I’ve mentioned the fine beers purveyed by the craft booze mechanics at BrewDog a few times here. This just turned up in my email. They’re selling shares in the company:

….we are offering you the chance to officially join the team and own part of our company, our brewery and our beers. Welcome to Equity for Punks.

We are looking for 10,000 BrewDog loving individuals to purchase shares in our company. This is your chance to buy into the BrewDog dream and share in our vision.

We believe the best way to further the growth of BrewDog is to ask you, the people who enjoy our beers, to be involved in BrewDog’s future.

"Do you know where you are?"

Warren Ellis dot com.

Let me start your day.

(Image: Molly Friedrich)

• Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: Physicists Calculate Number of Universes in the Multiverse
  "If we live in a multiverse, it's reasonable to ask how many other distinguishable universes we may share it with. Now physicists have an answer"
  (tags:sci space )
• Lecture: Francois ROCHE ? digital futures
  "Roche imagines a programmable assembly device dubbed the ?viab,? a construction robot capable of improvising as it assembles walls, ducts, cables, and pipes."
  (tags:architecture mad )
• RobotCub – An Open Framework for Research in Embodied Cognition
  "RobotCub is a 5 years long project funded by the European Commission through Unit E5 "Cognitive Systems, Interaction & Robotics". Our main goal is to study cognition through the implementation of a humanoid robot the size of a 3.5 year old child: the iCub."
  (tags:sci tech robot robot-revolt doooooom )

(I started writing this this afternoon, and it’s turned into a huge random braindump. Oops.)

Once again listening to THE SPOILS by Zola Jesus, while I wait for Baron Mordant to post me the new Mordant Music. With the autumn’s biggest bumblebee hanging around the top of my netbook in some confusion.

Feels like the year’s winding down, doesn’t it? I find myself unaccountably bored with culture, temporarily. Feels like not enough people are doing enough stuff. I think maybe I mean print and net culture: I’m finding terrific music still. Like this wonderful album. Hoping Nika untangles herself from higher education sooner rather than later, perversely, so I get more of this sound.

I trolled through Print-On-Demand (POD) magazine service MagCloud the other day, bought Mal Jones’ POTBOILER there, which I’m looking forward to, and a couple of other things on spec. I should have bought a copy of APEX SF, and probably will another time, but (perverse, yes) I didn’t like the cover. (And you’re all bored of me talking about covers.)

MagCloud should be a huge resource for someone like me, and it’s no real fault of MagCloud’s that it’s not yet. It’s about the awareness and uptake.

For instance, here’s two MagCloud-related links for your RSS reader: Recent Issues and Featured Issues.

I keep peering at it and thinking, what can I do with that? Without, of course, becoming a publisher, and having to disburse money to other people, creating for myself a nightmare of inefficiency and lost time. (The most valuable resource any writer has is time.) That said: I keep wondering. What can a one-writer magazine look like? What does a magazine do? You associate "magazine" with disposability: but on the other hand, I’m a hoarder, and magazines will live on a nearby shelf or stack for years in my office. Perhaps it’s simply a modular presentation. Perhaps it’s a tract. These things need considering.

8×11 pages are big, and take work to fill. A 20-page MagCloud mag would come out at USD $4 before you added your mark-up, and it’d cost around USD $1.40 to mail it out to me, currently. That’d make a fascinating Dogme MagCloud, wouldn’t it? 20pp, $1 markup for a total $5 object, so that’s a hair under six and a half Yanqui dolla to get it to my door.

But: with MagCloud and other POD operations, it’s dead cheap (to the point of almost being costless) to experiment, and the single biggest headache of publishing — physical distribution — is solved for you.

(That is the fascinating problem Newspaper Club presents: they’ll ship your pallet of newspapers to you, but getting rid of them is entirely your problem. Which makes them either a hyperlocal object or the subject of much envelope-stuffing. Which is a pain. I kind of love the work their blog is doing to reduce expectations, a sort of "no, really, we’re far more rubbish than we look.")

