digitaldust

I went to a talk last night at the ICA on the new blood of British Science Fiction (do all of those need capitals?) which had a panel of people on both sides of the critic front line. Everyone was very keen and very excitable about everything they talked about. Highlighted by what Paul McAuley said at one point, that the difference between SciFi authors and “mainstream” authors was that everyone was all so supportive of each other. Genre authors in general took every opportunity to promote each other and raved about other books, something that he had found lacking in non-genre authors.

There were a couple of themes that kept recurring. One was What is the difference between SciFi and fantasy? The other was around what characterises this so called new blood?

Finally I’ve gone to Horsell common and found evidence of the Martian invasion. There’s nothing much left except a few pieces of scrap metal and some burnt trees. There’s a lot of regrowth and any pits and craters must have been filled in. Of course no one wants a reminder of those horrific events left lying around. The local residents seem blissfully unaware of the exact location of the landings and happily go about their business on the common. Though some are known to be scared off by strange white apparitions that can sometimes be see bobbing around in the midday sun.

On an entirely different note there is also a Melbourne band called Horsell Common. They have never knowingly been invaded by Martians.

Road developers in West Sussex have done a really nice thing and put up a rope bridge for dormice above a road in Haywards Heath. BBCi news article about it here. It always fills me with joy to see people doing nice things for my poor endangered totem animal.

[cond-mat/0205383] Identity and Search in Social Networks on arxiv.org.

Mathematical analysis of an old sociology experiment; How can individuals in a social network pass messages to each other when they are unaware of the links between them. Most relevant for P2P networking and P2P search.

It uses some network theory and probability to solve this. Depends primarily on two things. That individuals in the real world cluster on more than one thing. Each node (person) has a number of dimensions of similarity/dissimilarity, for individuals in a social world these could be things such as profession or geographical closeness, plus many more besides. All of these together give a vector of similarity/dissimilarity for each node relative to each other. Two people can cluster round either geographic similarity (live on same street) or professional (work at same place), so either of these dimensions can be used for similarity. We don’t have to perform any triangulation to determine distance. Thus each individual node can cluster with more other nodes, and share multiple networks. (This sharing of networks is one of the most interesting aspects of the paper, one not examined).

Its also relies heavily on a low probability of chain termination. In automated systems this can be set arbitrarily low. So little problem here.

Square up your Squirrel, dress him up for nutty business. 5 minutes of amusement but made me laugh.

Just so I don’t forget like I just did. I want to go to the Primavera festival in Barcelona.

2manyDJs, the White Stripes, Peaches, Sonic Youth, GSYBE!! and plenty more. Hmmm. To be followed by the Big Chill in August.