Editor and writer David Hepworth:

You can’t hide. I was talking to somebody in the record business recently who pointed out, rather mournfully, that it was no longer possible to hype people. What he meant was that it was no longer possible to convince them that something was more popular or widely adopted than it actually was. You no longer went into Radio 2 and told them that they should be playing a record because it was going to be popular among this or that demographic. You simply sent them a link to the You Tube page where they could see how many people had streamed the video. Digital is its own audit. This is something magazines are going to have to get used to.

“Digital is its own audit.”  That’s really kind of interesting to me.  I’m used to unique counts being obscured and lied about.  But I hadn’t considered the open-count public services.  And, of course, this is what Likes and RTs and +1s lead to.  A world where we encourage everyone to vote on everything (an element of more than a few sf pieces).

Cultural voting, of course, leads to the triage suggested in the quote: following counts leads inexorably to media that play only the things they already know people like.

Which makes me prize things like Mary Anne Hobbs’ Saturday night show on XFM all the more: because I know that for three hours I will hear things that I have never heard before.

Still.  Interesting point.

It took some 10 million years for Earth to recover from the greatest mass extinction of all time, latest research has revealed.

So.  Yeah.  That’s how long it takes a planet to recover from an apocalyptic sequence of massive physical environmental shocks.

We often see mass extinctions as entirely negative but in this most devastating case, life did recover, after many millions of years, and new groups emerged. The event had re-set evolution. However, the causes of the killing – global warming, acid rain, ocean acidification – sound eerily familiar to us today. Perhaps we can learn something from these ancient events.

IEEE, the world’s largest professional association advancing technology for humanity, today announced a new standard, IEEE 802.15.6™-2012, optimized to serve wireless communications needs for ultra-low power devices operating in or around the human body.

Or, put another way, a human LAN will run at 10mbps and data-processing implants can be wireless.  Consumer-level reporting devices.  Hook ‘em up to ifttt and have your liver email your doctor’s computer.  Turn your organs into blogjects.  (That’s very six-years-ago, but still amusing to me.)

Press release here.

A particularly of-the-moment video for a nice piece of Poborsk:

Via Mammoth, shiptracks are:

narrow clouds… form[ed] when water vapor condenses around tiny particles of pollution that ships either emit directly as exhaust or that form as a result of gases within the exhaust

Or: chemtrails for the ocean.

I like it when Charlie gets on a good rant.  This time, SF Signal asked him a question which was basically throwing raw meat to a cranky alligator:

Are SF writers "slacking off" or is science fiction still the genre of "big ideas"? If so, what authors are supplying these ideas for the next generation of scientists and engineers?

And off he goes.  You should really read the whole thing, but here’s the core of it:

…those people who are doing the "big visionary ideas about the future" SF are mostly doing so in a vacuum of critical appreciation. Greg Egan’s wonderful clockwork constructions out of the raw stuff of quantum mechanics, visualising entirely different types of universe, fall on the deaf ears of critics who are looking for depth of characterisation, and don’t realize that in his SF the structure of the universe is the character. On Hannu Rajaniemi’s brilliant "The Quantum Thief" — I have yet to see a single review that even notices the fact that this is the first hard SF novel to examine the impact of quantum cryptography on human society. (That’s a huge idea, but none of the reviewers even noticed it!) And there, over in a corner, is Bruce Sterling, blazing a lonely pioneering trail into the future. Chairman Bruce played out cyberpunk before most of us ever heard of it, invented the New Space Opera in "Schismatrix" (which looked as if nobody appreciated it for a couple of decades), co-wrote the most interesting hard-SF steampunk novel of all, and got into global climate change in the early 90s. He’s currently about ten years ahead of the curve. If SF was about big innovative visions, he’d need to build an extension to house all his Hugo awards.

So what’s at the root of this problem? Why are the innovative and rigorously extrapolated visions of the future so thin on the ground and so comprehensively ignored?

…We people of the SF-reading ghetto have stumbled blinking into the future, and our dirty little secret is that we don’t much like it…

In other words, the opposite of "complex" is not "simple," the opposite of "complex" is "isolated."

