HUPOMNEMATA

“Bionic Ear Blog
With apologies to Jamie Sommers. Adventures of a woman gaining a new and improved ear. ”

http://www.meryl.net/ci/

The diary of a woman having a cochlear implant to improve her deficient hearing.
Really moving.
The diary deals with a lot of issues and feelings: scientifical approach, day-to-day meditation, insights on the health care system, and the slow learning process to understand words without lipreading…

Just another link to a post where she explains the artificality of linking sounds and words

http://www.meryl.net/ci/archives/001268.html

…when writing fan fiction

is to be found there

by Muriel Andrin

Before anything else, it is pleasure in its barest expression. Pure fun
watching Lara’s new tricks and adrenaline-driven scenes. Punching the shark,
riding on the Chinese Wall, free diving in Chinese skies, kicking the
villain’s ass… The confrontation with the shark is not innocent or
arbitrary. Just like one of Jan De Bont’s previous film, « Speed », « Tomb
Raider II – The Cradle of Life » works as one: it’s got to keep on moving –
threatening to die at the shortest suspension of movement, contrary to one
of the film’s key moments when Shadow-Guardians hunt & kill moving bodies
and absorb them into the stones. Movement is then the first key word; boats,
cars, trucks, bikes, planes, parachutes, walking, running, swimming or
fighting help finding the true pace of the film. In a nutshell: speed.
Continue Reading »

Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO and SCI-FI novelist, Neal Stephenson paid a visit to the NASA…

from wired.com

Why did the founder of Amazon.com and a famous cyberpunk novelist ask for a tour of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab last February? Jeff Bezos and Neal Stephenson weren’t saying. But the Caltech rocket scientists who run JPL hoped that the visit by the billionaire bookseller and his star author, both known space buffs, would be followed up by a major donation – perhaps even enough to pay for the next generation of space telescopes. They rolled out the red carpet for Bezos and Stephenson, briefed them on new projects, and treated both to an elegant sit-down meal.

—> read more on wired.com

from newsweek:

What is blue origin? The name adorns a blue awning outside a 53,000-square-foot, one-story warehouse on a desolate side street along Seattle’s Duwamish Waterway. SUVs and motorcycles are lined up out front seven days a week, often late into the night. There’s no record of the company in the city’s phone books, and its workers will tell their neighbors only that the firm pursues scientific research. But the databases of the state of Washington offer more tantalizing clues. They reveal that Blue Origin is actually a space- research company and that the business was registered in 2000 from an office in Seattle’s old Pacific Medical Center, a building that since 1998 has been occupied by the world’s largest Internet retailer, Amazon.com.

In other words, Jeff Bezos is getting into the space business.

read more on newsweek

Japanese director Takahisa Zeze evolved from softporn movies to scince fiction small and then bigger budgets (Whip Cream and Moon Child). He now seems to use SF to talk about migrations in Asia (illegal aliens in Japan, marginalized Japanes in Asia)

“In the opening decades of the 21st century, economic collapse in Japan has seen a growth in illegal immigrants into the multi-ethnic city of Maleppa, a fictional society somewhere on the Chinese mainland riddled with organised crime and drug use. Sho (Gackt) is a young Japanese member of a rag-tag crime outfit living on the fringes who operate a drugged pizza scam in order to survive. One day the group are joined by the mysterious Kei (HYDE), a pallid vampiric youth cursed with eternal life.” (from Midnight Eye, go and read it)

Online novel in progress by Warren Ellis there.

Et pour nos lecteurs francophones on trouve pour le moment en solderie pour une bouchée de pain le premier volume de Transmetropolitan, traduit, un des meilleurs comics de Ellis (ça n’a pas trop marché chez nous).

File under Science-Fiction and copyright issues, this nice quote spotted by Doctorow.

I’m in the middle of ‘Kil’n people’ by David Brin and it’s a great book. Once again it’s dealing with the issue of downloading/uploading minds/memories/souls (whatever).

(in this on you can download your mind to clay golems so they do what you don’t want to do in the flesh. At the end of its short one day life, you can download the memories of the golem, or avoid to do it if the memories are unpleasant. But what happens when golems start to live longer, or to copy to other golems?)

Brin doesn’t try to avoid the questions and difficulties raised by the whole mind upload idea, which makes it a must-read.

Have you ever dreamed to be a super heroe with super powers? Your dreams might com true if you read Wired magazine, August 2003 issue. To be invisible, to fly, to have x-ray vision, to travel in time, regenerate body parts, is just a matter of time and science. As Wired says, ‘Forget about Science Fiction.Here’s Science’ Future is ours folks!

To my (very little) knowledge, this is one of the first SF movies coming from Bollywood (if a Bollywood specialist read this, correct me if i’m wrong). It’s called Koi Mil Gaya. More here and here.