Reader's Room: Between The Tradewinds
Reader's Room pulls the most fascinating writing from speculative fiction, science, and technology. In this edition we talk about what happens when the wind goes out of your sails, speculative fiction from Fireside, the optimistic present from Future Crunch, and long-term thinking from The Long Now foundation. And we talk about my difficulty with naming things.
Show links:
- Future Crunch
- The Long Now Foundation
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- List of seminars. (Available as podcasts and videos. Members can get better access.)
- The 10,000 year clock.
- The Interval (Their coffee shop and cocktail bar.)
- Fireside Magazine
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- The grown selection of newly published books
- Their website which features their short fiction (after subscribers get it)
- Subscriptions If you think what they do is worth money. (It is.)
Reader's Room: Fortune’s Furious Fickle Wheel
Reader's Room pulls the most fascinating writing from speculative fiction, science, and technology. In this edition we talk about coming to terms with things, including glitter, Shakespeare, and loss.
Show links:
- Margaret Atwood's Hag-Seed
- Which is part of the Hogarth Shakespeare collection.
- UK exam board fined$250,000 for confusing characters from Romeo and Juliet.
- Clark County inmates learning to engineer, produce, and play music. (Autoplay video warning. Sorry.)
- 10 minute documentary about a very unlikley soul album.YouTube Link. Here's one of their songs.
- Paper: The Surprising Creativity of Digital Evolution: A Collection of Anecdotes from the Evolutionary Computation and Artificial Life Research Communities PDF link
Reader's Room: The Benefit Of Experience
Reader's Room pulls the most fascinating writing from speculative fiction, science, and technology. In this edition we talk about experience on a Japanese leisure island, the unhelpfulness of book blurbs, and Nick Harkaway’s The Gone Away World.
Show links:
- Odaiba fortresses turned leisure island in Tokyo bay.
- Palette Town giant, eclectic collection of amusements.
- Mega Web. What happens when Toyota builds a theme park.
- The origin of the book blurb.
- Nick Harkaway's The Gone Away World.
- Linkdump:
Reader's Room: Fatal Words
Reader's Room covers the month's speculative fiction, science and technology. In this edition we talk about how to grow literature in the desert, the very real ways words can threaten life, as well as Kawamata Chiaki’s novel Death Sentences.
Show links:
- Nevada's Black Mountain Institute
- The Believer magazine
- The Believer Festival
- BMI's City of Asylum program.
- Progenitor of Surrealism, André Breton
- The Surrealist game, Exquisite Corpse
- And the Twitter thread where I talk my way though an editing problem. (Warning: Several swear words.)
Reader's Room: Turning The Corner
Reader's Room covers the month's speculative fiction, science and technology. In this edition we talk about autonomous vehicles, and how they're still a nuisance on the road if they can't communicate with the humans around them. We also talk about what causes car crashes in professional races, using AI to keep people and sharks safe from each other, and Karin Tidbeck’s powerful short story collection, Jagannath.
Show links:
- Las Vegas's autonomous shuttle.
- The giant, fire breathing mantis at Container Park.
- Linkdump:
- Studying car crashes in Formula One Racing suggests that competitiveness is more likely to cause crashes than skill or weather.
- The 2018 Hugo Award nominations are out. Good source of ideas for more for reading, watching, and listening.
- Australian beaches are looking to protect swimmers from sharks using AI linked to buoys and drones to sense sharks in the water.