The Sword and Laser discussion

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Arthur C. Clarke,
“an international team of neuroscientists and robotics engineers have demonstrated the viability of direct brain-to-brain communication in humans. Recently published in PLOS ONE the highly novel findings describe the successful transmission of information via the internet between the intact scalps of two human subjects – located 5,000 miles apart.
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-09...

hehe nice :-p

Sounds kind of like the mental texting done in Niven / Pournelle's Oath of Fealty.

Since they both have to physically jacked it
its sound less like telepathy then it does the metaverse.
Maybe one step beyond VR glasses.

Alex wrote: "If you're interested in this sort of stuff, I can't recommend Ramez Naam's Nexus enough. It's smartly written by someone who's looked deep into this research, and managed to turn it..."

Millions of people sending friend requests straight to your brain. Sounds like a horror story.
http://iurl.no/79j92
I'll check it out. Thanks

It only makes sense to apply technology to science fiction. What SF writer imagined this?

For years I have found it annoying that most reviewers say little to nothing about the science in the SF works they review. It occurred to me that there can't be much science in a work without using 'science words'. So I wrote a computer program that searches .txt and .rtf files for science and fantasy words and counts them.

For anyone interested in experimenting with the word counting program I have uploaded Windows and Linux versions with GUI interfaces. You must have Python installed on your computer to use them however. I have uploaded and downloaded and tested the downloads so they should work.

Linux - sfforensic_L.pyc
https://www.sendspace.com/file/8awxir

Windows - sfforensic_W.pyc
https://www.sendspace.com/file/pwqz4i

The input file is: ACC.AFalloMndust.txt with 439541 characters.

It uses 79 SF words 450 times for an SF density of 1.024

The input file is: OSC.EndersGame.txt with 582652 characters.

It uses 42 SF words 214 times for an SF density of 0.367

Hard SF tends to get significantly higher SF densities.

Ender's Game is 33% longer than A Fall of Moondust but uses about half as many science words less than half as often.

invisibility cloak
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/0...

I thought they had these a couple years back.
Or maybe that was just as Hogwarts

There's a whole class of physics research which intrepid university PR depts describe as "invisibility cloak". Which is why you keep seeing it "invented" over and over again. I assume when someone actually invents something at all functionally similar to a invisibility cloak they will be ignored. :p

Ulmer Ian wrote: "There's a whole class of physics research which intrepid university PR depts describe as "invisibility cloak". Which is why you keep seeing it "invented" over and over again. I assume when someone ..."
So if you've seen one invisible cloak you've seen them all?

There's an app for that
https://vine.co/v/OWgDTdZJwOH

Scientists learn to selectively erase and restore memories in brain
http://rt.com/news/163688-erase-memor...

http://goo.gl/wcM2F