Today I started to read Neil Smith’s Forge of the Elders, and had to chuckle at the names of the spaceships of the American Soviet Socialist Republic: Dole, McCain, Hatch (“three misunderstood and martyred socialist statesmen who had made America what it was today”). When this part was first published (as Contact and Commune), they were Democrats: Metzenbaum, Kennedy, [?].

A few years ago, Neil started saying that he preferred openly-socialist Democrats to crypto-socialist Republicans. I guess this renaming is part of that policy.

Isaac Asimov (1920-92) died of AIDS, from a tainted transfusion in 1983. (Locus; Ansible.) Was he the most famous such victim?

Bill Detty asks: was he more famous than Arthur Ashe?

Ftrain: Robot Exclusion Protocol. A story about the Google of the future.
(From Amygdala. Scroll down a bit to see a rant on Star Treks past and present.)

Vernor Vinge’s mind-expanding novel A Fire Upon the Deep (1992) contains numerous postings on “the Net of a Million Lies.” But unlike the Usenet of our time, most of the senders have institutional names, like Khurvark University or Sandor Arbitration. I have assumed that these represent consensus cooked up by AIs from internal discussions.

Now Sean Kirby says that Columbia Newsblaster (a project of the Natural Language Processing Group at Columbia University) automatically “trolls hundreds of news sites, collects all the information from the articles, and summarizes them with links . . . . its computer-generated summaries are virtually free from any possible taint of bias.”

Oh? Newsblaster itself lists seventeen sources (Yahoo, ABCNews, CNN, Reuters, LA Times, CBS News, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Virtual New York, Washington Post, Wired, FOX News, NY Post, USA Today, Science Magazine, BBC News, Nature Magazine, Lycos) some of which repeat each other; Yahoo and Lycos get most of their stuff from Reuters. The summary will be as unbiased as the median of mainstream news; that beats reading just one paper, but is it revolutionary?

Unfortunately there’s no obvious link to information on how Newsblaster works.

Yesterday a stranger asked me out of the blue – perhaps because she saw a book in my hand – whether I happened to know the name of the author of the book Nigger which was recently mentioned on Oprah. I happened to see it later; in case that stranger is reading this, the author is Randall Kennedy.

George MacDonald Fraser’s Lord of the Rings

2010: That link is unsurprisingly dead; try this one, though it’s probably not the same story.

Gary Farber observes that science reporters would benefit by exposure to some of the clichés of science fiction.