– Jamais Cascio

“Those hook things they used to ride the sandworms in DUNE.  You know the ones.  The hooks go in, and, um…y’know, that’s some really nice thin wire you got there…”

Conan! What Is Best In Life is a long-standing warrenellis dot com tradition.  You should not view Conan! posts if you or your workplace are squeamish, as some of them are… probably not what is best in life.  You can see lots of Conan! posts here.

Via Found Objects, it would seem our comrades at The Soulless Party are up to something haunty and dischronal.  The decontextualised footage in the last half of the piece does work with the music to genuinely odd effect.

So I’d been wondering what happened to the mooted revival of NEW WORLDS magazine, entitled in this iteration MICHAEL MOORCOCK’S NEW WORLDS.  (Previously commented on here, a little over a year ago.)  It’s been due… a few times.  And I knew they’d shed at least one staff member due to “artistic differences.”  So I went to their Facebook page, which appears to be the only public source of information, and found the below, posted on April 17th:

So here we are, post Easter con and still no New Worlds. Why is this? I hear those of you who still care cry, well the simple answer (and the one that happens to be the truth) is, that we were having some difficulties with the codec for the videos we wish/need to include with the site. This we have now been assured is behind us and we should soon be happy! I do have to give out a BIG thanks to those who have been creating, what is, a quite a complex site completely for free. As a salve to our heavy consciences we do plan on releasing issue 2 within a month or so of issue 1 (provided we generate enough sales from 1 to pay our authors) So we should be on course to publish 4 in the year! Please bear with us this was a much bigger programing job than we imagined. Best
Roger

I left a message, asking if they really are hosting their own video content.

Publishing a magazine is hard, whether on paper or online.  But it would seem to me that if you’re handcoding your own video players rather than stuffing your content into Vimeo and letting them do the work, you’re over-coding and making life harder than it really needs to be.

Given that the dedicated website remains static and mostly empty… well, I’m the last guy in the creative industry who should be commenting on things that are “late,” but this would seem to have joined the corpsepile of attempts to continue NEW WORLDS.

Maybe they should have just mounted the whole thing on a Tumblr and had done with it.

In Star Trek lore, the first Starship Enterprise will be built by the year 2245. But today, an engineer has proposed — and outlined in meticulous detail – building a full-sized, ion-powered version of the Enterprise complete with 1G of gravity on board, and says it could be done with current technology, within 20 years.

Someone using the fills-you-with-confidence name of “BTE Dan” is in fact hellbent on making an interplanetary service vehicle.  All he needs is 0.27% of American GDP and a few spare nuclear reactors.

buildtheenterprise.org seems to be having some downtime today, but PhysOrg talked to him at the first link about his plans for a machine that could reach Mars in ninety days.  It’s quite interesting, really, insofar as he’s probably right about most of the technological knowledge and expertise already being in place.  (Most: I suspect that some of the things he wants onboard just couldn’t happen within twenty years of today, and sticking a megawatt laser on the front is just boy’s-toys.)

The two real kickers that he thinks he’s solved however, are these – a full Earth gravity onboard and constant acceleration.

Obvious area of fascination: taking a fictional object and attempting to make it real as a historic feat of mega-engineering.  Something that started out as a plastic model on a stick in a tv studio becoming the most expensive single object of all time.  And the kind of perverse, idee-fixe-bound imagination that takes a fictional spaceship that could travel the galaxy and make it a real spaceship that can do local tours of the solar system.

Still.  BTE Dan isn’t frothing at the mouth, and it’s kind of a charming idea, in its way.  Worth a look.

From this talk by Chris Heathcote.

At this link here, an article and short video by NASA illustrating and explaining these bright blazing anomalies in Saturn’s outermost ring.  It looks like it’s growing spines or barbs in places.

