• We Made This: Pearson does McCarthy
  "Our studio-mate David Pearson spent a large chunk of last year working on a frankly fantastic series of covers for Cormac McCarthy's books, which have recently been published. They're a distinctly visceral set of typographic designs, reflecting the novels' frequently dark content."
  (tags:design covers )
• Augmented Reality: Metaio?s in town
  Not at SXSW? Relax. (((No! Don?t relax! Fear! Be paralyzed with fear! They are creating your future without you! You?re outside the social-media loop! Soon you will die.))) – Bruce Sterling
  (tags:funny )
• NASA Launches Interactive Simulation
  NASA today unveiled an interactive computer simulation that allows virtual explorers of all ages to dock the space shuttle at the International Space Station, experience a virtual trip to Mars or a lunar impact, and explore images of star formations taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.
  (tags:space )
• Australian archaeologists uncover 40,000-year-old site
  Australian archaeologists have uncovered what they believe to be the world's southernmost site of early human life, a 40,000-year-old tribal meeting ground, an Aboriginal leader said Wednesday.
  (tags:history )
• US military developing geolocation system for underground
  The US military is studying the feasibility of a system that could allow them to accurately navigate in enemy underground tunnels, an environment in which GPS does not work.
  (tags:tech war )

I’ve got masses of heavy thinking to do today, so most levels of internet machinery are getting switched off.

(My secret: I engage with the internet in levels, mostly using desktop apps, and switch down as I require more braincycles, until I’m just running a Gmail notifier — and sometimes that goes too, and I simply leave Gmail minimised and toggle it at will. Sometime it seems like I’m everywhere at once, and I am; sometimes it seems like I’m everywhere at once, and I’m just spooking around on realtime desktop apps while doing actual work.)

Back tomorrow. Which is FREAKANGELS day. In the meantime, laugh at our t-shirt.

• Panic Blog: The Panic Status Board
  "…a lot of things happening means a high chance that I, the man who lives and breathes Panic and has a giant status board in my head, might not properly explain everything to everyone. Steve and I realized it was high time we made this Cabel Status Board public? using technology! So, with partial inspiration, Neven, Steve and I built the Panic Status Board." Also, nice blog design.
  (tags:design )
• Designer nano luggage to carry drugs to diseased cells
  For the first time, scientists have succeeded in growing empty particles derived from a plant virus and have made them carry useful chemicals.
  (tags:med )
• Cryogenic electron emission phenomenon has no known physics explanation
  Although scientists know of a few causes for electron emission without light (also called the dark rate) – including heat, an electric field, and ionizing radiation – none of these can account for cryogenic emission
  (tags:sci )
• BBC News – DR Congo ring may be giant ‘impact crater’
  "Deforestation has revealed what could be a giant impact crater in Central Africa, scientists say. The 36-46km-wide feature, identified in DR Congo, may be one of the largest such structures discovered in the last decade."
  (tags:history )
• Fluid Radio – Experimental Frequencies
  "Fluid Radio brings you the best in experimental frequencies allowing listeners, artists, producers and promoters to be completely involved in the growth and direction of the station. Focusing on experimental genres, we aim to provide a space to share in the creative process and spread the experience of inner exploration through musical expression. The playlist is diverse, encompassing Ambient, Modern Classical, Experimental Acoustic, Folk and Abstract sounds."
  (tags:radio )

Kieron Gillen:

We’ve been doing "Phonogram" for over 4 years, not including the years before the first series came out. Imagine if we could have just done the comic and not had to deal with any of the shit we’ve had to. We’d have been up to issue 44 now. Instead, we have 13 issues.

I feel frustrated. Enormously lucky, sure, but frustrated. We’ve done this wonderful thing we’re crazy-proud about. But if the whole economic system was just a couple of degrees to the left, everything would have been different. I mean, just to give you an idea about narrow the margins are between what we are and what we could be, if we were selling 6K instead of 4K, we could have done those 44 issues. The difference between breaking even and actually being able to do it in comics is insane. It’s like being kept under ice, clawing. I feel like a bonsai plant.

You are not lost. This is Warren Ellis dotcom.

(via Richard Kadrey)

"Parasailing." Video by Richard Law.

G’night.

I have to write a column for WIRED UK and I don’t have a single good idea in my head. And when I went looking for inspiration I found this picture, which appears to be my friend Lisa doing something that I didn’t think my friend Lisa went in for. So I’m going to go away and look for inspiration somewhere else before something yiffy happens to me.

