Wired magazine’s NextFest, held in Chicago last week, was billed as an opportunity to preview the future. Or possibly not, if this report at Ars Technica is anything to go by:

Ten things I learned about the future at the Wired NextFest
[…]

3. The elderly Japanese people of the future will be so desperately lonely for companionship that they’ll purchase slightly creepy android replicas of the drug-addled but brilliant sci-fi author Phillip K. Dick. Why the Japanese, and why Phillip K. Dick? It’s a long story, and I’m not sure I fully understood it all when the android’s makers explained it to me. I think I probably read the wrong books growing up as a kid, or maybe I now watch the wrong TV shows.

I tried to convince the PKD android guys that if they were going to be in the business of making robotic replicas of famous, drugged-out writers, they should also consider offering a Hunter S. Thompson model. That way, at least the Japanese would have a choice of companions. I know if I were Japanese, I’d collect both models and watch them fight over a half gram of mescaline.

On a more serious note, I think the PKD robot would’ve been a lot cooler and significantly less creepy if they’d have glued his hair on, instead of leaving the wires in the top of his head exposed. But hey, PKD was an odd guy, and maybe he would’ve wanted it that way.

[Via Slashdot]

The excitement in some quarters over news of Franz Ferdinand’s new album is all well and good, but for my money that’s just a sideshow.

The really big musical news today is a report that Kate Bush has delivered her new album to EMI. I can’t quite believe that it’s been twelve years since The Red Shoes, but I don’t care. Kate has yet to let me down (though I’ll admit that it took me a while to appreciate the virtues of The Dreaming); this is going to be well worth the wait.

[Kate Bush album news via Do You Feel Loved?]

NASA have posted a very nice animation visualising what’s going to happen next week when the Deep Impact probe encounters comet Tempel 1. (No boom today. Boom next week.)

[Via the rather appropriately-named collision detection]

Longmire does Romance Novels makes a nice companion piece to the romance novel covers post from last month.

I’m torn between Chili Supper for Satan and For the Love of Scottie McMullet, but there are so many fine choices.

[Via bluishorange]

The trailer for Peter Jackson’s King Kong remake is online.

Admittedly, it’s difficult to discern anything from the trailer alone that makes the film seem much more than one more major Hollywood CGI-heavy action movie, but I think that in the absence of a sign that they’ve made any fundamental mistakes - a guest appearance by Jar Jar Binks, say, or a Spielberg-style disastrously misjudged ending - I think Peter Jackson has enough of a track record to earn my trust that he’ll produce something very much above average. I think I know what I’ll be seeing at the cinema the weekend before Xmas this year.

It’s interesting that this first trailer concentrates on the Skull Island part of the story; presumably they’re saving the iconic Kong-hangs-off-a-tall-building-in-New-York shot for nearer the release date. Or maybe - just maybe - they’re going to leave the money shot to our imagination until we get to see it in the film itself.

In The Register, John Lettice attempts to unravel the various statements made by ministers lately about the cost of the National ID card in the light of the LSE’s substantially more pessimistic realistic calculations:

We should be clear that this particular argument is really about overall cost. The LSE’s numbers reflect the group’s view that the Government’s own claims for overall cost are extremely optimistic, so the low LSE estimate is substantially higher than the current Government estimate, which itself has climbed substantially since the scheme was first mooted. As the Government has declined to explain how its own figure is derived, we have no proof that it is realistic, while the LSE group’s assumptions are explained in some detail in its report. If the Government is right, then perhaps a cost of £93 is sustainable, but if it’s wrong, then “as Treasury rules currently require”, a higher number will have to apply. In considering the Government’s ability to get it right, then it’s surely only reasonable to remind everybody of the numbers it first thought of, and published in the entitlement cards consultation document in 2002. These were a £10-£19 price increase in passport and driving licence fee in order to subsidise a standalone card cost of £5-£15, with the card being given to the 10 million poorest people. Ahem.

[…]

[Comments on how some of the cost of ID cards can be subsidised by the £70 charge the government proposes to make for biometric passports snipped.] There are plenty of other areas where (the Home Office no doubt hopes) scheme costs can vanish into other budgets. Infrastructure and reader cost to the NHS, for example, can be ‘disappeared’ into the National Programme for IT budget, and ID card operated by the police and the immigration service can come out of the budgets of the police and immigration service. Are these ID scheme costs or not? We don’t know, and we suspect Charles Clarke doesn’t know either, right now.

In other words, it’s not so much a question of “how much will ID cards cost?” as it is “how much of the cost will the government manage to offload to other government programmes?” Pitiful.

Fleep is a fantastic little comic strip. Writer/artist Jason Shiga explains the basic concept:

It’s about a boy who wakes up in a telephone booth which has been mysteriously sealed in an envelope of concrete. Using only the contents of his pockets (two pens, a paperback novel, three coins and 20 ft of unwaxed dental floss) our hero must fashion and execute an escape plan before he runs out of oxygen. Believe it or not, I try to end each strip on a cliffhanger which is very challenging considering most of the 42 strips take place inside this one phone booth.

I can understand why the newspaper that originally published the strip decided it wasn’t for them after just 28 episodes, but I’m glad that the web gives Shiga the chance to let us all see the full strip online.

[Via linkmachinego]

Dilbert gets it absolutely right.

