Westercon doesn’t really get underway until today–the opening ceremonies are at noon–but there was some “pre-convention” programming last night, and I took in a couple of panels. I didn’t take complete notes–I was using my Harrier and although I’m pretty fast with a stylus on a virtual keyboard, I’m not fast enough to catch everything …
There’s been no posting for the past couple of days because we’ve been travelling, first to Drumheller to see the Royal Tyrrell Museum (that’s me and Alice out front, about to get eaten) then to Calgary for Westercon, which starts tonight. I’ll be pretty busy but hope to post a blog comment now and then …
Most people think of fossils as neatly mounted skeletons displayed in cool, clean museums with nicely printed labels at their feet. That’s pretty much the way I think of them at the moment, since I’m writing this in the lunch room of the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta. Unfortunately they don’t occur that way …
The space station is getting a voice-activated computer. Astronauts hope it’s more like the Star Trek version than the 2001 version.
Technovelgy reports on (and has a photo of) the Philip K. Dick Robot, an android representation of the late science fiction author Philip K. Dick, now on display at NextFest 2005 in Chicago. It’s either really cool, or really creepy. Your call.
Those three words, or words very much like them, may have appeared in science fiction stories and movies more than any other phrase…and now, it appears, they may someday be spoken in earnest by astronauts on the moon.
I’ve written here and here about recent efforts to decipher ancient manuscripts using multi-spectral imaging, the photographing of the manuscripts under various wavelengths of light (a technique originally developed for the study of celestial bodies by spacecraft). Here’s yet another project using the same technique, this time at St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai Desert, …
Here’s an interesting story about a probably planetary system around Fomalhaut (at 25 light-years’ distance, a nearby star as these things go)–but what’s really cool is the accompanying image. Sauron lives!
RUBI and QRIO, two humanoid robots, are attending nursery school to help researchers improve the ways robots and humans interact.
This is way cool: famous two-dimensional artworks made three-dimensional via Photoshop. (Via By the Way…).
…and the future looks bright for private suborbital spaceflight. Alas, there has been nothing new from the Da Vinci Project, Esterhazy, Saskatchewan’s, hope for becoming a spaceport, for some months, although at least the Web site is still there…
I finally turned in my children’s biography of Orson Scott Card, which I’ve been working on off and on (mostly off, due to a variety of conflicts and problems) for roughly the last 97 years (subjective time) to Enslow Publishers, and I’d just like to say…Woo-hoo!
