• ‘Darker-than-black’ metamaterial could lead to more efficient solar cells
  "(PhysOrg.com) — If typical black paint absorbs about 85% of incoming light, then a newly designed metamaterial that absorbs up to 99% of incoming light may be considered “darker than black." By taking advantage of the unique light-scattering properties of metamaterials, researchers have discovered that a hyperbolic metamaterial with a corrugated surface can have a very low reflectance, which could make it promising for high-efficiency solar cells, photodetectors, and radar stealth technology."
  (tags:tech solar energy materials )
• The washable wearable antenna
  "This wearable antenna is able to send a signal to satellites using the Cospas-Sarsat worldwide search and rescue satellite system. It is made from highly flexible, lightweight material that is robust against water exposure and moist conditions, and resistant to wear and tear."
  (tags:tech rescue comms )
• Simon Faithfull Escape Vehicles
  "“Like all works in the Escape Vehicles series no.1 [1996] and no.2 [1997] are tinged with the melancholy of failure. "
  (tags:art space )
• Daniel Gray – Blog – On digital comics
  "Which raises the question: does the comics industry actually need comics any more? "
  (tags:comics digital+comics )
• Blawan & Pariah launch new label…
  "Blawan and Pariah, two UK producers who constantly push the boundaries of techno and bass music have started a new label series called  ’Works The Long Nights’."
  (tags:music )
• Fireball – a prototype 500g throwable sensor “grenade” from Intel allows fire… -
  "Fireball – a prototype 500g throwable sensor “grenade” from Intel allows firemen to monitor temperature and levels of specific gases (ammonia, nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide). The data is sent to a server in the fire engine, then sent back to the firefighters via smartphones or other devices."
  (tags:tech rescue sensors )
• Water supersaturation in the Martian atmosphere discovered
  "Extremely high levels of supersaturation were found on Mars, up to 10 times greater than those found on Earth. Clearly, there is much more water vapour in the upper Martian atmosphere than anyone ever imagined."
  (tags:space )
• After the Deluge: Alex Lukas at the Guerrero Gallery
  "Rising from the muck, much like the urban wastelands of JG Ballard’s novels, Alex Lukas’ remnant landscapes present viewers with a future vision of our ruined present. These works on paper hover into one’s vision, offering fleeting memories of great cities, lost and then rediscovered. Cities or their fragments are inundated with water, scrub, marsh, and creeping vegetation. Older industrial ruins are covered with graffiti—signs of life without the existence of people or other animals. These scenes of a world, after an unnamed disaster, skirt the line between aestheticizing decay and asking revealing questions of meaning, memory, and mortality that arise when gazing at ruins."
  (tags:cities sf art )
• BBC News – Rocket launches Chinese space lab
  "A rocket carrying China's first space laboratory, Tiangong-1, has launched from the north of the country. Tiangong means "heavenly palace" in Chinese."
  (tags:space )
• SpaceX says ‘reusable rocket’ could help colonize Mars
  "The US company SpaceX is working on the first-ever reusable rocket to launch to space and back, with the goal of one day helping humans colonize Mars, founder Elon Musk said Thursday."
  (tags:space probably+not+but+still )

I sent the BERG crew a gift, and they took a photo for me:

(I sent a case of 16.  You can find them here.)

Bits and pieces:

*  I’m attempting to use last.fm again.  This is me on last.fm.

*  I put together an hour-long music podcast for somebody else – basically just a mixtape of stuff – that I guess will be out in a few weeks.  And it really gave me the itch to podcast again.  I may just stick with doing 8tracks pieces more often, because 8tracks are at least licensed, and I don’t think I have the time or energy to do another The 4am run… but.  Geezer needs a hobby, right?

* I’m also trying out Goodreads.  I can be found there at http://www.goodreads.com/warrenellis .  I do have a novel coming out next autumn, after all.

*  And it seems that Dame Helen Mirren announced that RED 2 is go for next year. I haven’t been cleared to say anything, but, well, no-one’s going to argue with Dame Helen.

