Designed by Bryan Oknayansky.  More designs in a similar vein at suckerpunchdaily.

Why log this? The old comics muscle twitches: the one that’s constantly trying to detect interesting new fashion thinking that can be interpolated into memorable character designs.

Tomorrow, there’s to be an announcement concerning the Higgs Boson.  The viXra log has an amusing little take on the implications should the “God Particle” turn up in an awkward range:

It has been known for about twenty years that for a low Higgs mass relative to the top quark mass, the quartic Higgs self-coupling runs at high energy towards lower values. At some point it would turn negative indicating that the vacuum is unstable.

In other words the universe could in theory spontaneously explode at some point releasing huge amounts of energy as it fell into a more stable lower energy vacuum state. This catastrophe would spread across the universe at the speed of light in an unstoppable wave of heat that would destroy everything in its path. Happily the universe has survived a very long time without such mishaps so this can’t be part of reality, or can it?

There is, for me, some black humour in LHC physicists spotting the Higgs signature, reading the energy value, and then slowly whispering: “…nobody move.”

I also find myself wondering what that’d look like.  Lightspeed covers, what, six billion miles a year?  Which is, very roughly, the distance from Pluto to Earth and back again.  Even if The Higgs Doom was triggered off relatively locally, we’d have plenty of time to see it coming.  This wouldn’t be a neat movie-style 2D shockwave.  Space is a volume.  This would be a stellar tsunami rushing towards us from all edges of the visible universe.

Hey.  It’s a Monday.  Sometimes I think about these things on a Monday.

what in the name of god just happened to my eyes and my brain my poor poor brain

someone just @warrenellis ‘d this to me on the twitters and i clicked the link and now i can taste time itself

A Swedish artist that someone pointed me at a few weeks ago.  He has a tumblr, and his work is sold here: you can see more of his stuff at both places.

Strange and gorgeous paintings:

…a self taught figurative artist who began creating art as a therapeutic response to a difficult upbringing.

A glorious routine by novelist James Ellroy.  And I think he was reining himself in, too. 

Interesting interstitial things happen when a writer devises a character to be, for interviews and the like.  Especially if someone’s been doing it a long time, and has gone through the cycle and, I suspect in Ellroy’s case, gotten back to the point where he hopes someone somewhere is getting the joke.  Listen to how Ellroy speaks, now: more than ever, he’s speaking for tv, and speaking to be transcribed.  A lot of media training under the bridge, there.  And the little wink to the audience, if not his interviewer, is there too. Slowed down, like a big bit of bait being trawled across still water.

A still from "How To / Internet" by Jaakko Pallasvuo, as captured by James Bridle of RIG, who also tells me RIG have a FRSTEE for me.

Post-novel, I find myself still mostly in recovery: one of those disturbing “not as young as you used to be” moments.  Compounding this concern was the recent worry, introduced into the household by the arrival of two bottles of Shackleton whisky, that I was having blackouts and going internet-shopping for alcohol and not remembering a thing about it.  Thankfully, today, the fine people at Whyte & Mackay contacted me to ask if I’d received the bottles and the note.  There was no note.  I’ve been enduring days of people telling me I drink until I don’t remember ordering more drink.

This is a meticulous recreation of the whisky Shackleton took on his ill-fated trip to the South Pole: there’s a website (has an age-check gate) that explains it all.  The original whisky was a Glen Mhor, now a silent still.  I opened a Glen Mhor of some forty years’ age the other month, and it was frankly astonishing.  Very much looking forward to this younger, yet historic bottling.

(Whyte & Mackay just told me in email that there’s a scavenger hunt in the UK for smartphone users.)

The important takeaway from all this is: I am not having blackouts.  Or, at least, if I am, I can’t operate my credit card during them.

Now look at these: a photographer from Seoul using the name “komeda” on Instagram releases a new shot every day or so:

Something sadder, here’s Brian Wood talking about how Dark Horse Comics were essentially menaced into upping the prices on their digital comics.

And here’s Bruce Sterling at his most Bill-Hicksesque.  Back later.

