Pioneer 10 has finally fallen silent some thirty years after it left Earth for the far corners of the solar system and beyond.

This sort of news makes me feel old: I well remember the excitement of seeing Pioneer 10’s images of Jupiter when I was in high school. The Voyager probes a few years later produced better images of more worlds, but Pioneer got there first and started to open our eyes to just how strange and varied a place the solar system really is.

Then there was the famous gold plaque, introducing the human race and providing the Aldebaranii with a road map so they can come by and say “Hi” some four million years hence. I do hope the neighbours are friendly…

What if Operating Systems Were Airlines?

An excellent question:

Windows Air
The terminal is pretty and colorful, with friendly stewards, easy baggage check and boarding, and a smooth take-off.  After about 10 minutes in the air, the plane explodes with no warning whatsoever.

Windows NT Air
Just like Windows Air, but costs more, uses much bigger planes, and takes out all the other aircraft within a 40-mile radius when it explodes.

VMS Airlines
The passengers all gather in the hanger, watching hundreds of technicians check the flight systems on this immense, luxury aircraft. This plane has at least 10 engines and seats over 1,000 passengers. All the passengers scramble aboard, as do the necessary complement of 200 technicians. The pilot takes his place up in the glass cockpit. He guns the engines, only to realise that the plane is too big to get through the hangar doors.

Linux Airlines
Disgruntled employees of all the other OS airlines decide to start their own airline. They build the planes, ticket counters, and pave the runways themselves. They charge a small fee to cover the cost of printing the ticket, but you can also download and print the ticket yourself. When you board the plane, you are given a seat, four bolts, a wrench and a copy of the seat-HOWTO.html. Once settled, the fully adjustable seat is very comfortable, the plane leaves and arrives on time without a single problem, the in-flight meal is wonderful. You try to tell customers of the other airlines about the great trip, but all they can say is, “You had to do what with the seat?”

[Via december14.net]

Adam Roberts has written a very informative review of the shortlist for this year’s Arthur C Clarke Award.

I haven’t read any of this year’s shortlist, and goodness knows I’ve got enough books to read, but even so Roberts has persuaded me that three of the shortlist deserve a spot on my Amazon wishlist.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt is an alternate history, a genre I’m not fond of. However, the premise of a world where the Black Death completely depopulated Europe, leaving China, India and Islam to shape the world, is fascinating, and the notion of his main characters encountering one another repeatedly across successive reincarnations over the centuries is somehow reminiscent of something Neil Gaiman might write. Which is a good thing, obviously. M John Harrison’s Light would appear to be the most “traditional” work of science fiction on this year’s list, a baroque space opera told with flair and imagination, but one with more rounded, human characters than you sometimes see in the new generation of space opera. In a year when there’s no sign of a Culture novel from Iain M Banks, that sounds like a must-read. Elizabeth Moon’s The Speed of Dark doesn’t sound promising on the face of it, but Roberts’ enthusiastic review persuaded me that Moon’s tale, which presents the story of a high-functioning autistic man who is neither a savant nor an innocent, is worth a shot.

The only trouble with reading so many reviews is that my bank balance can’t take the strain, especially when I’m going to be buying a new computer next month!

Oh well, that’s what credit cards are for…

Mary Gentle is dissatisfied with the state of science fiction:

Allow me to tell you why the White Crow books are written exactly the way they are. I recently came across a beautiful quote in Foundation 64, in which J Michael Straczynski lambasts the endemic mediocrity of the SF field, and, more to the point, the consequences of that mediocrity: ‘cookie-cutter SF novels and worn-out fantasy clichés that pollute the field, diminish reader expectations, and degrade the taste and selectivity of the readership’.

This is why, when I say that there are jokes in Rats and Gargoyles that only three people in the world will understand (and one of them is dead), this is not an apology.

