Under the Martian Ice

The Mars Express mission has discovered a region of water ice on Mars large enough to cover Texas. It’s four kilometres thick in places. Wet it would be able to cover Mars to a depth of 11 metres.

A while ago I wrote a fifty-page science fiction short story about explorers who dig down into a frozen lake just under the dust of Mars. It’s full of adventure with a twist of humour. “Victoria, what are you going to do with the chainsaw?”
Mars by Stealth
http://www.zipworld.com.au/~raz/index.html

The Man Who Mistook His Girlfriend For A Robot

I love people who make breakthroughs they don’t know they aren’t supposed to be able to. Why do people doing things “the right way” get so good at figuring out that some things are impossible.

Highly skilled experts have been trying to make lifelike artificial characters for a long time now. Most people making serious attempts at this fall into what has become known as “The Uncanny Valley”. As you get closer to making a human character realistic the errors that separate the character from reality become more and more apparent. It’s one of those complex problems that are so entangled in the persistently mysterious structure of our brains that it’s very tough to solve.

David Hanson working on his own seems to have done better than an army of experts before him. What happens? It’s not like David Hanson turns his back on the accumulated knowledge. It’s not like people who have made a career in something like this aren’t creative, independent thinkers.

Is it the “off the shelf moment”? All this industry produces this great hardware and software. Then someone who is not in any particular speciality looks up at all the cool new stuff on the shelf and makes the connection.

The Man Who Mistook His Girlfriend For A Robot article at:
http://iiae.utdallas.edu/news/pop_science.html

The Uncanny Valley
Why are monster-movie zombies so horrifying and talking animals so fascinating?
Written and illustrated by Dave Bryant
http://www.arclight.net/~pdb/nonfiction/uncanny-valley.html

The Old Swings and Roundabouts Theorem

Apparently intermittent reward is one of the main forces involved in addiction. It’s that old Swings and roundabouts thing. That’s why video games can keep tugging on your brain even when it’s been grinding your self esteem into a fine paste.

I was having a pretty pasty day yesterday, not from games, from the going to get things done side of life. By the way in case you haven’t noticed getting things done at your end doesn’t necessarily mean that things happen anywhere else.

Well I woke up this morning with that this sucks that sucks, it all sucks kind of spirit. So I go to wrestle the spam and to my amazement there a genuine messages. A friendly web site wants to exchange valuable advertising space for a couple of articles I have written. An exuberant fan has sent info about Stolen Life to a local distributor “Is that okay?” Yes thanks. An animation magazine want’s to do an article.

So isn’t life such a breeze and all going according to plan? Filmmaking is so easy and straightforward. Why isn’t everyone doing it?