Links for 2010-05-10

"When I called my collection of essays and reviews What It Is We Do When We Read Science Fiction, I was struggling toward something I could not fully articulate. I don't know what is involved in reading science fiction, because I don't know what science fiction is.

There was a time, not so long ago, when I was quite clear what science fiction is. I could pick up a book from the shelf and know, with no real doubt or confusion, that it was science fiction. That certainty is with me no more, not because science fiction has changed (it has, of course, in many and complex ways, but not in a way that is directly relevant to this discussion), but because my relationship with science fiction has changed. And the nature of that change lies in my increasing criticism of and theorizing about the genre."

""Oh, but my Facebook account is private.... but my Twitter stream is locked!" Oh please. If all it takes to break a privacy system is for one of your friends to copy and repost your "private" photos or tweets then they're not private at all. The only true privacy is not to post anything on a social network that you wouldn't want the world to see. It's like that old advice for sending credit card numbers by email: think of it like a postcard; you wouldn't send your credit card number that way, so don't do it by email. Think of photos on Facebook as the colourful side of that postcard. We can blame Mark Zuckerberg all we like for killing privacy, but the truth is all he's doing is giving us the rope with which to hang it ourselves."

"A key focus now is to contain and clean up the spill. Both are massively challenging and have run into major issues - the solutions to which, of course, will rely (at least partly) on continued scientific research and engineering innovation. One problem in particular intrigued me, because it is very related to some of my current research studying the physicochemical and mechanical properties of emulsions, suspensions of one fluid in another. The problem is simple: now that a massive amount of the oil has already been spilled, how does one go about getting rid of it?"