m. c. de marco

Via Daring Fireball: there’s a new Spore movie out about the “science” of Spore.

Spore is a video game due out in September in which you evolve your way from microorganisms to interstellar travel. The Spore Creature Creator will be available for free in June.

The World Without Us sounds like an essential aid for the apocalypse writer. What's left after you kill all the characters? Alan Weisman covers the factoids (the NYC Metro would flood in two days without electric pumps) and the final mark of late humanity on the new Earth (in the sample chapter on persistent polymers).

At Making Light, Jim Macdonald debunks a classic alien abduction story at, I must warn the reader, great length:

Today [September 19, 2007], this very day, forty-six years ago, Betty and Barney Hill drove down U.S. 3, right past my house and into history. They were about to become Patient Zero for Alien Abductions with Weird Medical Experiments, Missing Time, and Big-Eyed Extraterrestrials.

Via a mailing list: Seed has an article up on Climate-Changing Sci-Fi.

“The genre of climate change fiction is accelerating, and I expect it will accelerate at the same rate as the scientific evidence becomes solider and solider,” said Mark Tushingham, an environmental scientist who’s studied climate change since the 1980s and published his first science fiction novel, Hotter Than Hell, last November.

No, it’s not a new Gene Wolfe novel; it’s a binary mechanical computer designed to keep time for 10,000 years, somewhere in the Nevada desert. Michael Chabon has a column up about the clock and our quickly disappearing future:

I don’t know what happened to the Future. It’s as if we lost our ability, or our will, to envision anything beyond the next hundred years or so, as if we lacked the fundamental faith that there will in fact be any future at all beyond that not-too-distant date.

Via Slashdot: Scientific American reports on the development of The Expert Mind.

The one thing that all expertise theorists agree on is that it takes enormous effort to build these structures in the mind. Simon coined a psychological law of his own, the 10-year rule, which states that it takes approximately a decade of heavy labor to master any field.

Via a mailing list: The Edge Annual Question for 2006 is What is your dangerous idea? Over a hundred forward thinkers answered the following question.

The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?