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One of the fictional technologies we imaged for In the Shadow of Ares is the “wallscreen”, a wallpaper-like display of practically unlimited extent which interacts with the characters’ mobile agents and other computing systems. In the scene where this technology is introduced, Amber’s mother is playing an ambience video loop of a tropical beach, which her father observes is probably too realistic for healthy morale. In other scenes, smaller data windows are displayed as needed over whatever is currently used as the background.
So, imagine my surprise this afternoon when I walked past the Microsoft store at the local mall and saw a wallscreen of sorts along all three interior walls of the place, with a tropical beach video wrapped around the whole thing in correct perspective, and with small application windows floating over the video here and there?
I didn’t react quickly enough to get a photograph of it before it switched to headshots of some unkempt programmer on a plain orange and white background, but it was very impressive and almost what we had in mind. One big difference was that the screen was only about three feet high, and at eye-level on the wall, rather than being floor-to-ceiling. It was also segmented (obviously made up of a number of individual display panels about 3′ x 6′, each of which had a tiny bit of vignetting) rather than being visually seamless.
But those are really just quibbles with what is still an emerging technology. This is 2012, and we’re already seeing technology that Carl and I posited for 2051. That’s pretty cool.
I haven’t read anything by him in years, probably since junior high when I voraciously consumed any of his books I could get my hands on. He did however have a big influence on my subsequent science fiction interests, and is one big reason I like Twilight Zone-type material (stories with clever metaphors and unexpected and ironic twists).
The Bradbury story I remember the best is The Veldt. I remember reading it in seventh grade and being shocked at the ending, and yet still amused by the twist involved. Strangely, I’ve never read The Martian Chronicles, a failure I ought to remedy.
Bradbury is also the reason I always carry a notebook with me. I recall reading a magazine article by him when I was 9 or 10 in which he recommended this practice. (I also remember that the article was illustrated with pictures of him amidst the wreckage of the then-being-demolished Apollo launch and service structures – something that gave me some weird deja vu when I saw the dismantled LUT at KSC back in 2002.)
Once the fix was made, Dragon returned to the 30-meter checkpoint and moved in for the final approach. When the craft reached a distance of 10 meters (33 feet), NASA astronaut Don Pettit used the station’s 17-meter-long (60-foot-long) robotic arm to grab hold of the Dragon’s grapple attachment at 9:56 a.m. ET.
“It looks like we’ve got us a Dragon by the tail,” Pettit told NASA’s Mission Control.
This certainly doesn’t seem to be the NASA Greg Klerkxwrote about a few years back. Let’s hope they can keep the commercial competition going long enough that we have multiple players in the market.
I’d like just once to have TV do a post-apocalypse show right. Having everyone be beautiful, unblemished, healthy, well-groomed, and attired in bright, clean, factory-made clothes 15 years after the entire world blacked out calls for a bit more suspension of disbelief than I’m able to muster. Jericho could almost get away with it, given the establishing apocalypse happened about 20 minutes into the first episode – everyone started off healthy and well-fed, and there were still stockpiles of soap, shampoo, makeup, and new clothes left over.
And don’t get me started on how post-apocalypse bad guys are always stereotypical “military psychopaths” with an authoritarian bent and leather wardrobe that would make Ernst Roehm salivate.
So, I sold the IR-converted d100 a couple months ago, and used the proceeds to convert my (now-superseded) d80 for infrared. Still fine-tuning the manual and autofocus, but it worked well enough to take this weird shot at Moab a couple of weeks back:
It’s not hard to imagine an alien world that looked like this.
Scrape off the cheese, and this was actually a pretty cool movie in terms of premise, plot, and the design of the Cygnus. I had forgotten there was talk of remaking it — I generally despise remakes as creative laziness, but like Battlestar Galactica here is a story just aching to be retold with modern FX and better writing.
Instead of using a more traditional symmetrical capsule design, the Blue Origin Space Vehicle uses a biconic shape with one side of the capsule flattened and a split flap (most likely two) that can be used for directional control. The flap can be seen in the multicolored image above from the computational fluid design program used to develop the spacecraft. Similar designs have been developed in the past, most notably McDonnell-Douglas’ legendary Advanced Maneuvering Reentry Vehicle (AMaRV) developed in the 1970s. This vehicle also used split flaps for directional control, though it was designed to deliver weapons launched from a Minuteman missile.
SpaceX is currently planning to launch its first flight (Dragon 2/3) to the ISS on May 7, but will have a test firing of the launch vehicle on Monday, April 30.
…our book In the Shadow of Ares is one of the finalists for this year’s Prometheus Award. Sweet.
The Prometheus finalists for Best Novel recognize pro-freedom novels published last year:
The Children of the Sky (TOR Books) – A sequel to Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep and in the same universe as Prometheus-winning A Deepness in the Sky, this novel focuses on advanced humans, stranded and struggling to survive on a low-tech planet populated by Tines, dog-like creatures who are only intelligent when organized in packs. The most libertarian of the three human factions and their local allies must cope with the world’s authoritarian factions to advance peaceful trade over war and coercion.
The Freedom Maze (Small Beer Press) – Delia Sherman’s young-adult fantasy novel focuses on an adolescent girl in 1960 who is magically sent back to 1860 when her family owned slaves on a Louisiana plantation. With her summer tan, she’s mistaken for a slave herself, learning the hard way about her ancestors’ attitudes and about courage, respect, individual rights and personal responsibility.
In the Shadow of Ares (Amazon Kindle edition) – This young-adult first novel by Thomas L. James and Carl C. Carlsson focuses on a Mars-born female teenager in a near-future, small civilization on Mars, where hardworking citizens are constantly and unjustly constrained by a growing, centralized authority whose excessive power has led to corruption and conflict. Continue reading In Case You Missed It…
