In an interview on Geeks Guide to the Galaxy (Wired), econtard Paul Krugman discussed the relationship between science fiction and economics. He said that he was inspired to pursue economics by Asimov’s Foundation series. Quelle surprise! He also claimed economic laws change over time (I know, I know!), but he nevertheless embraces one unstoppable apriori economic law in the interview: greed.
Free online college course: Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World: Taught by Professor Eric S. Rabkin of the University of Michigan. Hosted by Coursera. The course will run 10 weeks and will cover Grimm, Carroll, Stoker, Shelley, Hawthorne & Poe, Wells, Burroughs & Gilman, Bradbury, LeGuin, and Doctorow (Little Brother). Click on over for more details and the registration form.
ISS astronaut impressed by private firm SpaceX’s Dragon vehicle: “Inside of the Dragon module. Beautiful. Spacious, Modern. Blue LEDs. Feels a bit like a sci-fi filmset. Of course it is from Los Angeles.” And “You could say a new era of spaceflight has begun. Soon private companies will take people to and from space.”
Continuum is a new time-travel scifi tv series with a familiar leftist B-movie premise. A cyborg cop chases a group of escaped criminals from the future into the present. The “twist”? The criminals are freedom fighters, “struggling to overthrow a corporate-dominated future after the world’s governments have all collapsed.” I grow tired of this willfully ignorant and unthinking ideological trope. If traditional nation-states have collapsed, leaving corporations as the biggest organizations in society, and the corporations are employing cops to aggressively maintain a surveillance-police state with limited civil liberties, then the corporations have become governments.
New Scientist has a new digital quarterly publication, titled Arc, featuring science fiction and intriguing, thought-provoking science-factual articles.
Your ebook is reading you (WSJ). Is this a bad thing? Some are concerned about their privacy. But are they clinging to antiquated notions of privacy? Libertarians are rightly concerned about government invasions of privacy, but should we be concerned about corporations having all of this data on us as well? Can you think of any ways businesses having this data will be beneficial to consumers?
Game of Thrones–style political attack ads (via SF Signal):
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