"I think the F ring is Saturn’s weirdest ring, and these latest Cassini results go to show how the F ring is even more dynamic than we ever thought," said Carl Murray, a Cassini imaging team member based at Queen Mary University of London, England. "These findings show us that the F ring region is like a bustling zoo of objects from a half mile [kilometer] in size to moons like Prometheus a hundred miles [kilometers] in size, creating a spectacular show."

This is a photo of an aurora occurring two and a half billion miles away.

It’s a composite image of atmospheric activity over Uranus.  So, not a direct shot, in the purest sense.  But, in its way, no less real than an Instagram shot, or even this:

This being the original “Pale Blue Dot” photo, the dot in question being Earth as seen from 3.7 billion miles away.  This was taken in 1990, with a camera made in 1977, bolted on to Voyager 1 and having been in cold soak for some 13 years.

It is, to me, suggestive of that science fiction trope of sending space travellers off to other solar systems, and relativity working it so by the time the explorers land, the people they left behind had evolved FTL over generations and beaten them there.

Voyager 1 sails off into the dark, having 22 years ago taken the last good photo of Earth it could, wherein our world was imaged in a single blue pixel.  And now we’re taking photos of the Uranian Northern Lights.

I wonder exactly how difficult it would be to have the Hubble take a photo of Voyager 1.

I’m not entirely sure what artist and architecture professor Nat Chard is up to here.  I presume it has a lot to do with the weird “drawing instruments” he’s been making and recording on his blog.  But you knew I was going to pay attention to something called The Institute Of Paradoxical Shadows, right?

English Russia can always be relied upon for fine rusty obsolete-tech porn:

The Tropospheric Radio Relay network called Sever (North) is a former Soviet system of communications lines the purpose of which was to provide connection between remote parts of the country. The line is 13 200 km long and consists of 46 Tropospheric Radio Relay Stations (TRRS) located mainly along the coast of the Northern and Pacific Ocean and largest Siberian rivers.

Much more at the link.

Now that’s a goddamn headline.  THE PIT-CHAINS OF MARS.  I live for that kind of line.

The latest images released from ESA’s Mars Express reveal a series of ‘pit-chains’ on the flanks of one of the largest volcanoes in the Solar System. Depending on their origin, they might be tempting targets in the search for microbial life on the Red Planet.

So what’s a pit-chain?  And can I put my eventual Martian palace in one?

…a series of circular depressions that formed along fracture points in the martian crust.

Pit-chains can have a volcanic origin…. (and) can also be caused by strains in the Martian crust, which translates into a series of parallel elongated depressions known as grabens, in which pits can also form.  But the most dramatic scenario involves groundwater… Some of Earth’s most famous examples are the network of ‘cenotes’ on the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico. These deep natural pits form when the surface limestone rocks collapse, exposing the groundwater underneath.

Yes yes yes get to the good bit.

If there are any cave-like structures associated with the pits, microorganisms could have survived, protected from the harsh surface environment.

Great.  Martian Pit Flu awaits.  That’s not the good bit.  (I know I’m supposed to be excited by any form of life on Mars.  But, really, we know it’s going to be Martian Pit Flu.  And then it’ll spread to complex biologies and become the Martian Bird Flu.  And I’ll catch it.  So to hell with that.)

Mars landers have measured surface radiation around 250 times higher than that found on the Earth, and more than double that experienced by astronauts on board the International Space Station. Any caves associated with the pit-chains may in future provide a possible refuge for astronauts from the harsh surface radiation.

There you go.  Martian Pit-Chain Cave Compounds.  That’s the stuff.  The Pleasure Pits of Tharsis.  Hurling the inferior out on to the radioactive red desert to die.

What?

Related articles

• Deathmatch On Mars: Interviewed By VICE (warrenellis.com)
• GUEST INFORMANT: Stoya (warrenellis.com)
• FAQ 22mar12 (warrenellis.com)

People wonder why nothing is interesting, it’s because they try to get a fucking answer to it, to everything.