• Sino Superfund
  "Urbanization in China–explosive and seemingly boundless in potential–has in some cities reached a 'natural' obstacle. A vast ring of post-industrial sites surrounds cities like Tianjin, Guangzhou and Shanghai. Although the factories have moved further afield, the remaining land and groundwater is often seriously contaminated."
  (tags:cities pol )
• fecal politics
  "According to the World Bank, in 2008 46 percent of Indian urbanites – or nine out of every ten living in a slum – lacked “improved sanitation facilities”, meaning that people living within them lack sewerage and public toilets3. Where community toilets do exist, poor maintenance and overuse often render them unsanitary before long. For example, a survey of 151 slum settlements in Mumbai conducted by Mahila Milan/NSDF found that there were 3,433 municipal toilet seats, 80 percent of which were not working, to serve one million people – a ratio of one toilet for every 1,488 people4. Likewise, a 1993 survey of half a million slum-dwellers in Kanpur found that 66 percent had no toilets. Lacking facilities, they shit in the open or in waterways."
  (tags:pol cities eco med )
• Guernica / Nick Turse: Obama’s Arc of Instability: Destabilizing the World One Region at a Time
  'In his book The One Percent Doctrine, journalist Ron Suskind reported on CIA plans, unveiled in September 2001 and known as the “Worldwide Attack Matrix,” for “detailed operations against terrorists in 80 countries.” '
  (tags:war pol pmeth )

Marley Zarcone

Related articles

• Planet Pulp (warrenellis.com)
• GUEST INFORMANT: John Reppion (warrenellis.com)
• SECRET AVENGERS 16 Sold Out (warrenellis.com)

• The Future Desktop
  "…And therein lies the answer to why hardware manufacturers are so eager to prematurely declare the PC dead: they need to sell more devices quickly before the silicon chip maxes out. And, they can already see that Moore's law will collapse entirely within the next 10 or so years. In other words, their desperation is showing."
  (tags:comp money )

Anyone remember Siri?

Siri was a voice-activated “personal assistant” for iOS, made by an independent developer.  It was last year, I think.  It was the beginnings of something very interesting.  Voice-driven search agent.  “Siri, call me a cab,” you’d say, and it’d do it.  “Siri, book me a table at my favourite restaurant,” you’d say, and if it had that information and web service details, it would.  Like I say, the beginnings.  It might have wound itself deeper into iOS itself, as well as broading its search and action agency.

And then Apple bought it, a year ago, and it went away.

I bought myself a little bluetooth earpiece, a Jawbone Shadowbox, to make it easier for me to listen to podcasts.  So today I’m sitting at my work table in the back garden, and decide that I want to send a voice memo to someone while I’m working.  I hold down the button on my Shadowbox that activates voice control on the phone, and say “voice memo.”

It redials my last-used number.

I try again.  It dials into my phone provider’s voicemail service.

Hmm.

The hell with it, I think, and, while voice control’s on, I tell it to play a Grouper album I have on the phone.

Terrifyingly, it dials the mobile phone of an executive at 20th Century Fox.

I decided that this was annoying.  And then I thought, wait, Apple bought Siri a bloody year ago.  Siri was apparently capable of telling me the weather in New York City and booking me a ticket to go and see Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.  But the bloody phone voice control tries to wake up a movie studio VP at 530 when I ask it to play a record.

All of which are beyond trivial, as problems go.  I can, of course, just pick up the phone and make it do what I want.  But if you’re going to put voice control on there, and allow third-party devices to access it, isn’t there an onus on you to make it a bit more useful?  Especially when you’ve had Siri in-house for a year?  Maybe this is what’s coming with iPhone 5.  I’ve read that Android voice control is better.

But – at least in my head – there’s a broader point.  People are beginning to come to terms with the idea of the phone screen as ghost box, as viewer and mediator of the invisible world of informational connection and flow.  Augmented Reality is helping that along, in certain quarters.  I am, however, amused by the idea that Apple, whose general design policies seem mostly informed by Star Trek: The Next Generation (and note how the design of the new Star Trek film evoked nothing so much as an Apple Store with added LEDs and lens flare), let something as obviously Eighties-science-fiction as voice interface get away from them.  Which is why I nodded sagely, as is my wont, when they bought Siri.

