Angel...

Damn, I'm going to be sad to see this go. Last night's one on Sky was simply excellent and reminds me why Josh Wheadon should be allowed to write anything he likes. The final exchage between 2 of the characters on the nature of evil was perfect, astonishingly beautifully written - although half a bottle of Shiraz might have had some impact on that.

The Footprints of God - Greg Illes

A friend left this behind the other day so I thought I'd have a read through. Interestingly Illes is better known for writing historical techno fiction, apparently producing a good book on the Manhattan Project. This is a forray into SF and not altogether a sucessful one. It's basically a Crichton pot boiler with a few nice bits exploring the nature of the Technological Singularity.

Sadly, however, in my opinion, it gets a little too into the relgious aspects of the Singularity and the nature of intelligence and God.

Andrew Fielding, a quantum physicist working on Trinity - a super defence computing programme, is found dead and his best friend and co-worker on the project Dr David Tennent suspects foul play.

The idea of the Trinity computer is to take super high resolution MRI scans of the human brain and run them in simulation inside the Trinity Super Computer - so far so pedestrian.

The problems I have start with Dr Tennent getting hallucinations about Jesus and travels to the Holy Land to investigate the nature of God.

Apparently Tennent worked with Roy Kurweil, one of the leading figures in the AI movement on this, and it shows, but not necessarily in the right places. There is some good stuff here - the way the new hybrid Augmented Intelligence takes over the internet and starts to take over is a good rendition of a hard Singularity starting. The resolution on the other hand is... well... sadly, straight out of Star Trek.

There's the making of a good book here, but its definately airport material.

Automated Blacklists...

These guys http://cbl.abuseat.org/ have black listed my hosting company for Spam Abuse.

Anybody come across this sort of thing before, it is very very annoying.

Does this mean somebody has spoofed my domain name, or is the problem at my ISP???

Life Jim????

Something that has not really been discussed yet is the results of the Viking Landers back in the 1970's. As people might recall, the initial results from the life experiments suggested that there might be life on Mars - when mixed with water and warmed, there was evidence of respiration. The problem was the equipment on the Viking was primative and weight constrained, so vital experiments stayed on the ground.

However, based on the soil chemisty there was an alternative, more plausible (at the time) explanation that the soil composition itself was leading to a chemical reaction which resemble respiration. After all, it looked like the planet was bone dry.

However, one of the requirements of the alternative explanation was that the soil was of a particular composition. Obviously, we're not back at the VIking landing sites, but where the current rovers have landed they are finding a salty soil, with indications that these are, in fact, brines.

The chemistry needed for the Viking results is apparently highly unlikely if there is a brine.

So. Did the Viking Landers discover life?

Hard to say at the moment. The Rovers can't detect life and they are in different locations, so the soil conditions at the Rover sites might be very very different to the two Rovers. There is a more fully featured, larger Rover planned for 2006/7 - this will have a greater range and life detection equipment.

If we're not alone... and I suspect that where there is water, there is life of some kind, then will that make people want to go all the more?