Years ago, I blogged some notes by Matt Webb & Jack Schulze, back when they were Schulze & Webb, on the notion of a “social letterbox.”  Later, Schulze & Webb and Matt Jones fused into the creature known as BERG, and became a company that did all kinds of interesting stuff, including publishing SVK.

Hello Little Printer, available 2012 from BERG on Vimeo.

Hello Little Printer, available 2012 from BERG on Vimeo.

BERG Cloud, and The Little Printer. Or, as Jones put it to me last night, a node for the papernet. 

It ties together a bunch of ideas from the last few years: the social letterbox, BERG’s notion of the receipt as the “paper app", Tom Taylor’s microprinter. 

And in 2012 it’ll be a thing you can have in your house.  It comes with a cloud-based control system to allow you to precisely control what’s printed – therefore, what enters your home or office – and when.

Little Printer, a thing that makes the vague and numinous ideas of the papernet concrete, would appear to be just the start.  BERG Cloud, the thing that makes it go, is scaleable and adaptable:

Our technology means we can focus on great design for connected products, rather than programming chips to make them work. We have a list of products we’ll be making next, but if you have a need for anything from prototype Web-enabled clocks to smart infrastructure for a new city block, we’d love to hear from you.

And that is all kinds of interesting to me.

My friends amaze me.

The daily Reuters news galleries – all these images are from Reuters photographers and all rights reside with them and Reuters – are always an unsettling window on the world.  Here’s a selection from today’s spreads, without attribution or explanation.

Things and stuff I want to make note of:

John Robb, writer on Open Source Warfare and Resilient Communities, is doing a Q&A at the Well right now.  You may recognise his name: I’ve quoted from his blog, Global Guerrillas, many times here.  I’d like to clip a couple of things, from his introduction and his definition of OSW:

I began in operations (Tier 1 spec ops) and and then became a technology analyst (I was Forrester’s first Internet analyst in ’95)… spent some time figuring out how warfare would evolve over the next decades. That resulted in my work on open source warfare (which has become popular with guerrillas around the world and ended up in a scientific study that was on the cover of Nature magazine), violent superempowerment, systems disruption. After I got a handle on that topic, I started to use the same approach to work on ways of configuring society/economics to weather future disruption/failures. Essentially, strategies of peace.

Open source warfare is a form of warfare seen in a world without compelling ideologies. A world where lots of small groups, each with their own motivations for fighting (from criminal to religious to nationalist to ethnic), can join together to take on a much larger enemy (usually, a nation-state). In many cases, the groups involved don’t even know what they are doing when they engage in it. They just do it naturally, out of weakness. Open source warfare is a form of warfare where any group that wants to fight can participate. Every group can innovate. They can try out new methods of attack. New targets. If the technique works, every other group copies it (as in, release early and often). Groups share info between each other freely since the other groups are co-developers of the war…

Elsewhere, I’ve not been able to keep up or completely parse Jacob Appelbaum’s rolling coverage on Twitter of the following event, but this site seems to have it in a nutshell (?):

After breaching the Dutch CA (Certification Authority) DigiNotar, Iranian hackers managed to sign forged certificates for the domains of spy agencies CIA, Mossad and MI6. Leading certification authorities like VeriSign and Thawte were also targeted, as were Iranian dissident sites.

“The era of disposable robots, sharing our lives, is so obviously just around the corner, with all the resultant goodness and badness.”

– Russell Davies

I’m not completely sold on the “sharing our lives” rhetoric, especially not in the same sentence as “disposable robots,” but that is a statement that makes you (me) lean back in one’s chair and go “Huh.  Yeah.”  Another little future that’s in the process of sneaking up on us from an unexpected angle.  But I have to circle round to “disposable robots,”  and slightly recontextualise that as “burner robots.”

Molly Crabapple began her Week In Hell.

Interesting little article on one of the last remaining maskhara, or royal jesters, of Afghanistan (and why this one may still be around):

Atta boasted proudly of Pashean’s many talents, telling me that in addition to his prowess as an entertainer, he was also a professional blackmailer, a master thief, and a prolific murderer, with an estimated fifty victims killed by his own hand…

And, in Lagos, Jan Chipchase stopped moving long enough to find this odd little piece of cultural disconnect:

In a country where a music video is shot in a day, and a movie can be shot in two – a collation of news clips on the Japan earthquake/tsunami makes for a decent disaster movie.

