Here's Your Damn Jetpack

Objects in the future may be closer than they appear. Reach me at [email protected]

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That's all for now

It's been a little over a year since I started this project, and I'm pleased to say that (barring some small breaks) I've managed to post a story, quote, or picture per day that shows how we're living a little closer to a science fiction future than you might automatically assume. I'm going to take some time off now, to try to come back around and do long-form pieces once or twice a month for a year. I'll still be collecting articles, and I might even update this Tumblr now and then with the most interesting ones. I hope you've enjoyed this series, and feel free to contact me by email if you have any ideas or suggestions. I'll see you in the not too distant future.

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MTV's new dating show, where people must try to match themselves up with their perfect mate as decided (in secret) by an inscrutable AI. Bow to your new master, human scum.

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Fridge sends spam emails

Welcome to the stupid future.

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Dear subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass disturbance.

Text message sent to mobile phone users in the vicinity of a protest in Kiev. All of them. "Maybe the Most Orwellian Text Message a Government's Ever Sent", Motherboard.

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The Littler Mendelson law firm has a robotics law division.

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Our hardware is changing our lives far more profoundly than anything that we ever did to ourselves intentionally. We should heed the obvious there, and get used to that situation. We should befriend one another, under that reality. We should try to see what that means.

Bruce Sterling, "An Essay on the New Aesthetic", Wired.

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The title is a little hyperbolic, but we are thrillingly close to making this actually work.

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Sooam Biotech has created 400 cloned dogs and they are now looking to expand their business across the world, kicking things off in the UK with this once in a life-time competition prize.

Copy for a a competition to have your dog cloned, at the UK's Channel 4.

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The last time we caught up with ANGELINA, Michael Cook's astonishing attempt to build an artificial intelligence that can design its own games, the program had taken a disliking to Theresa May. Cook had given ANGELINA the ability to zip around social networks and the wider internet, learning about people and forming a rudimentary opinion of them. It quickly decided Theresa May was the worst person it had ever heard of - including Bashar al-Assad. When I visit Cook again in December, ANGELINA's been busy - and it has discovered an unlikely beau. "ANGELINA likes Rupert Murdoch," says Cook, sheepishly. He looks down at the floor and shifts his feet around. "ANGELINA really likes Rupert Murdoch."

Can an AI win a game jam?, Christian Donlan, Eurogamer.

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Anti-UAV sign in Deer Trail, Colorado. Matt Pearce, from "Colorado town declares open season on drones" by Matt Pearce for the Los Angeles Times. "Open season" is not hyperbole: there's a guy selling drone-hunting licences.

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One of 5000 bees wearing an RFID tag as part of a large-scale research study. "Scientists glue sensors to 5,000 bees in a bid to better understand them", Matthew Humphries, Geek.com.

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Sight restored to partially blind man

I wrote last year about progress in gene therapy as a way of improving eyesight. Here's the BBC with the results of its preventative use.

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Forensic fingers

Magic gunshot-residue-detecting gloves. I like the idea of streamlining a sensor device so that you can just use your own appendages, rather than external tools, to do the job.

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The room is not air-conditioned; nor is it particularly clean. Flies buzz around the pig's head. My first thought is that the operation is being conducted with an air of total routine. Even the presence of a foreign television crew seems to make little difference. The animal is comfortable but there's no sensitivity about how we might react, let alone what animal rights campaigners might make of it all. I check the figures: the team can do two implantations a day. The success rate is about 70-80%.

David Shukman, "China cloning pigs on an 'industrial scale'", BBC.

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X-Ray Specs, for real: these glasses see through skin

The Verge takes the augmented reality see-through-skin glasses - intended for the medical profession - for a spin.

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BUT meaning is emergent in the network, it is the apophatic silence at the heart of everything, that-which-can-be-pointed-to. And that is what the New Aesthetic, in part, is an attempt to do, maybe, possibly, contingently, to point at these things and go but what does it mean?

We have a culture around computers too, of course. James Bridle, "#sxaesthetic".

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Hadfield sings Space Oddity live

I got Hadfield's autobiography, "An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth" for Christmas. Probably my favourite part so far is the litany of rituals involved in a space launch out of Russia. To think that we actually have a space travel culture is fascinating.