• English Russia: Flight to the Moon
  "In the middle of 50?s authorities of the USSR decided to take their chances and try to dip into the future and make a slide film describing spaceflight of the first Soviet spacecraft that was supposed to be launched in 1975"
  (tags:art space )
• The Secret Lives Of Objects: StickyBits Turn Barcodes Into Personal Message Boards
  "But what if you could give any physical object a story simply by sticking a barcode on it and appending a message to that barcode? The message could be a photo, a text message, a video, or a voice note. All anyone would need to unlock the message is a phone with a special barcode scanning app."
  (tags:tech spimeworld comms phone )
• New method to grow arteries could lead to ‘biological bypass’ for heart disease
  A new method of growing arteries could lead to a "biological bypass" -or a non-invasive way to treat coronary artery disease, Yale School of Medicine researchers report with their colleagues in the April issue of Journal of Clinical Investigation.
  (tags:med )
• Google introduces its Public Data Explorer
  (PhysOrg.com) — Google's latest release is an application that allows users to create their own interactive, animated graphs and charts using public data such as census data or government statistics on unemployment or mortality rates. The charts and graphs created can then be embedded into web pages
  (tags:web )
• SXSW 2010: Fieldnotes | booktwo.org
  "The panel?s about post-digital design, or what we could and should be thinking about when we can blend physical and digital formats in new and interesting ways. As part of my own preparations and thinking, I (surprise!) made a book."
  (tags:books pod )

My name’s Warren Ellis. I write comics, graphic novels, journalism and anything else that people pay money for.

I’m the writer of the graphic novel RED, currently being made into a film starring Bruce Willis, John Malkovich, Helen Mirren, Morgan Freeman and a shedload of other famous people. I’m the writer of the GRAVEL graphic novels, under development for film by Legendary Pictures. I also wrote the novel CROOKED LITTLE VEIN.

I write here almost every day. A collection of the writing I’ve done here and elsewhere on the internet, SHIVERING SANDS, was published last year.

For people wanting to send me to their sites, wanting to email stuff or tell me about new music or send me tips or whatever, I’ve set up a Gmail account that I’ll check once every day or two: warrenellis [-at-] gmail com. This isn’t, I stress, my main email account, and it’s not for asking me when some comic’s coming out (there’s a FAQ for that). Always interested in new music, new art, new connections, new madness etc.

If you need to contact me about writing for print or web, please contact my agent Lydia Wills using the link in the righthand menu bar.

If you need to contact me about anything involving film, tv, games or other things that move, please contact my agent Angela Cheng Caplan using the link in the righthand menu bar.

If you (for god knows what reason) wanted to send me something physical, the best solution right now would probably be to send to my literary agency in New York City.

Warren Ellis
c/o Lydia Wills
Paradigm
360 Park Avenue South
16th floor
New York
New York 10010

I don’t have a solution for people living closer to me as yet. I stop in on my message board Whitechapel several times a day. I leave Twitter on most of the day. I still have an undead MySpace account — I keep it open because I look for music there.

Jamais Cascio:

A piece in the latest issue of Science shows that there’s a considerable amount of methane (CH4) coming from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, where it had been trapped under the permafrost. There’s as much coming out from one small section of the Arctic ocean as from all the rest of the oceans combined. This is officially Not Good.

Here’s why: methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, significantly more powerful than carbon dioxide. There are billions of tons of methane trapped under the permafrost, and if that methane starts leaking quickly, it would have a strong feedback effect — warming the atmosphere and oceans, causing more methane to leak, and on and on. The melting of methane ice (aka "methane hydrates" and "methane clathrates") is probably the most significant global warming tipping point event out there…

So, on my message board, I run weeklyish art challenges for the amusement of the artistic community therein. This week, I decided to change things around, and posted the following:

You are an artist/designer. You have to put together the cover for the first issue of a weekly science-fiction anthology comic called 2000AD.

You don’t know much about what’s in it. You’ve been given the following pieces of information to include on the cover somehow:

"featuring the new DAN DARE"

"M.A.C.H. 1 – his incredible hyperpower will amaze you!"

"SPACE-AGE DINOSAURS! Read ’FLESH’ "

"STOP PRESS! GREAT BRITAIN INVADED!"

Without the "", obviously. Your choice as to how you use these — whether you relegate them all to text at the bottom, or choose one to illustrate, or whatever.