This is why, in Left to His Own Devices, the story of what is really going on is written in iambic pentameter and attributed to an Artificial Unconscious versifying as the 16th century playwright Kit Marlowe.

You’re not smart enough to keep up? Get over it. Get used to it. Get up off your ass! I don’t care if you have to try hard — try harder.

And following the kick in the bollocks, the explanation. There’s a sporting chance now that I’ve upset enough people that you’re not reading me any more, but really — would you rather be told that all you’re capable of reading is soggy unicorn fantasy? Police-identikit characterisation in engineering SF? Sexist dominatrix versions of cybertrash? Tired-out alternate histories to which there is no alternative? Honey, there are a hundred publisher’s editors out there who base their salary on the opinion that all you can read is brain-candy. Biker elves. Folksy fantasy. Watered-down mythology, and jazzed-up New Scientist. Books that do not speak irony. Room-temperature-IQ material, and Centigrade at that.

Thus far, the only Mary Gentle novel I’ve read is Grunts, which she doesn’t discuss in any depth here, but which I suspect she’d regard as one of her less ambitious efforts. Even so, it’s a quick, funny (in a deliciously nasty way) read, and a fine example of how to mix SF, fantasy and horror whilst overturning reader expectations at every turn.

Around the time when I was finishing Grunts Gentle’s most recent novel, an enormous tome by the name of Ash: A Secret History, had just been released. I wasn’t in the mood to dive into a long novel right then, so I didn’t follow up my interest in Gentle’s work. I think it’s time I took another look at her work. (Oh good, more books for the To Read piles.)

[Via Wisse Words]

Ernie was on the US daytime TV version of The Weakest Link last year. He says his most embarrassing moment was edited out, but feels obliged to share the gory details with his loyal readers.

Ernie has just told the show’s host, George Gray, that he wrote about being laid off on his weblog:

GG: A weblock? A weblah?

E: A weblog. It’s kind of.. uhm… hrm. It’s kind of like a personal…

Ernie’s conscience: Don’t say diary. Don’t say diary. For the love of god, don’t say diary.

E: …diary.

Ernie’s conscience: fuck.

GG: … oh. Uhmm, that’s cool, I… guess.

E: Uh, it’s not like I’m putting up naked pictures of myself or anything.

Random audience member: EEEEW!!

Ernie’s conscience: double fuck.

It’s reported that Sarah Michelle Gellar has confirmed that she’s leaving Buffy at the end of season 7.

Not a major surprise, to be sure, but when combined with the news that Eliza Dushku has signed up to star in a pilot of another show it does increase the odds that the best show on TV over the last seven years will close with the season 7 finale rather than attempt to reinvent itself with a new lead actress. At least the writers, forewarned of the show’s ending, will be able to give it a proper send-off.

Would that the writers of Farscape had been granted the same privilege…

[Via ext|circ]

Yoz Grahame is thoroughly unimpressed with ThreeDegrees, Microsoft’s attempt to reinvent Instant Messaging and Peer-to-Peer file sharing for the youth market:

In case you’ve missed all the fanfare, ThreeDegrees is Microsoft’s new chat/P2P/music app that came about through the revolutionary process of asking the teenagers at which it’s aimed to help design it. The app lets users organise themselves into social groups (point and clique?). Groups are limited to a ten-member maximum, a bizarrely arbitrary limit that will hopefully be the first victim of the beta programme. Group members can chat, share pictures, play music and “wink” at each other. (”Winking” is a kind of animated emoticon broadcast to all members of the group. Wondering why you never see your teenager these days? He’s probably up in his room, winking.) As you’d expect, it’s all wrapped up in the kind of huge lurid skinnable UI that will have Alan Cooper wandering around the Redmond campus with a rifle.