Japan Bitter Experience!

“The tomb for the original builders of Stonehenge could have been unearthed by an excavation at a site in Wales.”

"Perhaps in the future, we will not need a constant manned presence in the lower Earth orbit," Roskosmos deputy director Vitaly Davydov told journalists in Moscow.

Roskosmos chief Vladimir Popovkin said in a recent interview that he regretted Russia having put so much emphasis on manned space flight, rather than looking into more financially rewarding spheres like telecommunications.

(link)

A photo essay at English Russia.  I have to cull a few of these for myself, but you should check out the whole thing.

Steve Renn

via April Cacioppo, thanks

I am currently using my illustrative style to form fictional but plausible unions of biological and man-made structures on canvas. In my studies of science, I have observed many structural similarities in nature which man has also used to achieve a similar function. One example of this is found in the end point of a circuit, called a lead, located on a computer board. This structure looks very similar to a nerve cell ending called a bouton. Both constructions serve the purpose of communicating electronic signals but one is built by man and the other occurs naturally. I paint wallpaper in my compositions to enhance and compare the elegance that I see in bones, veins and nerves. I would like viewers of my artwork to think about the patterns and beauty in these parts of our bodies instead of seeing them as a reference to death…

Site.  And prints, skins, and iPhone case designs.

(via Deb Chachra, thanks)

Found on their facebook page:

Hello everybody! So, after all the speculation and absolutely no hype, we are pleased to announce the publication date of the first e-edition of Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds magazine. The auspicious date will be the 10th of November (2011) The web magazine will include no less than four original stories by new writers, audio visual content from both the British Library and the Greenwich arts festival and features by some very well-known and well respected names from all areas of the genre. Our submission guidelines will be posted on our FB page so, New Worlds will be once more, and we hope in time to approach the heights that the name has reached in the past… but in the future! Watch this space for subscription prices and FAQ’s.

The submission guidelines were actually posted on the page a few days before the above entry.

The dedicated website still hasn’t been set up, and is defaulting to http://81.21.76.62/newworlds.co.uk/index.html at this time.

Utterly magnificent editorial graphic from the Radio Times of days gone by, as surfaced in a wonderful post about the RT’s classic years by Mike Dempsey.

Aeroecology: the study of flying and floating organisms in the air they inhabit.

“This could be one of the largest biological repositories in existence…”

When scientists piece together a time series of backscatter images, they see patterns in the air on a spatial and temporal scale never before possible. Armed with the ability to visualize flying creatures, researchers are starting to look for larger ecological patterns in the air…

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Found on the website for WEIRD TALES magazine today, a statement by editor Ann VanderMeer:

I am very sad to have to tell you that my editorship at Weird Tales, which has included one Hugo Award win and three Hugo Award nominations, is about to come to an end. The publisher, John Betancourt of Wildside Press, is selling the magazine to Marvin Kaye. Kaye is buying the magazine because he wants to edit it himself. He will not be retaining the staff from my tenure. I wish him the best with the different direction he wants to pursue, including his first, Cthulhu-themed issue.

WEIRD TALES had been absolutely resurgent over the last few years.  There had been stops and hurdles, but it was a progressive magazine with fine work, some beautiful design and an impressive list of contributors.

Kaye is a prolific anthologist, clearly very retro in his tastes, and, I believe, still the editor of Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine.

I am sad to see the current iteration go.  I suspect that the new iteration, if it sees print, will not be to my tastes.  Starting off with a Cthulhu-themed issue is not exactly future-facing.  Still, I wish him luck, just as I wish all the luck in the world to Ann and her staff in their next adventures.

Psychogeophysics:

Psychogeography can be defined as an examination of the total effects of geography and place on the individual.

Psychogeophysics expands this artistic research to embrace geophysics, defined as the quantitative observation of the earth’s physical properties, and its interaction with local signal ecologies.

Psychogeophysics proposes a series of interdisciplinary public experiments and workshops excavating the spectral city and examining the precise effects of geophysical/spectral ecologies on the individual through pseudo-scientific measurement and mapping, algorithmic walking and the construction of (experimental) situations.

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