The cover must include a logo and the numbering, which you’ve been told is not the usual "issue one," but "Programme 1."

And that’s it.

It’s up to you what kind of company you’re at. What kind of comics you make. What era you’re in. Who you are, even. Go nuts with it.

(Obviously, there was a time when 2000 AD was The Future. So, you tell me. Is this a retro-sf comic? Or are you in the late 19th century and publishing it on punch cards? Is it the Seventies and are you Roger Dean? Or Jamie Reid?)

It sort of mirrors the truth of 2000AD Prog 1, which was that it didn’t strictly speakinghavea cover illustration, as a massive frisbee was mounted on the front cover as a free gift.

You have one week. Go.

Which was really, a terrible thing to do to them. It runs until Sunday night, and anyone can play.

This is warren ellis dot com and i am very tired

(via Wil)

By Robin Guthrie, from the album IMPERIAL.

G’night.

Want a coffee that requires an LD50 statement? The Direktor’s continuing experiments in making the supercondensed, superpowered coffee he’s named The Black Blood Of The Earth never fail to amuse, and the latest update made me smile. He has created coffee that now breaks Science itself.

Subject 3: had several sips of Batch 3 prior to breakfast with two cups of Baker’s Square coffee and followed it with the remainder of the Batch 3 mug upon return. She entered a state of hyperactivity requiring "walkies" outside, rapid speech, and much bouncing from one foot to another prior to complete burnout and crash for a period of an hour. Full recovery was made within three hours…

Probably the best sf magazine on the web.  Featuring new work by fellow-travellers Paul Di Filippo and Kek.

TOTW is basically a joke that Ariana and I pull each week in our joint guise as the International Electrophonic Unit. Basically, we take some of the stupider things I’ve said on Twitter and elsewhere, often in a state of extreme alcoholic refreshment or severe sleep deprivation, and put them on a t-shirt. Ariana set up a Cafe Press store (because this is a joke and engaging with a serious maker of t-shirts would be less funny to us), and… well, once a week, here we are.

Through this website and this Cafe Press store, we’re going to release one t-shirt a week. It’ll go live on Monday… and it’ll die Sunday night — midnight UK time, more often than not. Each one lives for a week, and then it’s replaced by the next week’s shirt. Until I either run out of dumb ideas or Ariana’s brain explodes.

So, every Monday, I’ll post the new shirt here, and you can peer at it more at http://www.cafepress.com/electrophonic.

Anyway. I present to you T-Shirt Of The Week #014: FAILED TO DIE:

We also offer a couple of perennial items, including:

(And also a MAN COOK MEAT WITH FIRE "splatter-shield", because Ariana’s crazy)

Thank you for your kind attention.

• Vitamin D crucial to activating immune defenses
  Scientists at the University of Copenhagen have discovered that Vitamin D is crucial to activating our immune defenses and that without sufficient intake of the vitamin, the killer cells of the immune system – T cells – will not be able to react to and fight off serious infections in the body.
  (tags:med )
• Ritalin boosts learning by increasing brain plasticity
  Doctors treat millions of children with Ritalin every year to improve their ability to focus on tasks, but scientists now report that Ritalin also directly enhances the speed of learning.
  (tags:med neuro )
• MIT researchers discover new way of producing electricity
  (PhysOrg.com) — A team of scientists at MIT have discovered a previously unknown phenomenon that can cause powerful waves of energy to shoot through minuscule wires known as carbon nanotubes. The discovery could lead to a new way of producing electricity, the researchers say.
  (tags:sci )

This is warren ellis dot com.

(Marc Quinn’s sculpture of Buck Angel photographed by Siege)

Haven’t been too present here over the last week or two. Spent the last few days in London, being interrogated on camera for a thing that I believe gets announced late next month.

Check out this amazing shot by Melyssa Anishnabie.

The year’s just rushing by. I have ten days at home, and then I’m in London for another day or two for more meetings. Looking at more international travel in late April/early May, and then god knows what the summer’s going to bring. But, right now, it’s all about focussing on the next ten days: killing off some more comics work, bringing the hammer down on Project Drill and talking with my film agent a lot. Strange days continue.

Also, I keep getting nudged towards doing something with Newspaper Club.

Here’s a pretty picture by Ellen Rogers.

