This weekend's links for your viewing pleasure.
Scifi's Greatest Space Builders — And How We'll Copy Them
One day, when you hear someone is a construction worker, you'll have to ask whether he or she wears a spacesuit on the job.
Old School vs. New School Science Fiction
Ok, so in a previous blog, I addressed the difference between old school and new school gamers. Perhaps rightly so, I got the response that this is a distinction that shouldn't exist. Perhaps there should be no distinction, either, between old school and new school sci-fi. But, for the sake of this blog, I'm going to make the distinction, however categorically confusing it might be.
The Russian Cold War Rocket That Still Does Heavy Lifting
This Russian Proton rocket, looking like something out of a 60s sci-fi novel, launched yesterday from Baikonur Cosmodrome carrying one of the largest satellites ever built.
U.S. Navy Developing Lasers and Huge Guns
The year is 2019. The destroyer U.S.S. Mason patrols enemy waters, and is suddenly faced with a barrage of incoming missiles. Almost instantly, dozens of brightly colored lasers beam out of the Mason, intercepting the missiles and destroying them harmlessly in the air. Then a massive deck-mounted gun turns and takes aim at an onshore target 70 miles inland. The ship's lights dim for a moment, and the magnetic railgun fires a projectile at roughly Mach 7. The impact is audible as a dull, subsonic thud. Want to find out what else the Navy's researchers are cooking up?
Four Reasons Not to Give Up on Interstellar Travel
According to the scientists who attended this year's Joint Propulsion Conference in Hartford, Connecticut, humans may never be able to achieve interstellar travel. Aerospace experts from NASA to MIT claim that finding the amount of energy and time we'd need to cross the huge distances involved is out of the realm of possibility. In a recent article, Wired Magazine's Robert Lemos suggested that the JPC's frustrating findings meant humans would never reach the stars. But don't add "space adventure" to your list of unlikely futures for the human species just yet — here are four reasons why.
Book Publishers: Learn From Digg, Yelp—Even Gawker
Amazon.com's Kindle electronic reader has come a long way since its late 2007 debut was met with mixed reviews, some derisive. Who could forget the moment at last year's Le Web Conference in Paris, when legendary designer Philippe Starck sniffed (BusinessWeek.com, 12/20/07), "It's a pity. It's almost modern." The audience erupted into laughter.