“We’re living by science and data, not our constitution.That’s wrong. We are not safe if we are not free.”—Darwin Award contender, protesting in Pennsylvania The target won’t stop moving. Not so long ago the WHO came out with a mortality rate of 3.4%; country specific rates span the range from almost 10% to virtually zero […]
PSA. AMA.
Category: public interfaceI was holding off on this until I could slip it in at the top of a more substantial, imminent follow-up to last month’s Plague Journal entry. But plagues will be with us for the foreseeable future, I still haven’t been able to look away from the headlights long enough to distill my notes into […]
Revenge of the Pangolins
(Or, The Epidemiology of Understatement)
Category: In praise of biocide, scilitics
I’ll admit I didn’t really see it coming. I mean, sure: I’ve been harping on Dan Brooks’s epidemiological musings (and, as it turns out, those of the US DOD) for years now. I’ve written articles both magazine- and ‘crawl-based; ranted on panels from Sofia to Tel Aviv (and possibly Berlin, assuming international flights are still […]
DeHumanize
Category: In praise of biocide, rantBack before Christmas, Bakka-Phoenix hosted a launch for Sentient Tumor. In the course of that event—during the traditional Reading Of The Excerpts— I revisited a 2015 scenario in which gut flora reprogram the brain’s anger and image-recognition macros via the Vagus Nerve. People thus weaponized could be driven into a violent rage at the site […]
Bottleneck
Category: art on inkBeen quiet here lately, yes. Not that there hasn’t been stuff going on: I’ve been dying to weigh in along a hundred axes from the time they revived those disembodied pig brains right up to this very morning, when Isabel Fall’s brilliant story was pulled (at her own request) from Clarkesworld thanks to the […]
When Worlds Collide. (And Crash. And Burn.)
Category: On the Road, public interfaceYou may remember me telling you about my recent travels to Tel Aviv and Berlin: the concept of Utopia figuring into both events, even though dystopia was more front-and-center at least in my own case. You may also remember, a bit further back, campfire tales of my journey to Bulgaria. I made new and wondrous […]
The Perfect Gift for Someone You Don’t Like Very Much.
Category: On the Road, public interface, reviewsHow time flies. Peter Watts is an Angry Sentient Tumor is on the verge of release— Nov 12 according to official schedules, but if past experience is anything to go on it could be on bookstore shelves before then. (It could be on bookstore shelves now for all I know. Assuming there are any […]
Transitioning to Apocalypse
Category: public interface, sciliticsMeghan Murphy, a radical feminist in the classic Second-Wave mold (that’s TERF to you kids), gave a talk to a packed house at the Toronto Public Library last night. She got a standing ovation inside and hundreds of shouting protesters outside. I’m giving a talk tomorrow at a different TPL branch, to a smaller […]
Smarter Than TED.
Category: AI/robotics, ink on art(A Nowa Fantastyka remix) If you’ve been following along on the ‘crawl for any length of time, you may remember that a few months back, a guy from Lawrence Livermore trained a neural net on Blindsight and told it to start a sequel. The results were— disquieting. The AI wrote a lot like I did: […]
Seeding Utopia. Like, Today.
Category: fellow liars, ink on art, On the Road, public interfaceHey, Torontonians: There’s this local thing I’m a part of: “The Multiversity Collective” (which might not strike some of you as the coolest name on the block, until you learn that we narrowly avoided being called “Multiversity Our Strength”). Remember that “Toronto 2033” book that came out from Spacing a while back? That was the […]