Does it feel like your Internet is slow? Depending on where in the world you are, it could be because of cut sub-marine cables. This time, the cables that were cut are in the Mediterranean Sea and there are three, SMW 3, SMW 4, and FLAG.

While this article at USA Today doesn’t mention Sri Lanka specifically, it does say that 65% of traffic to India is thought to be down, and Singapore, Malaysia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, and Pakistan are also heavily affected. This article at PCMag says that 82% of India is down. A Google news article states that Maldives is completely down, while Qatar and Djibouti are losing over 70% of their traffic.

Causes for the cut cables is unclear - could be seismic activity, although ship anchors have been to blame in the past.

Repairs are estimated to take either a few days or until 31 December, depending on the news source. Ouch!

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It hardly seems possible, does it, given all we’re hearing now about global warming, except that what I’ve been learning seems to indicate that calling it global warming is actually very inaccurate. Calling it global climate change is better and, honestly, would make it more easily understood by the masses, including me.

Leaving aside their bad site design, which means there’s no border padding, so text is right up against the left side of the browser window, making it more difficult to read, the article is well worth reading.

What I find really interesting is that, according to their research, had humans not come along, the planet would have entered a semi-permanent ice age.

Even more interesting than that, to me, is the idea that this planet could alternate between Hothouse Earth and Ice Age/Interglacial. Hothouse Earth is when a hot climate with no ice at the poles with the Antarctic covered in forests while huge amounts of Europe, Africa, and America (they don’t indicate whether they mean America as in the USA or America as in North America and South America, although I’m guessing the latter).

Anyway, go read the article.

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AdesClrPicker - capture colour codes from anywhere on your screen. Extremely useful for those times you find the perfect colour in another application or image and want to transfer it to your web design or such.

Link Popularity Check - lets you check your own website’s link popularity through a few search engines.

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You can read about it at SFSignal.

Astronomers captured images of three planets around one star (infared picture) and a fourth around a second star (visible light photo).

Personally, I find this very cool and can’t wait to see what other planets we’ll get photographic evidence of over the next year or ten or twenty.

The one with the three planets is located in the Pegasus constellation. And those planets are huge and far from their sun! And their distance from their sun could change how planets are defined.

All in all, very interesting! Go read the article if you haven’t already.

How do you think this and discoveries like it will change how we view ourselves, our world, and the galaxy around us? How will it change science fiction? How will it change how YOU write science fiction?

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I’ve got one nitpick with the article. Or, at any rate, one right now. We’ll see if I find more.

The title for the article is:

The Army’s Totally Serious Mind-Control Project

But if you read the article, they’re talking about the experiment/device/thingamajummy as a way to communicate, not control. Sensational titles can attract readers, it’s true, but if the device that’s being created is not about control, don’t bill it as control unless you care that there will be many who will misunderstand what the article is about.

And if there is a control aspect to the device, that leads to a whole heap of other questions, like who, then, would be held responsible if a controlled person committed murder, let’s say. Yeah, major moral conundrums, methinks.

And then there’s this little tid-bit:

Users also will have to be trained to think loudly.

I, apparently, already have that skill. I say this with all seriousness. There are those around me who can pick up my thoughts very easily because they can almost hear them. True, I’ve got a loud voice anyway, as do all my sibs - we can be heard from a couple of miles away when we want to be, truth be told. Evidently this also translates to thought.

But back to the article.

From my read, it looks more like they’re talking about a built-in communications device for more efficient communication. And that has all sorts of interesting possibilities. Instant communication between user and computer? GPS readouts in the brain. How about covert ops? What about communications between a scientist and a lab rat?

And this bit:

And don’t overlook potential civilian benefits. "How often have you been annoyed by people screaming into their cell phones?" Schmeisser asks. "What if instead of their Bluetooth earpiece it was a Bluetooth headpiece and their mouth is shut and there’s blessed silence all around you?" Sounds like one of those rare slices of the U.S. military budget even pacifists might support.

Ah, yes, blessed silence. That, I could definitely get behind.

What else can you come up with? How would you use technology like this in your stories? What other kinds of technology will technology like this lead to in 10, 20 or 50 years?

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Write or Die is a software application that could be useful to you if you’re a. a writer and b. procrastinate writing. As their slugline says, Putting the "Prod" in Productivity! Hopefully not a juiced-up electric cattleprod, though…

With Write or Die, you type your text in their text editor, and whenever you switch from the text editor to, say, a browser to research canaries in Papua New Guinea, it starts a countdown. Or even if you just stop typing. If you don’t return back to writing in the time you’ve set, there will be consequences.

Like your text will start disappearing, word by word. Of course, that’s Kamikaze Mode.

Gentle Mode pops up a reminder to continue writing. Normal Mode will cause an unpleasant sound to play on your computer, and the sound won’t stop until you start typing again.