(Also amused by the idea that, in an era of voice interface, New Aesthetic would become No Aesthetic overnight.  Or, at least, would have to somehow become audial.  Would audio glitch even be possible in voice interface?  Maybe activation pings would become the basis for next-gen chiptunes.)

Noise-cancelling technologies make voice interface more feasible by the day.  If you already have a voice control system, why not tie it deeper into your OS, rather than keep it as a part-functional appendage?  Right now, it’s sort of a vestigial tail on iOS.  And, while I don’t want to seem entitled or pushy – Apple moves slow with iPhone, and, hell, the phone didn’t become a useable device until the 3GS iteration as far as I’m concerned – they bought Siri a year ago, and voice interface is right in the wheelhouse of a company that makes Star Trek goods.  And not everybody wants to look at a screen for everything.

This too-long post was brought to you by Random Jabbering As A Warm-Up For The Day’s Work.

Moonwood are on Bandcamp.

Seven Feathers Rainwater are on Bandcamp.

TASH WILLMORE are on Bandcamp.

If you are old like me, you will remember Morrissey once singing “Hang the blessed DJ/ Because the music that they constantly play/ It says nothing to me about my life.” And then lots of people singing “Hang the DJ.”

I went shopping for comics today. Felt much the same way.

But the new issue of CASANOVA is on Comixology now.

Related articles

• Never The End: Comics And MP3s (warrenellis.com)

• Computer simulation shows Solar System once had an extra planet
  "A new study published on arXiv.org shows that, based on computer simulations, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune may not have been the only gas giants in our solar system. According to David Nesvorny from Colorado’s Southwest Research Institute, our current solar system could never have happened without the existence of a fifth planet."
  (tags:space )
• Scientists Use Google Earth to Understand Mysterious Giant Wheels
  "Thousands of geoglyph "wheels," almost completely unknown to the public, are now part of public knowledge thanks to advances in technology, both photographic and social. These wheels are scattered across the deserts of Jordan and adjacent countries."
  (tags:geo history cult )
• BBC News – Speed-of-light experiments yield baffling result at LHC
  "Puzzling results from Cern, home of the LHC, have confounded physicists – because it appears subatomic particles have exceeded the speed of light."
  (tags:sci probably+not+but+still )
• shopwork » tumblelog » space is massive
  space is massive, from shopwork http://www.shopwork.net/
  (tags:ifttt googlereader shopwork )
• russell davies: talking on the radio / the internet with things
  "It reminds me of a thing I saw in a coffee shop a while ago. A little plastic thing, a bit like an ice-cream spoon. I couldn't work out what it might be for. And then I realised that it's to go into the hole in the coffee cup lids to stop the coffee spilling out. That feels a bit like the technological moment we're in with the social web. Were fiddling around at the edges of mostly solved problems."
  (tags:web comms unsure+about+this+but+interesting )
• BBC News – Murder victim Maire Rankin ‘beaten with crucifix’
  "Prof Jack Crane said Mrs Rankin had bruising on her chin consistent with the crown of thorns on Jesus' head."
  (tags:crime cult )
• supernatural jewels for surrealist darlings by BloodMilk on Etsy

  (tags:shop )

In January 2011 my wife, our son, and I moved out of a flat in Toxteth into a house of our own, just a mile or so from that of my parents. My mum and dad still live in the same 1930s semi they moved to shortly after I was born. My sister and her family live a mile or so further on, just a fraction over the border of Liverpool. A circle drawn on a map with my parent’s house at the centre, my home marking one edge of the diameter and my sister’s marking the other, would cordon off an area in which I attended Nursery school, Infant school, Junior school, Secondary school and Sixth Form College. Within that circle I learned to ride a bike; I had my first kiss; I got served in a pub for the first time.

Inside that circle my grandparents met while air-raid sirens droned panic and fire rained down from above. Within its bounds they courted, and were married in the very same church whose Italianate bell-tower casts an afternoon shadow across my back garden. Inside that circle, six doors down from where my parents live today, my grandparents set up home and raised their children. There they stayed long enough for the children to leave and the grandchildren, and then great-grandchildren to arrive. Inside that circle their bodies were cremated – gran’s last year, granddad’s this – their ashes scattered partly in their own back garden, partly on the grave of gran’s parents who are themselves buried inside that same imaginary circle.

