor: Leigh Grossman
e-mail: english217@swordsmith.com
This course traces major themes and concepts in science fiction from
the Golden Age writers of the 1930s, through the New Wave of the 1960s
and 1970s, to the present day. You will read works by Asimov, Bradbury,
Heinlein, Clarke, Delany, Dick, Le Guin, and other seminal writers–
some still well-known and some almost forgotten– and learn about their
impact on the field. Mostly, the course traces the development and
impact of particular ideas in speculative fiction, along with the
relationship of science fiction literature to other genres and other
media. The state of the SF publishing field today– including the
dramatic editorial and demographic shifts of the last 10 years, and
some of the most important current writers– will also be an ongoing
focus of the course.
READING LIST:
A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter Miller

Fool’s War, Sarah Zettel

The Price of the Stars, Debra Doyle and James D. Macdonald

The Forever War, Joe Haldeman

I, Robot, Isaac Asimov

Startide Rising, David Brin

Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep), Philip K. Dick

Expendable, James Alan Gardner

Modern Classics of Science Fiction, Gardner Dozois, ed.

The SFWA Grand Masters Volume 1, Frederik Pohl, ed.

The SFWA Grand Masters Volume 2, Frederik Pohl, ed.

To register, go to:

http://continuingstudies.uconn.edu/specialsessions/Summer_2003/index.html

You will need the following information:

Class #: 2110

Campus: STORR

Dept. ENGL

Course number: 217

Section: 921

If you watch tonight’s Late Night with Conan O’Brien, you’ll see me on the far left, front row of the audience, shaking hands with Conan for his farewell performance.

Honest.

Thanks to Lisa Sullivan for getting me tickets. Feel better, kiddo.

From the comments at PeterDavid.net:

My point is that for whatever reason, the public is behind this war.
I personally think we’re lynching Negroes. A black man raped a white
girl and since we can’t find that black man, we’re going to ride into the outskirts of town and lynch a black man because you know how those people are and even if he claims he wasn’t involved in that rape, he must have been up to something and if you have any kind of problem with that, you’re obviously in favor of little girls getting raped.
I’d never looked at it in quite that way before, but unfortunately it
makes just too much sense to ignore. Can’t find Osama? Get Saddam. The
fact that the war is being run by the party of Trent Lott makes the
similarity just chilling.
Because lynch mobs always bring peace to an area, even if you have to flout the law to do it– especially if you have to serve a higher law. And the darkies never give us any problems after that.

…here’s Kirk Anderson’s last poltical cartoon for the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

Of course, nobody in St. Paul knows this, because the paper pulled his final cartoon. So it’s up instead at, of all places, Dork Tower‘s
website.
Here’s hoping his unemployment is a short one. Of course, I’ve been
hoping that for all of my friends too, and it hasn’t been working all
that well…

AOL’s front page today has some heavy stuff on the unemployment
problems so many folks are facing. And then there’s the poll results from their questions:

What do you blame for the scarcity of work?

32% Bush’s policies 47,288

28% The depressed market 41,667

25% Nothing specific, it’s cyclical 36,144

15% Corporate scandals 22,036

Total votes: 147,135

(current as of when I looked last)
And if you happen to think that Bush has something to do with the
corporate scandals and the depressed market– well, you might be right.
In any event, a real damning situation. I read recently that Bush has
presided over the biggest job loss in America since Hoover… and look
where that led us.

For those of you who’d like to read more about it, click here.
I just grabbed a copy of the book from Simon & Schuster earlier
today, and it looks quite neat. (Yes, I read the other stories a while
back, but it’s still a good package, and you should click on the link
below and buy it if you haven’t already. Mama needs a new cable to hook
up her DVD player…)