Exploring one universe at a time. Interested in #Nature, #Photography, #NaturePhotography, #Science, #ScienceFiction, #Physics, #Engineering.
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AI will be the defining development of the twenty-first century. Within two decades, aspects of …
Gods Behind the Masks: in Nigeria, a young man, whose fake video catches the interest of a group who want to discredit a masked political group with another fake video. The solution he uses would involve a 'deep fake' that would provoke a political scandal. But he has second thoughts about the job and needs to find a way out.
More than a hundred years from now, an arborist fighting to save the last remaining …
Based on the actual Future Library project, where stories are collected to be published in a hundred years time on trees planted at the beginning of the project, this story takes a fantastical and magical spin by imagining the project in a world on the brink of ecological disaster, and the forest is the last remaining one in the world.
Told in first person by the curator of the project, the story jumps in time from the beginning of the project to where the first tree was felled, to be used to publish the first story collected, and after. This is where things begin to turn strange, as the narrator realizes a truth about the trees that the Foundation may not want the dying world to hear, and has her jailed as an eco-terrorist to bury the truth.
It is a bleak story of a world with no ecological future, …
Based on the actual Future Library project, where stories are collected to be published in a hundred years time on trees planted at the beginning of the project, this story takes a fantastical and magical spin by imagining the project in a world on the brink of ecological disaster, and the forest is the last remaining one in the world.
Told in first person by the curator of the project, the story jumps in time from the beginning of the project to where the first tree was felled, to be used to publish the first story collected, and after. This is where things begin to turn strange, as the narrator realizes a truth about the trees that the Foundation may not want the dying world to hear, and has her jailed as an eco-terrorist to bury the truth.
It is a bleak story of a world with no ecological future, where the efforts of one person to tell the truth about the trees aren't enough to save humanity.
A better than average issue with some intersting stories by Nalo Hopkinson, Graham Edwards, Eleanor Arnason, K. A. Teryna, Hayley Stone and Jennie Goloboy.
"Broad Dutty Water: A Sunken Story" by Nalo Hopkinson: an interesting story in a future when global warming has caused water to cover much of the world. A girl with newly added augments attempts to use them before they are ready, causing her to crash in a storm. On an island, she finds something new, but it would have to wait for rescue to find in the form of her augmented pet pig.
"A Dime" by Megan Lindholm: a story of s payphone used yearly by a character to call home, but never seems to be able to find the time to go home for Christmas. But maybe this time she will.
"What Makes You Forget" by Victor Pseftakis: in a mining town there is a …
A better than average issue with some intersting stories by Nalo Hopkinson, Graham Edwards, Eleanor Arnason, K. A. Teryna, Hayley Stone and Jennie Goloboy.
"Broad Dutty Water: A Sunken Story" by Nalo Hopkinson: an interesting story in a future when global warming has caused water to cover much of the world. A girl with newly added augments attempts to use them before they are ready, causing her to crash in a storm. On an island, she finds something new, but it would have to wait for rescue to find in the form of her augmented pet pig.
"A Dime" by Megan Lindholm: a story of s payphone used yearly by a character to call home, but never seems to be able to find the time to go home for Christmas. But maybe this time she will.
"What Makes You Forget" by Victor Pseftakis: in a mining town there is a mysterious Hole that hints at the ability to fulfil the wishes and wants of people, but for a price. For a mother who works at the mine but has big ambitions for her sons, it may be a price she may be willing to pay at the end.
"A Vast Silence" by T. R. Napper: a petty thief is on the run from the law, unknowingly carrying with him a 'voice' that may be the cause of the pursuit. Discovering what the voice is and why it is important enough to make police officers murder to get it back is part of the story.
"The Reckoning" by Alexander Glass: in historic England, Christopher Marlowe meets Will Shakespeare, who warns him of his impending death. But it can be avoided, for this Shakespeare is from the future, and offers him a way to escape his fate.
"Castellia" by Graham Edwards: in a world where castles of stone come to life and can move, one castle makes a journey north on a journey to discover why it has been awakened and the role it will play at the end of the trip.
"Laki" by Eleanor Arnason: a fantasy story based on a real life eruption of an Icelandic volcano, involving trolls and one wise old sheep.
"Mad Milk" by Natalia Theodoridou: in a war between two countries, a general also looks for revenge for the murder of her lover. But as the war progresses, helped along by milk that gives warlike furry and strength, she begins to doubt the reasons for the war. But it may be too late, for the horrors caused by her actions cannot be undone.