And as easily as these words connect those events so too do physical paths link their settings. The hypothetical circle is divided up not just by modern streets and roads but also by more ancient thoroughfares. Narrow brier choked, ivy curtained corridors that might be faerie paths, or corpse roads, link the abundant cemeteries, parks, playing fields and hidden green-spaces that wait impatiently for the moment when they can reclaim the circle. Centuries old roots ripple through tarmac, absorb railings and bow walls. Stop-motion brambles wind cunningly around fallen sandstone slabs, spider-walk through skull-socket knotholes, cascade over weatherworn fence panel and post in a prickled, black-fruit foamed spray. Looking out from the crest of a suburban hill where an Iron Age fort once stood, the thin veneer of civilisation can be seen, almost heard, crumbling one driveway-fracturing dandelion at a time.

Pre-adolescent weekends and school holidays were spent exploring the circle with friends: clambering over ornate iron railings into the overgrown grounds of a Victorian Convalescent home to eat square crisps in its long abandoned chapel while dust motes danced in its ruined-roof sunbeams. In a deserted factory two streets behind my parent’s home: the words NO DOG FIGHTS spray-painted in two foot high dripping red letters on an inner wall; a flight of concrete steps leading directly down into the inky waters of a flooded cellar. Racing mountain bikes through a two-hundred-and-thirty-three acre cemetery, slaking our thirst at the taps meant for filling memorial vases while headless angels knelt beside us in prayer. In the cricket pavilion of a closed down secondary school – a row of showers turning themselves on. One. By. One. A black collie sleeping peacefully on its side next to a railway track turning out  to be only the matting of indigestible fur covering a skeleton picked clean by creatures from the dark, damp earth below. All of it terrifying, all of it wonderful, seen now not so much through rose-tinted spectacles as Instagram or Photoshop filters. Add Dust & Speckles. Add Grunge. Fuzzy focussed, faded edged, and un-really vintage.

Nightmarish is the right word for such pre-adult horrors – like nightmares, though ominous and threatening, they could never have harmed despite all appearances to the contrary. Bikes lead to cuts and bruises, and early onset anxiety about theft. Kisses begin a cycle of want, and need, and heartache. Beer turns to hangovers, to lost time and borrowed money. All those supposed pleasures summoned so eagerly from within the circle so many summers ago had their costs, but consequences are an adult’s neurosis.

Back there, at the very cusp of adolescence, as the days of let’s pretend drew to an end and genuine fear and risk became reality, the meshing of the child and proto-adult psyche created something incredibly powerful and truly beautiful. Knowing just enough, understanding just enough to take things seriously but still not knowing exactly what it is you’re supposed to be taking seriously –  allegorical fears flickered temporarily into un-deconstructed, un-questioned existence.

Here tonight inside the invisible circle an ancient oak creaks gloomily in the wind  just beyond the floodlights of a pub car park; a tattered black tracksuit top caught in a cemetery brier hedge flaps frantically; a car’s headlights flash momentarily in the eyes of a fox, or cat, skulking in the roadside shadows. Everything crackles with potential unreality like a two day old acid trip on the tip of the brain.

This is the place where my son is already growing up day by day – family, as always, at the circle’s centre. Here his mum and I will teach him to ride a bike; here his first kiss sleeps soundly somewhere close by; here half a dozen struggling pub landlords are already counting on him buying his first pint from them. And here inside this circle where his great-grandparents lived and died, for an all too brief time, my son will have the most wonderful nightmares that will stay with him the rest of his life.

John Reppion is the co-author, with his wife Leah Moore, of many wonderful graphic novels, and the forthcoming online motion-comic THE THRILL ELECTRIC.  John also writes non-fiction, such as 800 YEARS OF HAUNTED LIVERPOOL, and short fiction like the marvellous ON THE BANKS OF THE RIVER JORDAN.

Related articles

• GUEST INFORMANT: Lauren Beukes (warrenellis.com)
• GUEST INFORMANT: Richard J. Lockley-Hobson (warrenellis.com)
• GUEST INFORMANT: Matthew Sheret (warrenellis.com)

• Eyewitness: Depth charge | World news | The Guardian

  (tags:ifttt facebook like )

And some days I’m incapable of anything. Took a couple of days off to do a hard reset on my brain. Back at the desk now, to ride the novel down into the dirt.

