Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Is Verne's Nemo Original Steampunk?

Mike Perschon, a self described "hypercreative scholar, musician, writer, and artist" who also happens to be a fan of steampunk wrote a presentation for the 2009 Eaton Science Fiction Conference. In his blog where he posts the text and images he cites my interview with Bruce Sterling that I did for The British Science Fiction Association's media magazine, The Matrix.

Finding Nemo: Verne's Antihero as Original Steampunk - Eaton SF Conference, 2009

I'm still working on the next of my reports from the Eaton conference. I'm working furiously to do final revisions on my Steam Wars paper (which looks at the Steampunk Star Wars art at CGSociety) for submission to the Journal of Neo-Victorian studies, so updating the blog, as always, is what suffers. Rather than leave the site without content this May long weekend, I'm posting my images and text from the paper presentation I gave at the Eaton conference. Feel free to use the images, so long as you provide me with a link. Thanks again to Art Donovan for the use of his Shiva Mandala images, which provide a visual link to the three identities of Nemo I explore in this paper, and to Greg Medley, who is the visual Nemo of my research. I like him better than Mason and Shaw.

Head over to the Steampunk Scholar blog top read his full dissertation.

Monday, May 18, 2009

WolframAlpha

The search engine created by Stephen Wolfram author of "A New Kind of Science" has gotten much media attention. It launched on Friday, May 15, 2009. I am still playing around with it to find its utility besides simple curiosity. I am confident I will eventually find a real world use for it.

The website about page says that "Wolfram|Alpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone." Sounds good to me.

Stephen Wolfram is a pretty smart guy so I am sure this website can be put to good use. In the meantime I proposed this question:

"answer to life, the universe and everything"

To which Wolfram|Alpha responded:

"42"

So far, so good.