| #1
Outer Cyberspace
"No one lives in space stations, in this scenario... Instead, our entire solar system is saturated with cheap monitoring devices. People, even quite ordinary people, rent time on them in much the same way that you would pay for satellite cable-TV service. If you want to know what Neptune looks like today, you just call up a data center and have a look for yourself." #2 Buckymania "A free buckyball rotates merrily through space at one hundred million revolutions per second. It's just over one nanometer across. Buckminsterfullerene by the gross forms a solid crystal, is stable at room temperature, and is an attractive mustard-yellow color." #3 Think Of The Prestige "Project Babylon was Bull's grandest vision, now almost within his grasp. The Iraqi space-launcher was to have a barrel five hundred feet long, and would weigh 2,100 tons... The vast, segmented cannon would fire rocket-assisted projectiles the size of a phone booth, into orbit around the Earth." #4 Artificial Life "Because of the ubiquity of powerful computers, Artificial Life is 'garage-band science.' Much of A-Life practice basically consists of picking up computers, pointing them at something promising, and twiddling with the focus knobs until you see something really gnarly." #5 A Brief History Of The Internet (Feb '93) "Some thirty years ago, the RAND Corporation, America's foremost Cold War think-tank, faced a strange strategic problem. How could the US authorities successfully communicate after a nuclear war?" #6 Magnetic Vision "It's an odd experience to look long and hard at one's own brain. Though it's quite a privilege to witness this, it's also a form of narcissism without much historical parallel. Frankly, I don't think I ever really believed in my own brain until I saw these images." #7 Superglue "Superglue is potent and almost magical stuff, the champion of popular glues and, in its own quiet way, something of an historical advent. There is something pleasantly marvelous, almost Arabian Nights-like, about a drop of liquid that can lift a ton; and yet one can buy the stuff anywhere today, and it's cheap." #8 Creation Science "How does one deal successfully with the dissonance between the word of God and the evidence in the physical world? Or the struggle, as Stephen Jay Gould puts it, between the Rock of Ages and the age of rocks?" #9 Robotica '93 "A faithful reader of SF from the 1940s and '50s might be surprised to learn that we're not hip-deep in robots by now. By this time, robots ought to be making our breakfasts, fetching our newspapers, and driving our atomic-powered personal helicopters. But this has not come to pass, and the reason is simple. We don't have any robot brains." #10 Watching The Clouds "Most clouds never manage to rain or snow. They simply use the vapor-water cycle as a mechanism to carry and dissipate excess heat, doing the Earth's quiet business of entropy..." #11 Spires On The Skyline "In this column, we're going to demystify broadcast towers, and talk about what they do, and why they look that way, and how they've earned their peculiar right to loom eerily on the skyline of every urban center in America." #12 The New Cryptography "The real wild-card in the mix, however, was the new cryptography. A new technique arose in the 1970s: public-key cryptography. This was an element the codemasters of World War II and the Cold War had never foreseen." #13 The Dead Collider "The Machine in the Desert was a transcendant scheme to steal cosmic secrets, an enterprise whose unashamed raison d'etre was to enable wild and glorious flights of imagination and comprehension. It was sense-of-wonder and utter sleaze at one and the same time. Rather like science fiction, actually." #15 Bitter Resistance "Two hundred thousand bacteria could easily lurk under the top half of this semicolon; but for the sake of focussing on a subject that's too often out of sight and out of mind, let's pretend otherwise. Let's pretend that a bacterium is about the size of a railway tank car." |