And I was going to write a whole thing here, but I’ve just been told that a script has to be rushed in, so, no, I guess not.  Tomorrow.

• Comic Relief co-creator urges BBC to split news and entertainment | Media | guardian.co.uk
  "Bennett-Jones railed against the BBC management's "twisted tyranny of data" and their "lack of faith in creative talent" he believes is smothering the TV industry."
  (tags:media tv culture )
• Proton-based transistor could let machines communicate with living things
  "Materials scientists at the University of Washington have built a novel transistor that uses protons, creating a key piece for devices that can communicate directly with living things…Applications in the next decade or so, Rolandi said, would likely be for direct sensing of cells in a laboratory. The current prototype has a silicon base and could not be used in a human body. Longer term, however, a biocompatible version could be implanted directly in living things to monitor, or even control, certain biological processes directly."
  (tags:sci tech comms )
• HeskinRadiophonic – Heskin Radiophonic: Jupiter Mourning | Mixcloud – Re-think radio

  (tags:ifttt facebook like )

Joe Stannard of The Outer Church and THE WIRE magazine just pointed me at this. I was aware of her work, but hadn’t heard this for some reason. An EP entitled BLACK PRINCE FURY. The first piece alone is kind of vast and strange and magnificent.

Black Prince Fury by Anna Meredith

Related articles

• Death Rat City (warrenellis.com)
• Improper Message (warrenellis.com)
• Peckham Outer-Space Initiative (warrenellis.com)

• The WELL: John Robb on War, Peace, and Resilient Communities
  "My students were former child soldiers. Let me say that after the
  schools had been out of business for more than 10 years, say starting
  around 1990, the wars were more like Lord of the Flies with pickup
  trucks, automatic rifles, light and heavy machineguns, and mortars…

  "…Illiterate 20-somethings leading uneducated armed bands of teens and children across the countryside, enticed by rice and magic. And some drugs, it's true, but chiefly rice and magic. These were hungry children empowered by an AK-47 and some sadistic charismatic leaders.

  "…Funny how quickly a new generation will believe in the power of magic in as few as 10 or 12 years after the schools close."
  (tags:war pol cult magic edu )

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.

• It’s Nice That : Peckham Outer-Space Initiative
  "Ships Not Shelters (SNS) is the battle cry of this campaign, a cry for a progressive view of the world which is represented by the ship, a tool for the prospect and fascination of the uncharted. The shelter sits in sheer contrast to this, it is where we hide away, scared to venture out into the unknown."
  (tags:quote )
• BBC News – S Korea holds North defector ‘in poison-needle plot’
  "South Korean officials have arrested a North Korean defector on suspicion of plotting to kill high-profile activist Park Sang-hak, reports from Seoul say."
  (tags:crime pol war )
• Mounds and Circles: Graham Collier

  (tags:covers design )

• My speech to the IAAC | Ben Hammersley’s Dangerous Precedent
  "I’m simply now expecting people to give me their data to improve my life. The freeing of public data over the past ten years has been driven by geeks, it’s true, but their arguments were merely foreshadowing a general shift in the mindset of the population at large…We expect everything. And we expect it on our own terms."
  (tags:security net )
• Eyewitness: Somerset levels | World news | guardian.co.uk

  (tags:ifttt facebook like )

• BBC News – Mozambique holds ‘pirate hunters’

  (tags:ifttt facebook like )

• What We Still Don’t Know About the Kabul Attacks – By Andrew Exum | Foreign Policy
  "One conclusion we can draw with relative confidence, though, is that the goal of this attack was more psychological than physical. The attack on the U.S. Embassy, it should be said, did not harm a single member of the hundreds of Americans who work there and wounded only four Afghans — none of who
  (tags:ifttt facebook like )
• BBC News – German police seek help over mystery ‘forest boy’
  Berlin police have appealed for information to help them establish the identity of a teenager who appeared in the city saying that he had been living in the woods for five years.
  (tags:weird )