Why Charlie Stross hates Star Trek.

Paul Krugman, anti-Singularitarian?

UPDATE: The indispensable Bill Simmon has tracked down an MP3 and transcript. I hadn't realized Charlie Stross was Krugman's interlocutor; it was only last week that I was talking about how much I like Accelerando. Off to listen.

Just finished Accelerando for my exams and really enjoyed it. The book gets better as it goes, and in accordance with Stross's singularitarian themes it's free on the Internet. What I think I like best about the novel is Stross's unflinching take on the "rapture of the nerds," which is reframed at one point in the book as "the Vinge catastrophe"; what the Singularity is for Stross is not so much the moment A.I. achieves sentience but the moment corporations do.

Sunday, Sunday.

* The New Yorker has fiction from the late great David Foster Wallace as well as discussion of his unfinished final novel. (There's also a profile of Rahmbo.) Discussion at MeFi.

* Even more six-word science fiction. More at MetaFilter.

* The twenty-first century: an FAQ from Charlie Stross.

* Hypothesis: Sufficiently usable read/write platforms will attract porn and activists. If there's no porn, the tool doesn't work. If there's no activists, it doesn't work well. (via)

* Maybe Dollhouse shouldn't have been as series: io9 clues into the central problem facing American television production, open-ended perpetual serialization. Discussion at Whedonesque.

* Sebelius to HHS.

* The formula that killed Wall Street. Some talk at MetaFilter.

* Anime Peanuts. More along these lines at MeFi.

* Reverse-plot movies. Reverse-plot games.

* Aside from their nihilism and incompetence, the biggest problem facing Republicans is that their mythology has become too difficult for the average person to follow. It’s like a comic book “universe” where the writers have been straining to maintain continuity for decades — all the ever-more-fine-grained details are really satisfying for the hardcore fans, but intimidating for potential new readers, who are left asking, “Trickle-what? Chappaquid-who? What’s that about Obama’s birth certificate? Obama’s European now? I thought he was a Muslim! Darn it, I’ll never catch up!”

I suggest, therefore, that the Republicans use their current time of wandering in the wilderness to do their own version of Crisis on Infinite Earths. They wouldn’t have to ditch their favorite heroes, of course — we could also be treated to limited series like Rush Limbaugh: Year One, Newt Gingrich: Year One, etc. They can reboot all the plotlines, free the beloved characters of the chains of continuity, and then do it again, and yet again — until finally they find success in some genre other than politics, much as comic book superheroes have moved on to the movies. GOP: Year One.

* See also: the GOP's voice and intellectual force, Rush Limbaugh.

* Forget Switzerland: Is Ireland the next Iceland? Don't forget your recession tourism.

* Slowly but surely, here comes marijuana decriminalization/legalization. Don't forget your revenue stream.

* Imprisoned fifteen-year-old beaten by police officer. On tape.

* And put aside that old question of "justifying" the humanities: the real problem is that for much of the past decade, the culture isn't listening to what the humanities have to teach.

Link dump #4, son of the mother of all link dumps.

* Still another Pac-Man text adventure. (Previously.) See also: Guitar Hero as text adventure (1, 2).

* It turns out the Bush administration didn't bother to keep case files on many of the prisoners in Guantánamo. Via Pandagon.

* Cultural treasures of New Jersey.

* Make Something Cool Every Day makes something cool every day.

* Crooker Timber had a Charlie Stross book event today with tons of links.

* Also at Crooked Timber: Should you delay parenthood till tenure?

* And Obama gets it.

The Guardian interviews science fiction writer Charlie Stross. Here he is on the Singularity, subject of his recent book Accelerado:

Perhaps the strangest future predicted by science fiction writers is the Singularity - an idea that is already "old hat" for Stross. This concept was more or less invented by scientist and author Vernor Vinge, and started with a simple insight: If an artificial intelligence can be created on computers, it can in turn design more powerful computers to create more powerful artificial intelligence and so on at an ever accelerating rate until we arrive at the Singularity - a point where technological change happens so quickly that it irrevocably alters human existence. A powerful idea, but as Stross is the first to point out, not one that science fiction has always treated with the scientific rigour it deserves.

"A whole bunch of extra cruft accreted rapidly around Vinge's idea, which was misappropriated and misunderstood by many writers," he explains. "Along with the idea of nanotechnology, the singularity became a substitute for magic pixie dust that could do anything, and a placeholder for what author Ken McLeod dubbed 'the rapture of the nerds'."

Like all good science-fiction writers, Stross has a blog.