Sunrise.

sunflowers-onassorted-onFor those who haven’t been checking the Updates Link to your right, The Shorts Gallery went up a few days ago; it gathers assorted illustrations (of varying quality) based on a number of my stories (likewise) which have appeared in various publications around the world.

The one popularly-reprinted story which is not represented in that gallery is “The Island“, which gets a wing all to itself. That gallery just went live today: a motley collection of “The Island” illos and concept art deriving not just from the story, but from occasional aborted attempts to translate it from print into the digital-interactive realms.  I haven’t heard anything new about any of those projects for at least a year now, so I’m assuming they’re all dead. Still, for all I know some ragtag fugitive fleet of indie designers is yet working away in a cave somewhere.  That’s the dream, anyway.

Someone emailed me the other day to ask if I could stick an rss feed into the Updates page.  Which I probably could, but having looked over the online tutorials and taken a quick stab at reverse-engineering the relevant files from this blog, I figure it’d take about a day for my obsolete squidly brain to work out the kinks and get it running properly.  And that is a day that will not arrive before 1) my e-mail backlog is significantly smaller; 2) I have fewer PRy things hanging over my head, and 3) I don’t jam out on running quite so often as I seem to be now. In the meantime, though, the rss feed for the ‘crawl works just fine, so I’ll post updates here instead.  Much as I’m doing now.

Next post will be more substantive.  Promise.  Probably I’ll do Russia at last.



This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 17th, 2014 at 11:49 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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Altoid
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Altoid
9 years ago

Damn, next note already. Let me just leave it here – I’m casting this song for Blindopraxia trailer music:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GY9kQcWLvEM

“…sky is over…”, “Not even from the sun
Don’t you want me to run?”, wink, nudge

whoever
Guest
whoever
9 years ago

Diggin’ it.

Surprised there’s not more discussion of your non-scrambler, non-Portia aliens. Think we’re behind the curve.

ajay
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ajay
9 years ago

Just finished Echopraxia. Sincere congratulations; it’s every bit as good as Blindsight, just the right blend of familiar ground and new (interesting/horrifying) stuff.

But a nanogram of antimatter won’t blow a hole in anyone’s hull. A gram of AM is 43 kilotons of TNT. A nanogram of AM is 43 grams of TNT. About a quarter of a hand grenade, or a largish firework. I think even what was left of Crown of Thorns by that stage would have survived that.
A microgram of antimatter, though, and it would have been ripped apart…

Scott
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Scott
9 years ago

Pity about the Sunflowers game-thing, but that’s a tough racket. Neal Stephenson’s swordfighting Kickstarter thingy just folded, and now he’s refunding half a million in crowdfunding.

HomicidalWombat
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HomicidalWombat
9 years ago

Peter Watts,

While we’re on the topic of nitpicking, I noticed that at some point in Echopraxia, it was claimed that deinococcus radiodurans was the most radiation resistant organism well apparently there’s an organism that can take about twice the dose it can:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermococcus_gammatolerans

ajay
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ajay
9 years ago

Thanks. If there’s ever a new edition, I’ll make that change.

Well, there probably will be a new edition, because I am harrying my family and social network to buy out the entire printing of this edition… listening to the Sapolsky lecture now. Any plans to put the endnotes and references online?

Sheila
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Sheila
9 years ago

ajay,

oh hi, I am the person obsessed with providing citations in machine readable format.

http://bit.ly/echopraxia-citations

the above redirects to a collection in my zotero account that contains subfolders with Echopraxia citations.

https://www.zotero.org/smiguez/items/collectionKey/43K2PW58

and I figure if someone wants to make a zotero group for Peter Watts citations I can redirect the url to that.

peter k
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peter k
9 years ago

ajay:
Thanks. If there’s ever a new edition, I’ll make that change.

Well, there probably will be a new edition, because I am harrying my family and social network to buy out the entire printing of this edition… listening to the Sapolsky lecture now. Any plans to put the endnotes and references online?

+1 would love to see the endnotes online ! (I would be willing to put it up myself if there are no copyright issues 😉 )

Doug Rowe
Guest
9 years ago

http://www.rifters.com/starfish/S_main.htm from Starfish is broken and no way to just email you or your web person….

goto http://www.rifters.com/starfish/s_excerpts.htm and click on the ‘intro’ button in the left nav. get 404

Ashley R Pollard
Guest
9 years ago

Just a shout out to say I’ve mentioned I’m reading Firefall on my blog. Was going to email you, but couldn’t find the link, even though I’m sure I’ve seen an email address for you somewhere. Clearly my mind betrays me.

whoever
Guest
whoever
9 years ago

@Ashley – cool graphic and glad you shared with the rest of us.

@Peter re 404. Some sites have funny 404 pages. Know the last thing you want may be more web programming but your Coen bros to Buscemi relationship with people you put in your stories and then have them die in horrible ways might make a fun easter egg. Like those pages that end badly in a choose-your-own adventure. Eaten by Valerie with a link to Root, etc.

Ashley R Pollard
Guest
9 years ago

Hi Peter,

You’ve may not have seen this quote, “IIT (integrated information theory) thus offers an answer to the question of whether a superintelligent computer would be conscious: it depends. A part of its information processing system that is highly integrated will indeed be conscious. However, IIT research has shown that for many integrated systems, one can design a functionally equivalent feed-forward system that will be unconscious. This means that so-called “p-zombies” can, in principle, exist: systems that behave like a human and pass the Turing test for machine intelligence, yet lack any conscious experience whatsoever. Many current “deep learning” AI systems are of this p-zombie type. Fortunately, integrated systems such as those in our brains typically require far fewer computational resources than their feed-forward “zombie” equivalents, which may explain why evolution has favoured them and made us conscious.”

From New Scientist here: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22229645.000-the-fourth-state-of-matter-consciousness.html?full=true#.VCmJV-cmY-c

Max Tegmark’s idea of consciousness from a physics perspective.

Ashley R Pollard
Guest
9 years ago

I assume you’re acquainted with Piaget’s work of cognitive development? One has got to start somewhere and he started with his own children. Not the weirdest thing a psychological researcher has ever done, but ranks up there as slightly obsessive, compulsive and odd.