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1. The tv series Community recently had a funny episode devoted to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. I started roleplaying when I was 12 with AD&D, roleplayed with a variety of games well into college, and have fond memories of it. I haven’t seen any other episodes in the series, so I don’t know if they’re worth watching. io9 has a good review of the D&D episode. Watch it for a limited time on Hulu.com.
2. As if anti-gay marriage bigots and statists weren’t bad enough, now we can add anti-AI marriage luddites to the mix. Yes, folks, that slippery slope that gay marriage will surely start us down will lead us one day to marriage between humans and artificial intelligences! Um, yeah…so what? That alone won’t destroy traditional marriage any more than gay marriage will. I guess this guy hasn’t heard that Japanese nerds are already marrying their favorite anime game characters. No, I’m serious. 
   
   But anyway: The libertarian ideal, however one feels personally about gay and AI marriage, is for the state to get out of marriage entirely. Let people decide what to call their relationships and social evolution sort it out. Down with government classificationism!
   
   Here’s io9 on the story. And here’s the biggotted luddite’s speech:
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1. In July, Amazon announced that Kindle book sales had surpassed hardback book sales. Analysts pooh-poohed this milestone as paperback sales are far greater than hardback sales. But now Kindle book sales have overtaken paperback sales as well. Amazon is now selling more digital or ebooks in its bookstore now than physical print books. We’ve reached a turning point in the way people read books.

   There is still a ways to go, however, for ereader owners are still buying print books and ereader ownership is still not mainstream. While the adoption of ereaders is spreading, even at an accelerating pace, a recent survey of book shoppers shows that only 21% own one. I don’t own one yet, though I hope to buy an Android tablet in the next year or so.

   I’m not sure print books will ever go the way of the dodo. Print books will increasingly have collector value. Some people may still prefer reading them, if only out of nostalgia for a bygone era. There are ways to add value to a print book as well: high-quality production, handwritten signatures, personal notes, and so on.

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In an interview with The 99% — Francis Ford Coppola: On Risk, Money, Craft & Collaboration — Coppola offers some very insightful and sensible remarks about creativity, copyright, the role of copying and imitation in the development of art and an artist’s own voice, the business of the arts, and immortality. As Cory Doctorow writes: “It’s always great to learn about seasoned, accomplished artists who refuse the lure of reactionary, knee-jerk get-off-my-lawnery.”

I once found a little excerpt from Balzac. He speaks about a young writer who stole some of his prose. The thing that almost made me weep, he said, “I was so happy when this young person took from me.” Because that’s what we want. We want you to take from us. We want you, at first, to steal from us, because you can’t steal. You will take what we give you and you will put it in your own voice and that’s how you will find your voice.And that’s how you begin. And then one day someone will steal from you. And Balzac said that in his book: It makes me so happy because it makes me immortal because I know that 200 years from now there will be people doing things that somehow I am part of. So the answer to your question is: Don’t worry about whether it’s appropriate to borrow or to take or do something like someone you admire because that’s only the first step and you have to take the first step…

You have to remember that it’s only a few hundred years, if that much, that artists are working with money. Artists never got money. Artists had a patron, either the leader of the state or the duke of Weimar or somewhere, or the church, the pope. Or they had another job. I have another job. I make films. No one tells me what to do. But I make the money in the wine industry. You work another job and get up at five in the morning and write your script.

This idea of Metallica or some rock n’ roll singer being rich, that’s not necessarily going to happen anymore. Because, as we enter into a new age, maybe art will be free. Maybe the students are right. They should be able to download music and movies. I’m going to be shot for saying this. But who said art has to cost money? And therefore, who says artists have to make money?

(Image: Coppola Francis Ford at Cannes in 2001, Ed Fitzgerald/Wikimedia Commons)

[Via C4SIF and Boing Boing.]

Another political-bureaucratic boondoggle at NASA. Just abolish the agency already and get out of the way of private space enterprises.

• NASA’s Ares rocket dead, but Congress lets you pay $500 million more for it: It’s all about pork (protecting jobs in a legislator’s home state), political wrangling over the federal budget, and the inherent inability of politics and bureaucracy to have the flexibility and alacrity of private enterprise.

The future of computing is near:

• 1,000-Core Chip Could Make PCs 20 Times Faster: The fastest consumer processors such as Intel’s Core i7 are limited to 6 cores, but “Scottish scientists have built a 1,000-core processor, claiming it will run 20 times faster than today’s chips while using less power. Dr. Wim Vanderbauwhede led a research team at the University of Glasgow to create the futuristic processor using a programmable chip called a field programmable gate array (FPGA).”
• Super Memory Breakthrough: Store Every Movie Made This Year on Your Phone (With Room to Spare): “IBM says they have made a significant leap forward in the viability of “Racetrack memory,” a new technology design which has the potential to exponentially increase computing power. This new tech could give devices the ability to store as much as 100 times more information than they do now, which would be accessed at far greater speeds while utilizing “much less” energy than today’s designs. In the future, a single portable device might be able to hold as much memory as today’s business-class servers and run on a single battery charge for weeks at a time.”

A few notable things I ran across recently:

1. Will Thomas of The Atlas Society (formerly known as The Objectivist Center) argues that transhumanism is compatible with Objectivism.
2. Kylie Sturgess, in her Curiouser and Curiouser column for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, interviewed Scott Sigler. I hadn’t heard of him before, but apparently he’s known as a podcaster and now also as an author of techno-thrillers.

   Sigler describes skeptics as people
    

   who were spreading the other side of the information instead of misinformation. They are out actively encouraging people to think for themselves, and what’s been interesting is that they’re not necessarily telling people “this is bunk.” They are encouraging people to think critically about things and learn how to address things when you run into them.

   He goes on to mention how, among other things, evolution is being challenged in America. But there’s a flipside to long-accepted, fairly well-established science being attacked in knee-jerk fashion by those faith-based types leery of science in general and of science that challenges their religious beliefs in particular. Sometimes science can become corrupted in politically-charged fields, and scientists lose their objectivity. I’m reminded of an old post I wrote about scientific skepticism in relation to global warming alarmism. I riffed off of Clarke’s First Law of Prediction and Asimov’s Corollary.

   But to get back to Scott Sigler, has anyone read any of his work? If so, what do you think? Do you recommend it?

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