The worst thing that can happen is that people think your magazine looks shit and so don’t order it. And you’ve lost nothing. And those people might be wrong anyway. MagCloud is the enabler for niche publishing, after all. Someone there is publishing a quarterly magazine all about the history of the Mafia in America. At least two people are serialising odd-looking novels.

Here’s a possibility to turn around in your head: print isn’t dying, so much as it’s becoming much less interesting and useful. Buying a magazine that’s two-thirds ads is not interesting, nor it is often terribly useful. Buying a magazine that’s two months behind the internet is neither interesting nor useful. Buying a magazine that is simply shitfuck ugly is neither interesting nor useful. Buying a magazine so bereft of content that it doesn’t outlive a single sitting on the bog is neither interesting nor useful. Right there, I’ve tagged a lot of magazines on your local newsagent’s shelf. But that does not eliminate all magazines.

If the magazine is dying, but there is yet this lovely and efficient service that lets you make your own magazines, perhaps the onus is there to rethink what the magazine does and can do. I mean, think about that for a minute: your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to re-invent the magazine.

Maybe this line of thought spears off a little into Papernet territory. Asking questions like "what work does the paper do" and "how do we talk to the paper?" Which sounds wanky, but if you’re to rethink things, start from the ground up. One of the best things about the Field Notes notebooks is that the outside edge of the inside back cover has a ruler printed on it. I’ve found myself using those rulers more than once, at home and outside. How are people going to operate your magazine? Do you print dotted lines down the inside edges of pages, to show where people should cut them out for remote operation? Create spaces for people to write their own notes on the pages? Interrogate the whole idea of the magazine.

And — and here’s a thing — how about, just for the hell of it, you think about making material you can’t find on the internet? Sold on the internet, unfolded in the physical world. Just as a stance, as a point for consideration, why not unplug the work and enjoy the physical magazine as a thing that isn’t networked and doesn’t require electricity to read. Because… because, sometimes, it doesn’t hurt to fetishise the physical every now and then, for one thing, but because…

The other day, writer Melissa Gira Grant was hanging around in a coffee shop in New York, and twittered that she was there. And if you went to visit her, she’d spend five minutes reading to you from her diary — on the condition that you recorded none of it on the net. No twitter, no flickr, no blogging, no nothing. The exchange for her time was to keep the experience physical, not digital.

Which I think is an interesting point. And a magazine is something that I, in any case, take away from the computer to read.

This went waaaaay off track somewhere, and I’m not sure where, so I’m just going to press Publish and to hell with it…

An interesting overview of how we might be headed for a very literal kind of "information culture," written by John Lobell — with a wonderful, headlong rush of a summation which I reprint below because I don’t want to lose it:

From Newton’s Space through Einstein’s Spacetime, we now live in a non-space, each point of which constitutes an entire four dimensional geometry. As more of our personalities can be stored and transmitted, and as technology makes time, distance and energy meaningless to human existence, we approach a cosmic nature in which all of reality is integrated into the personality.

The world becomes less matter and more information; translatable, storable, and transportable at the speed of light. The human personality as contained in its biological housing can be indefinitely preserved in liquid nitrogen. Translated into genetic code it can be stored and shipped on DNA. Translated into digital code it could be projected across the universe.

The new world created by a new perception becomes a timeless spaceless flux of simultaneity. Nations dissolve into projections of cosmic consciousness. Buildings and cities become the magnetic tapes and the fluidic valves that house and transmit projected consciousness. Photo-etched onto ceramic micro-circuits; structured on self-reproducing DNA, personality survives the ravages of entropy. Cities empty and circuits are occupied. The computer chip replaces Palladio.

Eliza Gauger, creator of the drooling-alien-baby-head bug for io9.com, recently created this lovely little mascot for Donna Ricci’s Clockwork Couture:

Emma’s serialising her fantasy graphic novel sequence DRAGON HEIR: REBORN online, for free. The first two chapters can be found via this link right here.

