Sep 29

What Meerkat Murder Tells Us About Human Violence

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Originally shared by David Brin

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.

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/28/495798448/what-meerkat-murder-tells-us-about-human-violence
Sep 29

These sound like good anthos.

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These sound like good anthos.

Originally shared by Kat Richardson

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!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/543968884/robots-water-and-death-anthologies/description

Sep 29

These scientists are so precious:

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These scientists are so precious:

“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”.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602025/how-vector-space-mathematics-reveals-the-hidden-sexism-in-language/
Sep 26

My understanding is that weddings “by declaration” – that is, couples exchanging vows in front of witnesses, without…

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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.

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/for-200-years-secret-anvil-weddings-were-performed-by-blacksmiths-in-the-uk

Sep 26

Before there were general-purpose computers, there were special-purpose computers that did one thing and did it,…

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Before there were general-purpose computers, there were special-purpose computers that did one thing and did it, often, surprisingly well.

Attn: steampunk authors.

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-strange-victorian-computer-that-generated-latin-verse

Sep 26

“The way we talk about disability, including disabled athletes, influences the way we think about it in a broader…

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Originally shared by Conscious Style Guide

“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.”

#ableism #ability #disability

http://ow.ly/Kx0v304zHsq
Sep 26

Via Winchell Chung.

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Via Winchell Chung. Like the original poster, I’ve read 11 of these 17, and would definitely include Ancillary Justice in the list (it’s not in there).

Originally shared by Wilhelm Fitzpatrick

I’m 11 out of 17. The article resonates with me because I divide up my own history with SF along before/after lines of books I read that left with me with a overwhelming impression of having encountered something new. For me those books are…

Neuromancer

A Fire Upon the Deep

Snow Crash

Ancillary Justice

http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2016/09/17-science-fiction-books-that-forever-changed-the-genre/

Sep 25

A post by Jeff Ford reminded me that I’d been meaning to think through how science fiction genres could be converted…

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A post by Jeff Ford reminded me that I’d been meaning to think through how science fiction genres could be converted into fantasy genres and vice versa.

Here’s my list, with acknowledgements to Wikipedia’s lists of subgenres (I added portal fantasy, which doesn’t have its own Wikipedia article). Asterisks (*) indicate something I’ve either tried myself or plan to try.

Science fiction subgenres for conversion to fantasy:

– Alien invasion (Fae or demons as aliens; intrusive fantasy)

– Anthropological or social SF (no magic, only social differences)*

– Apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic (magical or mythic apocalypse: the Old Ones return, or the magic goes away, or the magic comes as in the Kate Daniels books, or magical creatures invade)

– Biopunk (magical manipulation of living things)

– Cyberpunk (descent into a mythic realm where the real and the symbolic meet; possibly with a grittyness to the “real-life” part of the setting)*

– Dying earth (magic wears out, etc.)

– Hard SF (hard fantasy: the magical rules are clear, specific, and well understood)

– Military SF (military fantasy)

– Solarpunk (positive, utopian fantasy in which magic is used to build a better world)*

– Space opera (elements of voyage, battle, trading – could even be interplanetary, but with magically powered ships)*

Fantasy subgenres for conversion to SF:

– Bangsian fantasy (interactions of historical figures in the afterlife; SF version would use computer simulations of them, or something like the Philip Jose Farmer Riverworld books, where everyone is technologically reincarnated)

– High fantasy (epic tone and cosmic stakes)

– Contemporary fantasy (Nowpunk or contemporary SF – the science-fictionality of today’s life and technology; technothriller)*

– Dark fantasy (aliens substituted for vampires, etc.?)

– Fairy tale (supernatural beings and talking animals become AIs and uplifts; magicians become engineers)*

– Fantasy of manners (SF of manners, like Vance’s Araminta Station or Bujold’s A Civil Campaign; the social maneuverings are the focus, rather than the technology, etc.)

– Grimdark (some forms of dystopia; some kinds of cyberpunk)

– Heroic fantasy (the struggles of a hero in a science-fictional setting)

– Historical fantasy (alternate history)

– Mythic fiction/mythpunk (cosmic or metaphysical SF)

– Portal fantasy (alien or dimensional abduction)

– Sword and sorcery (planetary romance like C.L. Moore’s Northwest Smith stories)

Already on the borderline

Decopunk, dieselpunk, steampunk, clockpunk, etc. often already have fantasy elements in a pseudoperiod setting*

Psychic powers*

Science fantasy (obvs.) like Star Wars

Urban fantasy if it uses technomagic (like the “Elfpunk” of the 90s)*

Any thoughts on other subgenres that could be flipped, or on different ways in which the ones above could be flipped, from SF to fantasy or vice versa – or into something that’s both at the same time?