"Lajos and his Bees" by K. A. Teryna, translated by Alex Shvartsman: a fairy tale-like story of a man more at home in the forest who has a magical connection with bees. But then the harmony is disturbed by the entry of love, and things would never be the same.
"The Black Dog Gone Gray" by Hayley Stone: a nice short tale of a person given the task to train a young girl to live with her condition. Through patience, and lots of cake, he manages, but not without some tantrums in between.
"A Demon’s Christmas Carol" by Jennie Goloboy: the usual demon gets summoned, but there's nothing usual in this story about a demon who prefers to be on Earth, taking care of children and hoping to find one particular person.
A Better Way of Saying by Sarah Pinsker is a fantasy about a young man, …
A light fantasy set in the early days of film when 'talkies' did not exist and people were hired to shout out the title cards of silent movies in cinemas, to aid the illiterate people in the audience.
But one teenager hired for the job grows upset with the way some title cards don't work for the scene and shouts out his own versions. This has an unexpected effect that would become important when, years later, he shouts out words to change the result of an act he witnesses.
This act, by the way, would appear to have been a real-life incident. Whether the after-effects of the act are the result of the teenager is left as an exercise for the reader.
AI will be the defining development of the twenty-first century. Within two decades, aspects of …
The Golden Elephant: in India, a girl is interested in her classmate. But her family's AI insurance company's app continually makes recommendations to keep her away from him, showing the limitations of a deep learning system that optimizes insurance policies by keeping people away from undesirable actions.
"A Demon’s Christmas Carol" by Jennie Goloboy: the usual demon gets summoned, but there's nothing usual in this story about a demon who prefers to be on Earth, taking care of children and hoping to find one particular person.
"The Black Dog Gone Gray" by Hayley Stone: a nice short tale of a person given the task to train a young girl to live with her condition. Through patience, and lots of cake, he manages, but not without some tantrums in between.
A Better Way of Saying by Sarah Pinsker is a fantasy about a young man, …
Can be read online at [ www.tor.com/2021/11/10/a-better-way-of-saying/ ]
"Lajos and his Bees" by K. A. Teryna, translated by Alex Shvartsman: a fairy tale-like story of a man more at home in the forest who has a magical connection with bees. But then the harmony is disturbed by the entry of love, and things would never be the same.
L'Espirit de L'Escalier by Catherynne M. Valente is a provocative retelling of the Greek myth, …
Best read after some passing knowledge of Greek mythology, this is a modern retelling of the Greek tale of Orpheus and Eurydice, with a twist. In this version, Orpheus does rescue Eurydice from Hades and now has to live with the consequences of his actions. For Eurydice is still, for all practical purposes, a dead person but now in the world of the living.
That causes 'complications', like the constant decay that occurs around her that can only be kept at bay by constant cleaning and disinfecting of her and the surroundings. It also doesn't help that their modernized Greek mythological relatives, from Apollo onwards, visit, asking (or not) about her and when Orpheus is going to release more music that he is famous for writing. In the end, it may be all too much for them to take.
"Mad Milk" by Natalia Theodoridou: in a war between two countries, a general also looks for revenge for the murder of her lover. But as the war progresses, helped along by milk that gives warlike furry and strength, she begins to doubt the reasons for the war. But it may be too late, for the horrors caused by her actions cannot be undone.
Alena has momentarily escaped her world and its imminent gravitational collapse by cheating her way …
One person discovers herself at an aptitude test for designers of universes. But she is more interested in discovering who created her own universe, which is now close to death. But after creating her own universe, and cheating to disrupt the universes created by other candidates, she finds her self drawn to one other particular universe, whose creator shows her that there is more to be seen in universes besides creation and destruction.
Orna, a representative of a universe-wide trade union, undergoes a drastic change in perspective while …
An investigation into the sudden disappearance of three colonized worlds leads an investigator to a man on another world who claims to have been behind it. What the investigator finds would lead to a re-examination of the possibility that a 'higher power' caused it, but for the wrong reasons.
Probably clouding the investigator's emotions is her mother, who is one of those who also disappeared. But she whuld discover in the end that despite the brief lives of people, she would be remembered.
In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve …
A fascinating book that starts slow, introducing the reader to the host of people involved with Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos as they attempt to get their blood testing machines out into the market, but rapidly becomes a gripping tale as the behind-the-scenes shenanigans eventually cause people to have second thoughts and push for investigations into the company, eventually exposing its technology to be a fraud, but not before causing pain and anguish to people who might have been misled by the false results returned by the Theranos machines.
The story starts with Elizabeth Holmes's childhood ambition to 'change the world' that morphs into a desire to be a billionaire. While working in Singapore, getting blood samples during the SARS epidemic, Holmes would get the 'there must be a better way' urge to show that a whole host of blood tests could be done with small quantities of blood.