Emma’s done shitloads of stuff, as a writer/artist and illustrator, and most of you will have heard of at least some of it. For example, she was on the Eisner-winning COMIC BOOK TATTOO, has been in PHONOGRAM and THE DFC, and adapted HAMLET into a graphic novel. She’s very good. (Later in the week I think I get to show you a print she’s going to sell, which is gorgeous.)

Good morning, scumbubbles. I am very cold and tired and am going to the pub to get even colder but hopefully less tired. The cold, it’s in my bones, and I can’t get away from it.

Some things, there is no escape from. Like, it seems, Spider Jerusalem:

This is warren ellis dot com.

A short film written and directed by Artur Llobell.

Sepsis from Esteve Boix on Vimeo.

• BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Swedes divided over bunny biofuel
  "The bodies of thousands of rabbits are fuelling a heating plant in central Sweden, local newspapers say." Part of a project called BIOMAL. Brilliant.
  (tags:eco )

• Playdar – Music Content Resolver
  "Playdar is a music content resolver service – run it on every computer you use, and you'll be able to listen to all the songs you would otherwise be able to find manually by searching though all your computers, hard disks, online services, and more. Playdar provides a consistent API for accessing any song ever recorded…"
  (tags:music web )

Does it not bother anyone that the most beautifully and ambitiously shot (and soundtracked) programme on BBC television is in fact TOP GEAR?

EDITED TO ADD: in case it’s unclear or you haven’t seen me mention it before, I happen to really like TOP GEAR, even though I can’t drive and know nothing about cars save that women transport me from place to place in them.

Skip week for the serial: instead, a short article and pretty things.

The fine record label Absolutely Kosher (I have lots of their stuff, from people like the Hidden Cameras, The Court And Spark, Xiu Xiu, Jukeboxer, Frog Eyes and The Dead Science) are trying to clear a load of their stock. They’re doing it through Kickstarter.

We’re talking about a sale on the scale of twenty American dollars getting you eight CDs, as an example.

You can sample the goods of Absolutely Kosher via this link here.

A week ago, the BBC ran a story about how smartphone sales aren’t being impacted by the recession. Today?

Nokia has reported a loss for the July to September quarter after sales sank by almost a fifth.

I turn up this story immediately after reading that the Nokia N900 tablet/phone doesn’t do MMS. Which might not be a big deal for many, especially in the States, but it’s really kind of useful to me and my family.

I’ve been a Nokia user for more than ten years now. I had that slidy-clicky phone before Keanu had it in THE MATRIX. Nokia made me an early camphone user — hell, I was in an exhibition of camphone photographers in America. I liked that most Nokia phones looked and felt like they’d been sawn off girders by cold miserable Finns and then stuffed with difficult gizmos by pale intellectual Finns and then filed and decorated by scowling hipster Finns.

The Guardian has this, and it does tend to conjure the image of a large mammal bleeding out from a wound it can’t see or find properly:

Nokia blamed a shortage of components for its poor third quarter performance compared with the wider market. Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, its chief executive, said "We would have sold more devices and smartphones in the third quarter without the capacity constraints. The constraints did in fact hit the smartphone part of the business more than the rest of the devices."

I’m no kind of economist, but it does occur to me that a company in the smartphone-making business would usually ensure it has enough bits to make its smartphones with before it starts making them.

Carolina Milanesi, research director for mobile devices at industry specialist Gartner, said sales of Nokia’s flagship N97 smartphone do not appear to have been exactly stellar. "Despite their positive comments on the N97 I am reluctant to say that sales of 1.8m for a flagship product are good enough. Moreover, as Nokia stated at the beginning of September that N97 shipped 1.5m devices since the launch we can see that sales are actually not accelerating."

I was warned off the N97 by several people in the know, one of whom described it as "shocking." I’ve already spoken here about what I think of Nokia’s Ovi app store. I thought about getting a Palm Pre, having used Visors and Treos for years. But then I changed my mind. Ultimately, the point of the device is less what it does when it comes out of the box than it is what I can make it do once it’s out of the box. I’ve been fiddling with, cajoling, hammering and tinkering with phone brains for years, trying to get them to do the stuff I needed them to do — because no one device is perfect, right? But it’s gotten harder and harder to do that with Nokia devices — and the applications ecosystem isn’t there. I have an ebook reader for the Nokia 810 that only scrolls down. And, sure, that’s the clever experimental Maemo crew there, and it was very much a clever experimental device. But that’s the state of apps for the 810. Should I really expect better from the N900, which also runs (a new version of) Maemo — and, already, doesn’t do MMS?

