75 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time - What Is The Best Science Fiction Book Ever Written?
This is a damned fine list.
Link tags: science
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Amateur Mathematicians Find Fifth ‘Busy Beaver’ Turing Machine | Quanta Magazine
The mathematics behind the halting problem is interesting enough, but what’s really fascinating is the community that coalesced. A republic of numbers.
Your brain does not process information and it is not a computer | Aeon Essays
We don’t store words or the rules that tell us how to manipulate them. We don’t create representations of visual stimuli, store them in a short-term memory buffer, and then transfer the representation into a long-term memory device. We don’t retrieve information or images or words from memory registers. Computers do all of these things, but organisms do not.
The 21 best science fiction books of all time – according to New Scientist writers | New Scientist
I’ve read 16 of these and some of the others are on my to-read list. It’s a pretty good selection, although the winking inclusion of God Emperor Of Dune by the SEO guy verges on trolling.
The Lunacy of Artemis (Idle Words)
Maciej rips NASA’s Artemis programme a new one:
Advocates for Artemis insist that the program is more than Apollo 2.0. But as we’ll see, Artemis can’t even measure up to Apollo 1.0. It costs more, does less, flies less frequently, and exposes crews to risks that the steely-eyed missile men of the Apollo era found unacceptable. It’s as if Ford in 2024 released a new model car that was slower, more accident-prone, and ten times more expensive than the Model T.
When a next-generation lunar program can’t meet the cost, performance, or safety standards set three generations earlier, something has gone seriously awry.
It’s OK to Say if You Went Back in Time and Killed Baby Hitler — Big Echo
Primer was a film about a start-up …and time travel. This is a short story about big tech …and time travel.
European astronaut rookies make the grade - BBC News
Rosemary and her dad are regular attendees of Brighton Astro so everyone is pretty excited about this news!
Muscular imagination
Robin Sloan on The Culture:
The Culture is a utopia: a future you might actually want to live in. It offers a coherent political vision. This isn’t subtle or allegorical; on the page, citizens of the Culture very frequently articulate and defend their values. (Their enthusiasm for their own politics is considered annoying by most other civilizations.)
Coherent political vision doesn’t require a lot, just some sense of “this is what we ought to do”, yet it is absent from plenty of science fiction that dwells only in the realm of the cautionary tale.
I don’t have much patience left for that genre. I mean … we have been, at this point, amply cautioned.
Vision, on the other hand: I can’t get enough.
The global fight against polio — how far have we come? - Our World in Data
I think it’s always worth revisiting accomplishments like this—it’s absolutely astounding that we don’t even think about polio (or smallpox!) in our day-to-day lives, when just two generations ago it was something that directly affected everybody.
The annual number of people paralyzed by polio was reduced by over 99% in the last four decades.
SpeedCurve | The psychology of site speed and human happiness
Tammy takes a deep dive into our brains to examine the psychology of web performance. It opens with this:
If you don’t consider time a crucial usability factor, you’re missing a fundamental aspect of the user experience.
I wish that more UX designers understood that!
To Own the Future, Read Shakespeare | WIRED
I see what you nerds have done with AI image-creation software so far. Look at Midjourney’s “Best of” page. If you don’t know a lot about art but you know what you like, and what you like is large-breasted elf maidens, you are entering the best possible future.
How NASA Learned to Love the Worm Logo - The New York Times
A delightful ode to a once-divisive design.
The origins of the steam engine
The fascinating pre-history of steam power, illustrated with interactive widgets.
Tales Of The Algorithm – Terence Eden’s Blog
I’m really enjoying these sci-fi short stories that Terence is publishing on his site—one for every day of the month.
Stories | daverupert.com
Dave’s short’n’sweet sci-fi stories, collected in one place.
Against Scale
Claire L. Evans has written a beautiful piece on the difference between growth and scalability:
Life is nonhierarchical, and it shirks top-down control. But scalability relies on hierarchy, on the isolation of elements stripped of history and context. It is predicated on the assumption that nature is little more than a raw material to be processed and commodified until it is spent. This is, of course, unsustainable — at any scale.
Erik Wernquist - Short Film: “One Revolution Per Minute”
Suppose you had a luxury spacecraft spinning at 1RPM to create 0.5g using centripetal force, as is often depicted in science fiction:
I believe that the perpetually spinning views would be extremely nauseating for most humans, even for short visits. Even worse, I suspect - when it comes to the comfort of the experience - would be the constantly moving light and shadows from the sun.
Why We’ll Never Live in Space - Scientific American
In space travel, “Why?” is perhaps the most important ethical question. “What’s the purpose here? What are we accomplishing?” Green asks. His own answer goes something like this: “It serves the value of knowing that we can do things—if we try really hard, we can actually accomplish our goals. It brings people together.” But those somewhat philosophical benefits must be weighed against much more concrete costs, such as which other projects—Earth science research, robotic missions to other planets or, you know, outfitting this planet with affordable housing—aren’t happening because money is going to the moon or Mars or Alpha Centauri.
The Unreal Writer - by Joanne McNeil - All My Stars
Joanne McNeil on the retroactive pigeonholing of downright weird sci-fi writers like Philip K. Dick, JG Ballard and Octavia Butler:
The snobbery against science fiction in the past and today’s cartoon icons of some of its weirdest authors comes from the same root: an establishment that doesn’t know how to read or appreciate it.
And she absolutely nails the straitjacketed feeling I get from a lot of new sci-fi that’s laudable in its politics but lacking in other ways:
I suspect those authors are drawn to the genre for the thing that increasingly frustrates me about it: the way science fiction is mined for road maps and potential solutions in real situations of uncertainty and disaster. The way it’s “smart person” literature about systems with hyper-competent protagonists. I’m here for the losers. The losers are my people.
Imagining a Future with Surgically Inserted Earbuds and Whale Concerts – Rolling Stone
Annalee Newitz:
When we imagine future tech, we usually focus on the ways it could turn humans into robotic workers, easily manipulated by surveillance capitalism. And that’s not untrue. But in this story, I wanted to suggest that there is a more subversive possibility. Modifying our bodies with technology could bring us closer to the natural world.