Via BoingBoing: In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, the eponymous subject keeps his youthful looks while the vagaries of age are visited upon his portrait in the attic. Now a digital version of Wilde’s idea is being developed to show you what you will look like in five years’ time if you take [...]
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Chimeras
Via /.: For those of you who think I’m obsessed with science fiction, well here’s some science, reported on the National Geographic web site, that suggests we all should pay a bit more attention: Scientists have begun blurring the line between human and animal by producing chimeras — a hybrid creature that’s part human, part [...]
Moral Fashion
“Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?” Indeed. Paul Graham takes up an issue in “What You Can’t Say” that has been central to my life since my move to Macon about a year-and-a-half ago. I knew relocating deeper into God’s country, [...]
Dodgy Science Fiction
Today, Mark Ward of the BBC laments the lack of hard science in film these days. He states: “A strange idiocy seems to have over-taken the makers of blockbusters such as The Matrix Reloaded, Star Wars: Attack of the Clones and others who are bolstering their creations with some decidedly dodgy science.” Well, this might [...]
The Science of the Night
I touch you in the night, whose gift was you,My careless sprawler,And I touch you cold, unstirring, star-bemused,That have become the land of your self-strangeness.What long seduction of the bone has led youDown the imploring roads I cannot takeInto the arms of ghosts I never knew,Leaving my manhood on a rumpled fieldTo guard you where [...]
Genetic Verse
According to an article in New Scientist, David Rea has written a poetry program based on a genetic algorithm that evolves depending on user input. Each word in the poem acts like a gene, and when enough would-be versifiers choose one gene to survive, others are killed off to make way for the newly evolving [...]
Visible Circuits
This is not really recent news, but in the light of this week’s reading for my New Media class, I thought it might be worth a look: the Visible Human Project.