Tag Archives: Mike Reeves-McMillan

Sep 30

And yet more good news: The ZNB multi-anthology Kickstarter is now over, but we made it to the first stretch goal,…

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Originally shared by Kat Richardson

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.

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

Sep 30

Very nearly mentioned in comment #9, but not quite: orbital datacentres.

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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.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/09/what-else-can-you-do-with-a-bi.html

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/