It took a little over a year for iPhone (combining 2G and 3G units) to clock up a million sales in the UK, as opposed to the seven months it took Nokia to sell a million N95s when it launched in ’07 — a device comparable in complexity and price. But iPhone was selling from a single network. When iPhone became available from three networks rather than one in France, sales went up 136 percent.

In the top six iPhone markets that are still exclusive… we believe that Apple’s market share could rise to 10 percent, on average, in a multiple carrier distribution model from 4 percent today.

Meanwhile, Nokia posts its first loss since 1996 (only partially due to a write-down on a possibly injudicious deal with Siemens) and its market share plummets past 40%. They’ve been bleeding share on various stages all year.

And my Nokia N95 8GB has, since I started typing this with frozen fingers in the pub, lost packet data three times (and thrown up alerts) and restarted itself twice. All of which is to say that, as a non-city-dwelling person with no local wifi, who needs a 3G-networked communications device in his pocket that does more than make phone calls… I’m going to miss having a tough, powerful little Nokia in my hand. But I need more than Nokia’s prepared to design or sell. And for everything the bloody iPhone doesn’t do, like outboard keyboards, and for every annoying thing about it, like probably having to install the terrible iTunes to manage its apps… it does do several things I require of a street computer. Including MMS and cut-and-paste.

None of which was of interest to anyone but me. Morning. This is Warren Ellis dot com.

• British scientists develop ‘brain to brain communication’ – Telegraph
  "The system, developed by a team at the University of Southampton, is said to be the first technology that would allow people to send thoughts, words and images directly to the minds of others, particularly people with a disability. It has also been hailed as the future of the internet, which would provide a new way to communicate without the need for keyboards and telephones. "
  (tags:sci tech neuro )
• ‘Magnetricity’ observed for first time – physics-math – 14 October 2009 – New Scientist
  "The magnetic equivalent of electricity, dubbed "magnetricity", has been demonstrated experimentally for the first time. Just as the flow of electrons produces electrical current, individual north and south magnetic poles have been observed to roam freely, generating magnetic "current". The result could lead to the development of "magnetronics", including nano-scale computer memory." Also, a thing called SPIN ICE.
  (tags:sci tech nano weird )

A bit of a boingboingy title, I know, but there’s no better way: a giant Russian WW2 monument that used to have an "eternal flame" gas torch got converted to a phone tower with (pixel!) flames painted on the transmitter housing. English Russia has the story and, as ever, some of the best pictures on the net:

Or, more soberly: the writer Si Spurrier’s column for this week is very good:

I was diving alone the other day in a quiet lagoon beneath a series of jagged cliffs. Perfect conditions for Creepiness abounded: the visibility wasn’t great, the seafloor was a mangled confusion of sharp ridges (urchins, anemones and polyps) and deep crevices with thick snakelike weeds coating the slopes. At any time one was either dodging Spiky Bits just beneath the surface, or hanging above inky canyons with no visible floors; just an off-putting nebulous impression of distant movement.

I crossed one of the ridges and found a deep recess beneath the lip of the cliff. Not quite a sea-cave, but a natural dead-spot where the waves flattened out and the topography of the ocean-floor rose up: a sort of natural womb of jumbled boulders and wispy seagrass; all of it toned a perfect emerald green. Still pretty deep — ten, fifteen metres — but suddenly crystal clear. And in the middle of it, on the bottom, a chair…

(but he totally poos himself later on in the story)

1. Big Island roid, 2. Photo Flurry 004 is up on Biorequiem, 3. Musée du quai Branly vertical garden, 4. Lost Highway , 5. Sleepsmile, 6. Be Mine