After various …
A fascinating book that starts slow, introducing the reader to the host of people involved with Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos as they attempt to get their blood testing machines out into the market, but rapidly becomes a gripping tale as the behind-the-scenes shenanigans eventually cause people to have second thoughts and push for investigations into the company, eventually exposing its technology to be a fraud, but not before causing pain and anguish to people who might have been misled by the false results returned by the Theranos machines.
The story starts with Elizabeth Holmes's childhood ambition to 'change the world' that morphs into a desire to be a billionaire. While working in Singapore, getting blood samples during the SARS epidemic, Holmes would get the 'there must be a better way' urge to show that a whole host of blood tests could be done with small quantities of blood.
After various iterations, the idea would become that of a machine that could sit in people's homes and do all their blood tests, an idea she believes would 'change the world' and make her rich. Thus, was Theranos born. Sadly, this is an idea that others have had and had struggled to achieve.
Holmes may have believed that by doing the machine in a 'Silicon Valley' type startup company, Theranos would succeed where others had failed. Unfortunately, the reality behind health-care's need to do careful studies of new technologies and trying not to hurt patients, appears to have been lost in the 'reality distortion' that a Silicon Valley start-up lives in, especially when Holmes begins to deliberately act like Steve Jobs in the running of Theranos and the treatment of workers and investors.
Time passes: the technology struggles to be made to work, yet Holmes (as do most start-ups) overpromises on what the technology can do. Eventually, it reaches a breaking point when Theranos makes deals to have the machines be used in retail locations. With non-working machines and deals that cannot be delayed, Theranos decides to cheat by using competitors' blood machines to do the tests, but in ways the machines were not designed to. It is at this point that some people at Theranos, locked behind company NDAs, decides that with people's lives at stake due to the inaccurate blood results, this cannot continue and begin to find ways to leak out the details of what was happening. And this is where the story gets gripping.
At this point, that the author gets involved in the story, when he gets a tip-off about shenanigans at Theranos and starts digging. Of course, Theranos reacts with lawsuits and threatening lawyers. Being able to get a 'front row' seat to the confrontations and then the revelations after his first article, and subsequent ones, on Theranos are published was worth it to read it all in one go.
In the end, the technology was revealed to be a sham; Theranos goes bankrupt and Holmes and others are (as this review is being written) now on trial for fraud.
If there is a moral to the tale, perhaps it is that ambitious people can change the world, but perhaps not in the way they intend to if the path they follow is filled with deception and by mistreating people.
In acclaimed graphic novelist Tom Gauld's first picture book for children, a little wooden robot …
Tom Gauld's cartoons in The Guardian and New Scientists are well known to me as hilarious commentary on the book and scientific fields (in the respective news media). So reading a Gauld tale longer than a standard comic panel aimed at younger children is a different experience. Can his art and storytelling abilities still be interesting. For me, the answer is yes.
The book is a fairy tale about a King and Queen who, lacking children, decide to go and make some. The Wooden Robot was created by the royal inventor, the Log Princess by a clever old witch. And they were happy together. The Log Princess turns back into a log when she goes to sleep and turns back when awaken with some magic words, which the Wooden Robot does each morning.
But one morning, the Wooden Robot was distracted, and before he could say the magic words, the …
Tom Gauld's cartoons in The Guardian and New Scientists are well known to me as hilarious commentary on the book and scientific fields (in the respective news media). So reading a Gauld tale longer than a standard comic panel aimed at younger children is a different experience. Can his art and storytelling abilities still be interesting. For me, the answer is yes.
The book is a fairy tale about a King and Queen who, lacking children, decide to go and make some. The Wooden Robot was created by the royal inventor, the Log Princess by a clever old witch. And they were happy together. The Log Princess turns back into a log when she goes to sleep and turns back when awaken with some magic words, which the Wooden Robot does each morning.
But one morning, the Wooden Robot was distracted, and before he could say the magic words, the Log Princess (in the form of a log) was accidentally discarded. Thus starts the adventures of the Wooden Robot to rescue the Log Princess and then return to the Kingdom. Which, of course, they do, with the help of some little friends.
The story is simple, the adventure is mostly linear (with some quick diversions caused by other adventures) but Gauld's intricate yet simple art holds it all together, together with more words than he usually uses in his weekly comics. Little Ones (and adults) who re-read the story will probably keep finding new things in the art.
All in all, a good first outing for Gauld in the field of art and fairy tale storytelling. Hopefully, there can be more in the future.