Seriously, I’m not sure where the year so far has gone. Is it going to be one of those years, where we all stand around in December and say "what the fuck happened? It was January yesterday." I hope that I at least notice it get warmer before then: winter’s sticking around like the last drunk at the party that you just can’t dislodge from your house.

Anyway. I’ll be around more, this coming week.

• blissblog – a weekend of radiophonic treats
  a weekend of radiophonic treatsSaturday 6th March, 4:30-6:30 PM (GMT) — Moon Wiring Club's Ian Hodgson guests on the Jonny Trunk OST show on Resonance FM Sunday 7th March, 5:30-8:00 PM (GMT)– The Advisory Circle's Jon Brooks appears on Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone show on BBC 6, for an interview and to air a brand-new Advisory Circle track
  (tags:music )
• New device may enable limbs to be controlled by thought alone
  "A portable, plugless, brain-to-computer interface using electroencephalography (EEG) electrodes strapped to the scalp has been developed by a team in the US. The device may allow paraplegics and others who have lost control of their limbs to control prosthetic devices and other equipment using their thoughts alone."
  (tags:tech med neuro )
• Engineering team developing helicopter that would investigate nuclear disasters
  "Students at Virginia Tech's Unmanned Systems Laboratory are perfecting an autonomous helicopter they hope will never be used for its intended purpose. Roughly six feet long and weighing 200 pounds, the re-engineered aircraft is designed to fly into American cities blasted by a nuclear weapon or dirty bomb."
  (tags:war tech )
• From two-trillion-degree heat, researchers create new matter — and new questions
  "A worldwide team of researchers have for the first time created a particle that is believed to have been in existence immediately after the creation of the universe – the so-called "Big Bang" – and it could lead to new questions and answers about some of the basic laws of physics because in essence, it creates a new form of matter."
  (tags:sci )

http://www.freakangels.com/?p=314

• Jury convicts 1 Mind Ministries cult members in boy?s starvation death
  "A Baltimore jury on Tuesday afternoon convicted three alleged cult members on charges of first-degree child abuse resulting in death and second-degree murder for starving a 16-month-old boy in their city apartment because he did not say ?amen? before meals."
  (tags:cult crime fucking+scum )
• BBC News – Fallujah doctors report rise in birth defects
  "Doctors in the Iraqi city of Fallujah are reporting a high level of birth defects, with some blaming weapons used by the US after the Iraq invasion."
  (tags:med war crime )
• Row as anti-abortionists target African Americans with US racist history | World news | guardian.co.uk
  "A Georgia campaign is accused of drawing parellels between abortion and slavery and using the phrase 'womb lynchings'"
  (tags:pol crime )

Jiminez Lai, via Suckerpunch:

fiction is the impetus of architecture, and architecture is one of the most powerful representations of culture. more specifically, the source of my work comes from interpreting taste, look, and trends. through acts of re-imagining fictional scenarios based on exaggerations of current practical and academic patterns, we can studiously investigate the alternate worlds and unexpected implications about architecture and urbanism.

in my work, i explore hypothetical scenarios of experimental architecture. by pressing alternate conditions against our context, the projects aim at interrogating different points of views and broaden the ways we engage conventions.

graphic novels and physical installations are my two primary weapons of choice, and i believe representation is more than half the battle.

the drawings often explore storylines of architecture and urbanism that dramatize exaggerated realities. the projects swerve back into the physical world via the interactive installations derived from the stories. these installations are attempts to better understand the spatial implications of the two-dimensional fiction.

In which I write, a few months ago, about the way the BBC is being hunted by commercial forces. Peculiar timing, that it should come out this week, after the BBC’s basically started cutting itself in public in the hope of appeasing said forces. Also:

Everyone cares about the iPad, because its awesome technological potency will do… something. Apparently. The iPad will shag the Kindle and make the Kindle call it Herbert or something.

God help us, it’s a new day, and so warren ellis dot com cranks up. My name is Warren Ellis. I write comics and books and things. And this is a picture by Eliza Gauger.

Good morning.

The opening piece of Zola Jesus’ forthcoming EP, entitled STRIDULUM, this is "Night."

G’night.

I’ve kind of lost track of how many variant covers Avatar generated for the CAPTAIN SWING serial, but I really love the "Penny Dreadful" design that Ariana came up with.

• Integrating translation into Google Goggles – Google Translate Blog
  "Soon your phone will be able to translate signs, posters and other foreign text instantly into your language"
  (tags:tech phone )
• blissblog: the etymology of “post-rock”

  (tags:music writing )