Plans include an Electroshock Mode.

Caveat: The text box for this program is not an editor. You still have to copy and paste what you wrote into a word processing program if you want to keep it.

Even though I’m not sure if I want to use this, I sure do appreciate the programmer’s sense of humour.

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Or so the review goes…

Disclaimer: Fahim Farook is my husband and I love to poke fun at him. No fishies, birdies, or other animals were harmed in the making of this post. Honestly.

Fahim wrote a book called Honest, The Martian Ate Your Dog (I wanted to say homework instead of dog, but, you know, my anal retentiveness got the better of me :)). Science fiction humour. He’s a major fan of Terry Pratchett and reads a lot of old science fiction. But one author who’s books he hasn’t read - ever - and believe me, I’ve tried getting him to read them, but he’s pretty stubborn and resistant - is Douglas Adams. I love Douglas Adams. I think Douglas Adams is hilarious. Spankingly nose-snortingly hilarious. But Fahim? Not so much.

So when we stumbled across this review, I kinda did a bit of a double-take:

The author has a vision (albeit one heavily inspired by a certain Douglas Adams) and some good ideas, but, unfortunately, he knows it and he will remind the reader of it constantly.

In all fairness to the person who did the review, I, uh, *cough* do kinda *cough* agree with her. *cough* Kind of.

But I think one difference between her complaint versus mine is readability (mine) versus irritability (hers). And honestly, a lot of people hate footnotes in fiction, so either way, I think the complaint is a fair one for those people.

But the funny part for me is the part in the quote that I bolded.

Fahim wasn’t inspired by Douglas Adams. Can’t have been. But he was heavily inspired by Terry Pratchett, who is, in many ways, Douglas Adams’ fantasy counterpart, so the misunderstanding is excusable.

Oh, yeah. One other nitpick. The book is labelled as fantasy. It ain’t. It’s science fiction.

And to the book.Honest, The Martian Ate Your Dog is available for free download from Lulu, so you can read it without shelling out a cent, buck, dollar, rupee, riyal, franc, euro, or pound.

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It’s called Bionic Eyes, but really, it doesn’t seem to me at all the same as the bionic eyes that Steve Austin had. That is, these eyes don’t make objects appear that much closer. Nope. These are contact lenses fitted with integrated circuitry.

Don’t get me wrong - still very very very cool. But I guess describing it as a computer in the eye would bring visions of pain and busted eyeballs more so than anything else.

And this reminds me of those glasses - prototype, at any rate - that came out a few years ago that also had displays all over them. Also very cool.

What I find interesting is this bit:

Although the lenses have only been tested on animals

Um, this just leads to so many questions. Like how do you get feedback?

When using animals to test if a product is carcinogenic or otherwise harmful, it’s pretty easy to tell when the cancer tumours show up.

But how can you tell if the animal is having a useful experience with an integrated circuit in their eye? Just how much feedback can an animal give? Two barks for "great!" and one for "oh cwap!" or "the css styling needs some work"?

At any rate, it’s still very interesting and I, for one, am curious to see where this kind of technology can go. And the writer in me wonders how this is going to affect science fiction stories. Which leads to the next question…

What would you do with technology like this if you were to write a story?

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There’s a handy dandy little plugin for WordPress that can convert pages to posts, or posts to pages, and retain all the categories, tags, comments, and so on for that page or post. That plugin is called p2pConverter.

There is a catch, though, and it all depends on how you have your permalinks set up.

If your permalinks are set up for posts to include year/month/day, then changing a page to a post or vice versa will also change the permalink. Posts that have a URL of, say, http://lmashton.com/2008.11/pages-to-posts/ will, when converted to a page, will now have a URL of http://lmashton.com/pages-to-posts/.

That means you might have to set up redirects (something which I, inevitably, forget to do. :()

Nevertheless, if you have some content that you aren’t sure if it should be a page or a post, or you want to post it as a post and later convert it to a page, you can. Or if, when changing from one blogging platform to another, some pages were imported as posts, you can fix that. Easily.

All in all, I’ve found this plugin to be one that works. Every single time.

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I’m twittering now. Have been for a while. It’s kinda fun and interesting.

Twittering, for those who don’t know, is basically microblogging. 140 characters of whatever you want to say about whatever. It can be random thoughts or events that are too small to make a blog post about.

Sprats, marinated in red chilli pepper & salt, then deep fried in virgin coconut oil = very very good!

Yeah, like that.

The Twitter posts are called tweets, by the way, not twits.

Updates are posted on the user’s page, but can also be downloaded into an RSS feed reader, just like any blog RSS.

And there are hundreds of tools to twitter around with, but that’ll be another day.

I mostly tweet about the odd happenings - from the expat Canadian perspective, of course - here, plus about writing and geek stuff.

Do you twitter? Who are you on twitter and what do you tweet about?

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