More “innovation” from Microsoft, then…

[Via Boing Boing]

James Oberg reports on the latest theories about the last few seconds leading to the breakup of the Columbia. There’s no new insight into the cause of the failure of the port wing, but Oberg spells out just why some analysts think it’s plausible that the crew lived through the minute or so after the shuttle started to yaw to port. Oberg concludes:

No one can know what Columbia’s seven astronauts were actually experiencing and doing in the final seconds of their flight, but the engineers who discussed the possible scenarios were deeply shaken by the implications. The overwhelming consensus is that the lack of knowledge is probably the merciful way it should be.

Amen to that.

[Via Robot Wisdom]

Calvin & Hobbes Resurrection is a tremendous resource devoted to a boy and his (stuffed?) tiger. The Quotes are especially choice:

Susie: Our class voted Calvin the “Most likely to be seen on the news some day”.

Calvin: I don’t need to compromise my principles, because they don’t have the slightest bearing on what happens to me anyway.

Calvin: Twisted fiend! No four walls can hold Stupendous Man! You’ve been foiled again, evil Mom-Lady! Ha ha ha!
Mom: Oh yeah?
Calvin: Great Zok! She’s fixed her mind-scrambling eyeball ray on me! I’m suddenly filled with the desire to go back upstairs and do her nefarious bidding!
Mom: Glad to hear it.

And finally, my favourite:

Calvin: Getting an inch of snow is like winning 10 cents in the lottery.

[Via I Love Everything]

Tired of seeing talking heads analyse Michael Jackson, his life and his oeuvre in excruciating detail? Kung fu grippe suggests that it’s about time all that critical brain power was directed at a fresh target.

The question before us this evening: is every girl really crazy ’bout a sharp-dressed man?

Clearly, these leering, bearded svengalis regard themselves as the saviors of puerile male fantasy?called upon by some higher power to deliver nerdly teen boys empowerment, car keys, and slutty girls dancing in stilletos.

Do these remarkable videos suggest a fractured Messiah complex? Or do these three men secretly wish they were the three slutty girls?

[…]

Reykjavik looks stunning in this series of photographs.

The picture of the Sun Ship overlooking the ocean is particularly striking.

[Via the null device]

Jeff Vogel has wrapped up The Story About the Baby now that his daughter Cordelia has made it to her first birthday relatively unscathed. From his epilogue:

The Three Main Reasons Being A Parent Sucks:

[…]

Two. You Are Doomed To Disappointment.

I believe that practically every parent has this moment: You go into your child’s room, late at night, and stare down at his or her slumbering form. And you imagine what that child might be. Every parent (well, I HOPE, every parent) looks at the kid and thinks: “This one might be president. Or an author, or a scientist. This might be the child that CHANGES EVERYTHING.”

No. It won’t.

Think, for a moment, about how stupid and irritating other people are. And realize that your child is, despite its dependency on you and the genetic material you provided, one of those OTHER PEOPLE.

Forget about raising the child that changes everything. I suggest you aim for, say, raising a child who doesn’t end up married to someone in the sex or lard rendering industries. Forget about grandchildren, forget about raising a doctor or lawyer. Heck, forget about your child even liking you when it gets old. Just aim for raising a kid who knows the difference between bricks and dinner rolls.

My guess is, if most guys saw how their relationships with their children would turn out, they’d give themselves vasectomies with ballpoint pens the moment they got their first boner.

I may sound a tiny bit pessimistic now. It’s OK, though. Reality is far, far worse.

Vogel’s hilariously cynical, resolutely non-cutesy account of life as a first-time parent should be compulsory reading for anyone contemplating having children.

This week’s MSNBC The Week In Pictures featured a rather wonderful image from a game of donkey basketball. Looks like a lot of fun, as long as you’re not on the pooper scooper squad.

Librarian Pickup Lines.

Are you a librarian? Well I really need to be shushed!

You must work at a busy library, cuz baby you just increased my circulation.

No one believes I am a librarian, maybe you should try to check me out.

I can do the neatest thing with a full set of the OED.

The word “corny” seems somehow inadequate to the task at hand…

[Via Memepool]