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A couple years ago, we shared with you our favorite moments of commanders trash-talking each other prior to, or during, an all-out battle in space. Now we're bringing it back again, as today's io9 flashback. More »
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A burning house, a flooded road, and a man with a gun. The images captured by the Google Street View van's automatic camera are poignant and weird. According to one artist, they're also how future historians will study our world. More »
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Is Wafaa Bilal an artist or simply a masochistic attention whore? The Iraqi artist spent a month in a gallery last year, with a webcam and a paintball gun connected to the Internet, letting people from 136 countries shoot 65,000 paintballs at him 24 hours a day. Was this a publicity stunt? A soul-searching art installation? Therapy for Bilal's suffering at the hands of Saddam Hussein and his brother and father's deaths in the U.S. invasion? Bilal's just published a book about his experience, and it sheds a bit of light on his futuristic experimental warzone. More »
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Shoot, it's only a few days until Halloween and you don't have a costume yet! More »
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Click to viewWelcome back to MangoBot, a biweekly column about Asian futurism by TokyoMango blogger Lisa Katayama. I'm a total sports nut. Olympic season makes my bones shiver with excitement. But this year, I took my mind off record-breaking swim relays and super-twisty gymnastics routines for a minute to consider the host country's techno-socio-political future. The opening ceremony confirmed my theory that China is breeding robots. (We already know that the cute girl who performed the patriotic song was lip-syncing and that the fireworks shown on TV were fake. I'm pretty sure that the 2008 drummers who kicked off the five-hour technological spectacularity were androids, too.) But what else is up in the giant nation that many believe will be the next world superpower? I called some experts and came away with a list of five predictions for China's next half-century. More »
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If your second thought while watching Iron Man (after "I think I have a crush on Robert Downey Jr. again") was "Why can't they make an Iron Man suit in real life?" then the US army and scientists in Madison, Wisconsin, are planning on making you very, very happy indeed. More »
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If you ever watched the Star Wars Kid and Homestar Runner, or gawked at the Tron Guy and web comic Xkcd, you're changing the future of celebrity. You're building a world where Paris Hilton and Tom Cruise will be replaced by captioned pictures of cats and clever comics about algebra. At least, that was the premise of a conference held over the weekend at MIT called ROFLCon, which brought together the web's most famous meme-disseminators to prove that In The Future, Fame Will Be Different. Will it really? More »
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The London Science Museum finally completed work on the Victorian era's greatest supercomputer, the Difference Engine No. 2, 120 years after the death of inventor Charles Babbage. This five-ton machine is currently traveling across the pond to San Francisco, and will go on display in America for the first time starting May 10th at the Computer History Museum. Find out everything you wanted to know about Charles Babbage and his wonderful engines in today's triviagasm. More »
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Click to viewThe next time you're feeling all smug and twenty-first century commuting into the office while using your laptop to catch up on emails or prep for a presentation, consider the following. Back in 1893, a publication called The Manufacturer and Builder hyped a new portable typewriter that could "readily be used on the lap, on the desk, on the train—in short, anywhere"—and showed a forward-thinking commuter doing just that. Click through for a closer look at the world's first laptop. More »
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Click to viewOur economic future could be even bleaker than you expect — and last year was the moment to unleash your inner survivalist. If the financial system suffers any more crises of confidence, credit gets even tighter, and the fed falls into a liquidity trap, we could be in for several hardscrabbling dystopian years. Forget maintaining your current shiny standard of living — how will you feed and clothe yourself, in the worst case scenario? We've compiled a few suggestions for things you can do now to brace yourself. More »
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The greatest science fiction heroes are resourceful, building high-tech devices out of whatever crap they find laying around. In the right hands, a paperclip and some bubblegum can become an interstellar wave modulator. The more ridiculous those moments of gadget improvisation are, the more they make you feel as if you could create your own otherworldly tech and access other planets using the materials you already have — if you only knew how. Click through for our roundup of the greatest MacGyvers of sci-fi. More »
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The greatest tacticians in space don't just use high-energy beams and force shields, they use psychology. And the best interstellar smack-downs start with the trash talking before a single shot is fired. Whether it's Kirk mocking Khan's superior intellect or Adama growling into the space-phone, nothing improves a shootout in space like a good calling-you-out speech. Watch our medley of clips, and then read our list of the greatest taunts and shouts of defiance in interstellar combat. More »
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Arthur C. Clarke, author of scifi classics Rendezvous with Rama and 2001: A Space Odyssey, died today at the age of 90 in Sri Lanka. Not only did Clarke create a legend with 2001 (he worked on the film with Stanley Kubrick too), but he also predicted many of the scientific inventions of the twentieth century such as telecom satellites. He was even knighted in recognition of his many mind-bending contributions to the worlds of literature and science speculation. [LA Times] More »
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Many futurists and science fiction writers are adherents of the theory that we're heading towards "Vearth," a state where the entire world is essentially replaced by a giant virtual reality made of "computronium." (Computronium is Charles Stross' jokey term for matter that's optimized for computing.) You see this fantasy cropping up in movies like The Matrix, where the world of 1999 has been completely replaced by a computer simulation; and in countless novels ranging from Greg Bear's Blood Music to Rudy Rucker's latest Postsingular. Now Rucker himself is railing against this idea of Vearth, in a terrific essay on why virtual reality will always suck compared to the real thing. More »
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Seen on the mezzanine, without any particular context whatsoever. Someone, somewhere, is having an obscure pop-cultural fetish fulfilled by this image at this very moment. More »
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Annalee is asking costumed fans roaming the halls of WonderCon one crucial question: How would they strip out of their costumes if they had to get naked really, really fast? She caught up with the an intrepid member of the Imperial Stormtrooper squad, complete with his own supply of Nerds candy. Stormtroopers have to eat too, you know. Since he was sitting behind a table, he may have already had his armored pants off, but find out how he'd disrobe in a hurry inside. More »
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At a young age, my brain was hijacked by the game of Tetris. Now it helps me navigate through life. When I was in the sixth grade, my friend Chiyo and I used to play this addictive puzzle game—developed in 1985 by a Russian engineer—for hours on end with a single 100 yen coin at an arcade in Tokyo. We probably should have been doing homework or at least pretending to, but instead, there we were, every day after school, sitting side by side executing crazy maneuvers with our joysticks. The mantras that I repeated in my head while playing the game at max speed as a pre-teen are totally in sync with some basic tenets of Asian philosophy. More »
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Steve Jobs is the first non-science fiction character to possess a reality distortion field (RDF). Apple's MacWorld 2008 conference kicks off tomorrow with a keynote from Jobs, which leaves gadget lovers and iPod fiends white-knuckled on Tuesday morning as news of the next "insanely great" thing trickles out of Moscone Center in San Francisco. Why does this speech cause such furor (and fury) every year? RDF, of course. We've got the scoop on how Jobs came to posses the RDF, and we've got four other famous RDFs from science fiction for you to contemplate as you await the mind-control ray that will emanate from MacWorld tomorrow. More »
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