Part Three of "The Ancient Ones"... plus other news...

Announcing that Part Three of my ongoing science fiction comedy serialized novel “The Ancient Ones” is now available at Jim Baen’s UNIVERSE Online. Remember that not only does UNIVERSE offer more fiction by great/top authors than you’ve ever seen before, for the money, but they will also match each paid membership with several offered for free or very cheap to students and people living in developing countries! (My idea.) Consider your subscription an act of philanthropy AND self-interest, helping to spread the memes of good science fiction around the world.

While we are listing fun web zines... this issue of The Onion has an especially choice satire: “In response to a Nov. 7 referendum, Kansas lawmakers passed emergency legislation outlawing evolution, the highly controversial process responsible for the development and diversity of species and the continued survival of all life.

Ah, but just to prove even handedness, do drop by the Bible... done in legos.

Ah but then the Creation Museum - motto: "Prepare to Believe!" - will be the first institution in the world whose contents, with the exception of a few turtles swimming in an artificial pond, are entirely fake. It is dedicated to the proposition that the account of the creation of the world in the Book of Genesis is completely correct.

Um, “by his fruits you shall know him”... and apparently these folks “believe” that fake fruit is best.

And returning to Earth...

Another on-target prediction from my novel “Earth”.... where I show a character grabbing a file folder and pulling our a data sheet and feeding it into a sheet reader... a much more convenient for of storage than a spinning disk. Now read on:

Store 256GB on an A4 sheet Techworld Nov. 24, 2006 - New "rainbow technology" allows data to be encoded into colored geometric shapes and stored in patterns on paper or plastic sheets at a density of 2.7GB per square inch and then played back through a computer with a special scanner attached....

In creepily relevant news... Virtual world Second Life was overwhelmed by a flood of "self-replicating" objects dubbed "grey goo"....

Okay then, quick query. Second Life is the biggest avatar world, with 2 million subscribers and an unbelievably awful methodology of discourse. “There” is in second place, using a method that is only a scintilla better.

Can anyone tell me who the third and fourth place avatar worlds are?

Do ANY of them allow visitors to talk to each other in statements of more than one-sentence in length?

-- FINALLY, SOME OTHER ITEMS --

Applying a gentle electric current to the brain during sleep can significantly boost memory, University of Luebeck researchers report. They believe this is due to the pattern of the applied current mimicking that seen in naturally occurring deep sleep, where memory consolidation is thought to take place.

The quantum world is about to get bigger, thanks to a technique that will allow objects big enough to see with the naked eye to exist in two places at once. The trick: eliminate thermal vibrations by bombarding a mirror of roughly 10^14 atoms with photons in a way that damps out thermal vibrations and cooling it to 135 millikelvin.

British scientists have grown the world's first artificial liver from stem cells in a breakthrough that will one day provide entire organs for transplant.

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Enough for now! Do spread the word about my posted “Suggestions to Congress”! And Don’t be shy with suggestions of your own. Participatory citizenship had better be the theme of this century, or we are totally buggered.