– Dean Blunt

GIFs by Kevin Weir, as archived in the Flux Machine tumblr.  All are based on vintage photos: some are a bit early Terry Gilliam, some are freaky, and some have a genuine haunted mist of eeriness to them…

Bruce dropped an epic essay on The New Aesthetic this morning.  If you’re a regular reader, you’ll recognise the term, but I’ll drop some internal links at the end of this.  Bruce being Bruce, he throws off ideas and perspectives in this piece with seeming effortlessness. 

An aesthetics that’s overdependent on weirdness lacks ambition as an aesthetics. Weirdness is merely relative. Weirdness is never value-free.

I need to read it a couple more times.  Right now, to me, there are little echo-whispers of Adam Curtis in there, and even Ray Brassier, linked a couple of posts below.

We’re not going to be able to gloss over this gaping vacuity by “making the machines our friends.” Because they’re not our friends. Machines are never our friends, even if they’re intimates in our purses and pockets eighteen hours a day.

This essay is basically the only thing the tech/design/digital crowd are going to be talking about today.  Catch up now.

The New Aesthetic | Drone Porn and the New Aesthetic Sleepbot

In an epic speculative post about commercial home-mapping services, Jan Chipchase drops this lovely idea bomb:

After seeing the nano-quadcopter presentation at TED 2012 – including this, but with a lot more background, insights into their capabilities, and a video of a quadcopter entering and mapping a building in real time – technically impressive stuff. First responders. Military. Pornographers. Research. Retail. This changes many things.

I think it might take me a while to fully digest this post by Matt Webb of BERG about products.  I have, for my entire career, staunchly fought against my work being called a product.  But there are a variety of lessons here, old and new – here’s an old one, which easily applies to book/comics covers –

products have to be shelf demonstrable — they can tell their story in 15 seconds, with no interaction beyond looking.

– that I think will be very much worth my time to think about.

Young James Bridle here apparently quoted me at SXSW earlier today, according to the little flurry of @s on Twitter, including the mordant Bruce Sterling comment: “Now Bridle is quoting Warren Ellis. It’s like a radically pixelated old home week in here.”  He was doing a thing about The New Aesthetic, which I’ve mentioned here before.  (You can get a quick catch-up by checking out the New Aesthetic tumblr.)  He’s now writing a fortnightly column for The Observer, and this link here should collect the pieces as they happen (first one’s up right now).

(Also: Bruce did his own fairly brain-burning NA capture of the NA thing at SXSW.)

In a perhaps similar mode, and found via tecxnotes, I will close this with 2SLEEP1:

2SLEEP1 is a 66-minute playlist of audiovisual performances in text mode, designed to make you fall asleep.

It’s the New Aesthetic Sleepbot.

Unknown Field’s Division collaborators Factory Fifteen have just released their short film GAMMA, shot on location during our 2011 expedition from the Chernobyl Exculusion Zone to Baikonur Cosmodrome. The landscapes experienced with the division have been reimagined as stage sets for a post nuclear future and members of the division are recast as actors navigating the ruins.

Full press release and details.

I first came across this idea, I think, at Charlie Stross’ blog some weeks ago.  I only chewed on it a bit, because I think I was still zoned out after finishing GUN MACHINE.  But it’s just popped up in my feeds again, and this is the takeaway:

(Karl) Schroeder explains the Fermi Paradox – the apparent contradiction between the likelihood that extraterrestrial civilizations exist and the lack of evidence for them – by speculating that we have not yet encountered our cosmic neighbors because they are indistinguishable from their native ecology.

Which is a fascinating thought experiment, and gives a marvellously wiggy megascale corollary to Arthur C Clarke’s famous dictum about any sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic.

What I haven’t seen dealt with yet in my skim-reading of the topic, and maybe it’ll be there when I drill down, is this: the experiment seems only to work if we assume such societies generated no electromagnetic noise at all in their transition to that level of civilisation.  We have to conceive of a civilisation that had no period of electromagnetic broadcast in its lifetime, or else there would be ambient evidence and Fermi would seem to me to reinstate itself.  Which is a wonderful workout for the imagination.

The tumblr YUGODROM has been posting a lot of art by Yugoslav-born Soviet illustrator Nikolai Lutohin recently.  Take a look at this: