Here in San Francisco it probably sometimes seems like the United States of America is the centre of the world. In a very real way it was, within living memory: in 1945…

Charlie gave a keynote at USENIX 2011 with the title Network Security in the Medium Term, 2061-2561 AD, and it’s great fun.  He does warm you up a bit with nuggets like

Mature nanotechnology is going to resemble organic life forms the way a Boeing 737 resembles thirty tons of seagull biomass. Both the Boeing and the flock of seagulls can fly, and both of them need a supply of organic fuel to oxidize in order to do so. But a flock of thirty tons of seagulls can’t carry a hundred passengers across the Atlantic, and Boeings don’t lay eggs.

before he gets to the hardcore:

…our metagenomic context (including not just our own genome and proteome, but the genome of our gut flora and fauna and the organisms we coexist with) and our sensory inputs actually define who we are, at least from the outside. And that’s not a lot of data to capture, if you look at it in the context of two terabits per second of bandwidth per person. Assume a human life expectancy of a century, and a terabit per second of data to log everything about that person, and you can capture a human existence in roughly 3.15 x 10²¹ bits … or about 65 milligrams of memory diamond…

And at the point he drops that, he’s not done yet.

Conventional futurists are the Michael Bays of the intellectual world: what they produce can be spectacular and amusing, but is ultimately hollow and depressing.

– Jamais Cascio, from his “minor rant,” ABOUT FORESIGHT

Issue 99 of ICON magazine, in which the design & invention unit BERG, publishers of SVK, refer to me, Bruce Sterling and William Gibson as “giant uncles or adopted parents.”  I can’t decide if that’s better or worse than the year they spent calling me “Big Chief.” Obviously, I see a beating in their future.

Speaking of Sterling, he took this photo at the weekend:

And, to get the day loping along, a bit of kosmische from Jon Brooks:

Langwelle (demo version) by cafekaput

A kind bystander helps Templesmith sedate his sentient and footloose beard, Marvin.

And I am fucking delighted.  DETAILS.

I have written the foreword for Laurie Penny’s new book PENNY RED, which is out in October from Pluto Press.  Here’s the book’s page.  It’s pre-orderable in the usual places.

In the space of a year, Laurie Penny has become one of the most prominent voices of the new left. This book brings together her diverse writings, showing what it is to be young, angry and progressive in the face of an increasingly violent and oppressive UK government.

All kinds of good stuff in there, including her interview with China Mieville.

Laurie Penny is a journalist, feminist, and political activist from London. She is a regular writer for the New Statesman and the Guardian, and has also contributed to the Independent, Red Pepper and the Evening Standard. She is the author of Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism (2011). She has presented Channel 4′s Dispatches and been on the panel of the BBC’s Any Questions. Her blog, ‘Penny Red’, was shortlisted for the Orwell prize in 2010.

Hitwomen will answer such pressing questions as "Assassin Union? Is it feasible?" and "Exactly how pissed would you be if you found out your hot date was at the head of a sex trafficking ring?"

You know, I’d really kind of like to see this.  It’s another Kickstarter thing.  My old friend Jolie Roberson, her friend Lindsey Marks, and special effects artist Matt Stratton –

Remember the flippy gun Angelina Jolie used in Wanted when she shot some dudes in a convenience store?  He built that shit.

– are putting together a web tv series called HITWOMEN.  Kick in US $25 and they’ll send you a DVD of the first three episodes.

They are less hopeless than they immediately appear.  Honest.  I think.

Brian Wood is offering a free download of the entire 132-page Public Domain 2 artbook.

I’ll be writing the foreword for the documentation of this fairly demented project, for reasons that will become clear when the eventual book is produced.  Molly Crabapple’s Week In Hell:

To celebrate my 28th birthday, I’m renting a room, locking myself inside for five days, covering the walls with paper, and filling every inch of that paper with art.  I might go insane, or it might be awesome.  I’m inviting you along for the ride.

Found this on her Tumblr this morning, wanted to save and share it:

1. You said you don’t really read comics, but have you read Transmetropolitan and/or do you read Freakangels? I know you’re pals with Warren Ellis, and Transmet is how I got into comics in the first place.

   Transmetropolitan is one of the few comics I have read. It was the first comic I ever read, too.

   I was at a boy’s house, and I really liked the boy, and the boy liked me. And we were in his room, and he said, “Here, read this.” And it was I Hate It Here. And I read it, and the boy was trying to kiss me, and I was like, no, I’m busy! Reading this! Reading this amazing piece of literature that I didn’t know could even exist. Have comics always been this great? Are there more like this? Who is this Warren Ellis? Does he write other things? And the boy was like, so we can’t make out anymore? And I was like, to the comics shop!

   So, yeah. That’s how that happened.

Trailer for the “motion comic” project written by Leah Moore & John Reppion and designed by Emma Vieceli for Windflower Studio.  It arrives in October via Hat Trick and Channel 4.  Find out a bit more about this scientific romance from the age of Morse here.  And now watch this, even just for the moment when the big room seems to tip back into three dimensions and the flow of information, 19th Century style, starts to stream…

Anna Young made this. The fraggle had it coming.

(She makes all kinds of weird stuff. Crucified fairies and things.)

Wil Wheaton, Cherie Priest and Si Spurrier at Phoenix Comicon.  The photo came from Si, who entitled it “Beneath The Master’s Sigil.”

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Available today for USD 4.99 at Thwipster.

Molly’s work reminds us of the dream we had after drinking large amounts of mushroom-infused tea, falling down some steep European stairs and winding up in an Amsterdam hospital. Anthropomorphized pigs in bowler hats, Dorian Gray, half-naked women, Victorian carnival performers, suave Octopi…

Steve Rolston

print

Ben Templesmith

Misery M.O.D.O.K.
currently on sale at eBay

And not the kind of help he usually needs.  Please click through to find out how to help him decide which of these images to run in a national fucking newspaper, god help Canada…

Another brilliant piece from Jess Nevins at io9, about the famous traveller David Livingstone, and the way the media filled the holes in an informationally-primitive world:

Most of us are familiar to a limited degree with the story of Dr. David Livingstone (1813-1873): his disappearance, his October, 1871 discovery in Ujiji, Tanzania, by Henry Stanley (1841-1904), and Stanley’s greeting to Livingstone: "Dr. Livingstone, I believe?" Even if the latter phrase is a post-facto invention by Stanley, an inveterate publicizer whose personal demons drove him to continually reinvent his life, the facts of the story — Livingstone, missing for six years, Stanley trekking eight months across 7000 miles of African tropical forest to find him — are impressive enough to deserve the status of cultural touchstone that they have achieved.

However, some of the details of Dr. Livingstone’s disappearance, and the reaction to it of his contemporaries, hint at how very different the cultural milieu of the 1870s were from the present era’s…