And yet more good news: The ZNB multi-anthology Kickstarter is now over, but we made it to the first stretch goal, which means Bookmarks for everyone who pledged $17 or more! Yay! And submissions for ALL of the anthologies are now open. Spread the word to your writer friends who might want to send something in to read the guidelines and get their story in by December 31.
You might expect the stories in a boxed set formed around the idea of being explicitly the opposite of grimdark to all be kind of the same.
Not remotely.
Originally shared by C. J. Brightley
Kyra Halland summarized our Light in the Darkness boxed set as “There truly is something for everyone in this set: sword and sorcery, sword and no sorcery, sorcery and no sword, sixguns and sorcery, steampunk, magical realism, settings from modern day to alternate history to fantasy worlds based on Asian myths, from no romance to romance in a variety of flavors. Light in the Darkness explores a full range of fantasy, featuring good (if flawed) characters doing their best to do the right things in difficult circumstances, with an undercurrent of hope.”
Very nearly mentioned in comment #9, but not quite: orbital datacentres. Lots of free solar power, and you could potentially even manufacture the chips in orbit.
There would be some transmission lag because of lightspeed limitations, so you would probably use it for big number-crunching primarily.
Originally shared by Winchell Chung
Charles Stross Trigger Warning
Speculations of other uses for the monstrous payload capacity of SpaceX’s proposed booster.
An amazing survey of cause-of-death of members of a wide variety of mammal species finds that a likely baseline murder rate among humans would be around 2 percent. The authors used the fact that closely related species usually show similar rates of interpersonal violence to predict a 2 percent rate of lethal violence among humans. That means that 2 out of every 100 human deaths would be a murder taking into account only our place on the evolutionary tree, and nothing about political pressures, technology or social norms.
In comparison, among mammals in general just 0.3 percent of deaths are murders. For the common ancestor of primates, the rate is 2.3 percent.
With 2 percent as a human baseline, we come across as both uncommonly peaceful for primates and uncommonly violent for mammals.
“Rates of homicide in modern societies that have police forces, legal systems, prisons and strong cultural attitudes that reject violence are, at less than 1 in 10,000 deaths (or 0.01%), about 200 times lower than the authors’ predictions for our state of nature.”
The champion killers of their own kind? Meerkats. Hakuna Matata, man.
Hokey smoke, Bullwinkle: the anthology Kickstarter has only 20 hours left and is only $1,000 away from its first stretch goal (bookmarks for everyone!), and a mere $3,500 away from adding more stories to each book and more money for each writer! Wheee! Tell your book-loving and genre-writing friends!
“One might have hoped that the Google News embedding would exhibit little gender bias because many of its authors are professional journalists,” they say.
Aha. Ahahaha.
Ahem.
This post could also have gone in my SFF Thought Starters collection. There’s a great story in the Futuristica anthology about an AI cop that’s shooting young black men because it’s been trained to assess threats based on a corpus of previous police interactions.
Originally shared by Winchell Chung
And how the MIT researchers used a mathematical transform to remove the odious gender bias from the dataset.
Bias example: If you query the vector space embedding asking Man is to Programmer the way Woman is to X, the dataset will respond “Homemaker”.
Miroculus is building a 3D-printed device that will be able to use a small blood sample to diagnose early stage cancer. And they’re open sourcing their code.
My understanding is that weddings “by declaration” – that is, couples exchanging vows in front of witnesses, without the need for a priest – were also legal in much of Europe in the Middle Ages.
Marriage customs are an interesting area to play with in your fiction. In my Gryphon Clerks novels, the requirements are two witnesses who have taken adulthood rites, a “person of standing” to conduct the ceremony, and filling in a simple form.
“The way we talk about disability, including disabled athletes, influences the way we think about it in a broader sense. Many people aren’t well-versed in issues important to the disability community and the Paralympics provides an opportunity to talk about them.”