Month: May 2015

  • How science fiction influences thinking about the future

    mostlysignssomeportents: Eileen Gunn writes, “What’s science fiction good for? The May issue of Smithsonian magazine has an essay on the relationship between science, science fiction, and the future by Boing Boing buddy Eileen Gunn. Major writers – Ursula K. Le Guin, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Samuel R. Delany, Kim Stanley Robinson, Cory Doctorow and others…

  • vjeranski: Bill ThompsonUntitled gouache and pencil on paper2005

  • ibmconsulting: Pathways, Timelines and Superintelligence Scenario noreply@blogger.com (brian wang), nextbigfuture.com Wait but Why summarizes some of the timelines and definitions for artificial super-intelligence. The general consensus among AI researchers is that Artificial superintelligence could arrive around 2060.Nick Bostrom defines superintelligence as…

  • [Editor’s Note: The author of this piece is a former Marvel employee and wishes to remain anonymous.] Disney does not care about Marvel’s female market, which makes us virtually invisible. I could probably populate Pluto with the amount of Princess items Disney makes. But where are Gamora and Black Widow? This exclusion of women from…

  • taleoftales: We are featured in this movie! GAME LOADING – RISE OF THE INDIES is a documentary about Independent Videogame Making a.k.a “the indie scene” um, at least a timecapsule of a certain time and place and how certain people (many of whom we know and love) make videogames. It seems they’ve finally put up…

  • mapsontheweb: Map of Nixtun, Guatemala. Earliest city in Mesoamerica to use a grid system and did it 100 yrs before Teotihuacan.

  • I came to learn that women have never had a history or culture of leisure. (Unless you were a nun, one researcher later told me.) That from the dawn of humanity, high status men, removed from the drudge work of life, have enjoyed long, uninterrupted hours of leisure. And in that time, they created art,…

  • thegits: fish-boned: shickalenia: dduane: thesuitsofwoah: that’s almost too cruelalmost I had to do this once with Privateer II: The Darkening. It gained a bit when he said “I bet you didn’t play it through, I bet somebody just told you how…” and I was able to smile gently and say “God, possibly, since I wrote…

  • Having leisure time is now a marker for poverty, not riches

    mostlysignssomeportents: In Post-Industrious Society: Why Work Time will not Disappear for our Grandchildren, researchers from Oxford’s Centre for Time Use Research argue that there has been a radical shift in the relationship between leisure, work and income. Where once leisure time was a mark of affluence, now it is a marker for poverty. The richer…

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