Snapshots 29 Palms

Here are 8 developments of interest to fans:

(1) Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Sworded Past on TMZ.com ran a photo of the legendary Conan sword on display in the California governor’s office.  Schwarzenegger posted it on his Twitter page on August 25. I guess when he can’t get bipartisan support from the legislature he has to chop it into more manageable pieces…

(2) Iain Banks’s latest novel, Transition, is to become the ‘first’ newly published book to be serialised internationally on iTunes.

(3) Another ‘first’ reported by Publishers Lunch (registration required), is surprising, if true. Is Bradley Ricca’s Super Boys: Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster and the Creation of Superman  really the first-ever biography of the creators of Superman?

(4) And following the rule of three, here’s another item about a ‘first.’ I reported here, in an article about people on the Anticipation program, that Paul Krugman, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economic Science, took inspiration from Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. After the same fact appeared in the New York Times, reader Doug Levene wrote into say he wasn’t the first winner to credit the Good Doctor:

Paul Krugman is not the first winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science to be inspired by Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy (“Up Front,” Aug. 9). Roger Myerson, a game theorist at the University of Chicago who won the Nobel in economic science two years ago, gave a copy of “Foundation” to the Nobel Museum in Stockholm to commemorate the inspiration he took from Asimov’s books.

(5) Gary Farber takes up the scientific explanation of egoboo

(6) Here are Pat Rogers’ photos of Comic Con.

(7) David C. Kopaska-Merkel’s poem “Medusa’s Tale” begins:

She lived alone, they say,
on an island with a small olive grove
and her collection of statuary for company.
She died alone, save for her killer,
and was ill-used after her death.
That’s one version, anyway; here is another part of her story.

And he does a wry and wonderful job of telling that other part…

(8) Dave Langford supplies “Answers from the Author of Ansible” on the British Computer Society’s webpage:

Do you think the interface between IT and humans has developed in the way that was initially predicted by science-fiction writers over the years?

Not if you take the initial ‘prediction’ to be the highly popular scenario where interfacing with IT means giving orders to robots and, from time to time, being horribly killed by robots who don’t like taking orders. Ambrose Bierce had a 1909 story about a robot chess-player which was such a bad loser that it vindictively murdered its creator.

[Credit for the links in this article belongs to Andrew Porter, and Gary Farber. Oh,and the editor of Ansible (but let’s just keep that as our little secret).]

5 thoughts on “Snapshots 29 Palms

  1. “Is Bradley Ricca’s Super Boys: Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster and the Creation of Superman really the first-ever biography of the creators of Superman?”

    If you add “full” and “adult”, I suppose it is.

    I refer you to Boys of Steel: The Creators of Superman by Marc Tyler Nobleman, published last year. It’s a juvenile book, not too much detail, illos very much in the early Superman style, but it is a biography of Siegel and Schuster. Their later years are tersely discussed in a single page.

  2. “I guess when he can’t get bipartisan support from the legislature he has to chop it into more manageable pieces…”

    On Arnold, I like to think of the bit in the second video here as how meetings of the California Cabinet go.

    Presumably you know about what one of my commenters pointed out, the rejected steel testicles incident.

    Darn, I was going to post about that letter in the Times Book Review, but hadn’t gotten to it yet, and now I feel like I’d be all duplicative. Such is the result of not instantly blogging.

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