Richard Thompson (yes, that’s the Richard Thompson) is apparently living the surreal life in California:

Governor Schwarzenneger arrived promptly for his elocution lesson, fairly modestly, by his standards, pulling up on a large Harley motorcycle sandwiched between a couple of black security SUVs. He was dressed casually in what looked like Colombian revolutionary army fatigues, but the bandoliers over his shoulder were specially adapted for carrying cigars. He was in good humour, and seemed determined to be a model student. As we proceeded with our task, I was unable to suppress images from ‘My Fair Lady’ from flashing through my mind, so I thought it better to just roll with it – I took perverse pleasure in casting Arnold in the Audrey Hepburn role, as we rattled off ‘The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain’, first as a mere recital, and then, as he warmed to the task, I made him sing it. Having an ego the size of one of the larger moons of Saturn, this did not faze or embarrass our noble Governor in the least, but his singing voice left a bit to be desired. As a teaching tool, I taped his performance, purportedly to play back to him at a future date, so he can measure his progress; but it’s also a great piece of blackmail material, if I need to call up a favour in the future. From the first lesson, I would say Arnold has no ear at all for nuance of accent, and is probably a hopeless case, but we will see… meanwhile, the agreed fee is not insubstantial. Our pool man Georgio, an old pal of Arnold’s, and someone with even less of an ear for language, was impressed. He happened to come by at the end of the lesson, and Arnold couldn’t resist showing off a few ‘How now brown cows’ for him. Georgio said that after only one lesson, his accent was undetectable, and I must be a genius. […]

If it isn’t true, it ought to be…

Photos of pregnant animals.

Looks like this bat is about to eat for two.

[Via Exclamation Mark]

“Google” is very, very funny.

Go and see it now, before their web host is swamped.

[Via feeling listless]

A month ago, the Observer reported that academics from the London School of Economics had calculated that the government’s beloved National ID Card would cost triple the sum originally expected. As the scheme is supposed to be self-financing, this could result in citizens being charged as much as £300 for the privilege of possessing the card.

Well, we can all relax. The Independent on Sunday today reveals that the government is in talks with some nice people who would like to help defray the cost of the scheme:

The Independent on Sunday can today reveal that ministers have opened talks with private firms to pass on personal details of UK citizens for an initial cost of £750 each.

Would anyone care to hazard a guess as to whether citizens will be allowed to opt out of having their data sold on to third parties?

[Edited to note that the government has described the claim that citizens’ personal details will be sold off to private companies as “without foundation.” jr 26 June 2005, 23:11 BST]

[Via The Inquirer]

Justin Lee writes a really good letter of complaint.

[Via sashinka]

Quite apart from writing a decent techie weblog, Charlie Stross has a burgeoning career as an SF author. I’ve greatly enjoyed what I’d read of his work - the short story collection Toast, his novel Singularity Sky, and the odd short piece in a couple of the Dozois Year’s Best SF compilations - but it’s immensely frustrating that his work tends to be published in the States long before it shows up over here.

Happily, there is a solution to this problem. Stross’ The Concrete Jungle, which has been shortlisted for this year’s Best Novella Hugo, is available online under a Creative Commons license. The Concrete Jungle’s narrator is Bob Howard, who works for part of the civil service known as The Laundry. The thing is, The Laundry isn’t exactly the civil service as you and I know it:

The next morning they put me on the train to Cheltenham — second class of course — to visit a large office site, which appears as a blank spot on all maps of the area, just in case the Russians haven’t noticed the farm growing satellite dishes out back. I spend a very uncomfortable half hour being checked through security by a couple of Rottweilers in blue suits who work on the assumption that anyone who is not known to be a Communist infiltrator from North Korea is a dangerously unclassified security risk. They search me and make me pee in a cup and leave my palmtop at the site security office, but for some reason they don’t ask me to surrender the small leather bag containing a mummified pigeon’s foot that I wear on a silver chain round my neck when I explain that it’s on account of my religion.

Idiots.

It is windy and rainy outside so I have no objection to being ushered into an air-conditioned meeting room on the third floor of an outlying wing, offered institutional beige coffee the same colour as the office carpet, and to spending the next four hours in a meeting with Kevin, Robin, Jane, and Phil, who explain to me in turn what a senior operations officer from GCHQ detached for field duty is expected to do in the way of maintaining security, calling on backup, reporting problems, and filling out the two hundred and seventeen different forms that senior operations officers are apparently employed to spend their time filling out. The Laundry may have a bureaucracy surfeit and a craze for ISO-9000 certification, but GCHQ is even worse, with some bizarre spatchcock version of BS5720 quality assurance applied to all their procedures in an attempt to ensure that the Home Office minister can account for all available paper clips in near real-time if challenged in the House by Her Majesty’s loyal opposition. On the other hand, they’ve got a bigger budget than us and all they have to worry about is having to read other people’s email, instead of having their souls sucked out by tentacular horrors from beyond the universe.

How can I fail to pick up a copy of The Atrocity Archives when it shows up in paperback over here?

Devouring The Concrete Jungle in no time flat served only to whet my appetite for more Stross. Conveniently, he’s just released Accelerando, his collection of linked short stories about how to live with a singularity, as a free download in a variety of formats (none of them encumbered with any Digital Rights Management nonsense.)

Read and enjoy…